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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (18804)	9/3/1998 9:19:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Respond to of 20981

NYT Lead Editorial September 3, 1998 Bill Clinton's Shaken Friends In an elegant turn of phrase, Michael Wines of The Times's Moscow bureau described the Clinton-Yeltsin summit meeting as an event teetering "on the slippery brink of self-parody." The same could be said of President Clinton's claim at a Moscow press conference that he had adequately apologized for the Monica Lewinsky affair. That view is not widely held among Democrats in Congress or even within the White House staff, and Clinton's comments are a troubling sign that he is still relying on outdated reflexes in dealing with the Lewinsky crisis. He has always been good at rallying himself and his followers against powerful external enemies, be they health-care profiteers, talkative mistresses or right-wing conspirators. By conjuring such plotters, Clinton was always able to assume the mantle of aggrievement and slip into his favorite campaign persona, that of the resurgent victim. This personal archetype had a name, the Comeback Kid. But when Clinton invokes that image these days, as he did in his universally panned semi-confession, he skids toward self-parody. That is because he is seen these days as the victim of his own bad judgment and indiscipline, rather than as the victim of his rhetorical rogues' gallery. As he resumes his White House schedule, the President has a problem more serious than the condemnation of Trent Lott and the defection of Richard Gephardt. He is a politician whose most loyal supporters have fallen silent. He is the leader of a party whose high-risk Congressional candidates often decline to defend him in public and then bash him in off-the-record conversations. This President's first problem is not winning over his enemies. It is winning back his friends. Recent pieces by George Stephanopoulos in Newsweek and Dee Dee Myers in Time have traced disaffection among loyalists. It may be the stronger and more pervasive because his followers placed such low demands on Clinton. The glue that bound his supporters to him was the same as that which seemed to bind his marriage: a belief in common values and policy goals. Under the terms of their pragmatic contract, past lapses were forgiven and mendacity about them excused as a political necessity. All that was required of Clinton was that he not gamble with the common policy enterprise through compulsive adventurism. He not only broke the contract with his staff and supporters. By then attempting to blame Kenneth Starr for his troubles, Clinton parodied his trademark blame game. Starr did not clear Monica Lewinsky into the White House on 37 occasions. Neither did Starr close the door to the Oval Office study. Those were the acts of a President out of control and in the betrayal mode when it came to the work and dreams that his supporters had entrusted to him. While Clinton has conducted his exercise in diplomacy-on-autopilot, here at home disappointment has taken deep root among his followers. There is, as always, a gap between grass-roots and elite opinion here. The public is tired of the Lewinsky story. The Democratic professionals are tired of Clinton and jumpy about what will be in Starr's report to Congress. So as he turns to the task of winning back his own party, Clinton faces a problem common to all caught liars. The words that availed in prior crises are no longer believable. A speech in the voice of the resurgent victim will flop into overt self-parody as quickly as if written by Jay Leno's staff. Clinton's best hope is to throw away the blame script and switch to contrition. But can he? It is a problem contemplated by a distinguished citizen of Clinton's home region. William Faulkner believed that the most riveting of human dramas was "the human heart in conflict with itself." As this vacation ends and the nation turns to the work that September always brings, what was true in Yoknapatawpha County will be true at the White House as well. nytimes.com