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To: wily who wrote (54016)	9/27/1998 6:45:00 AM
From: flickerful	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 58727

wily.... the new yorker doesn't have onlive archives... but, here is a piece from the the washington post. Ken Starr Win? No Way By William Raspberry Friday, September 25, 1998 I was trying to explain to a Duke University colleague my ambivalence on the Clinton scandal. "One minute I tell myself that when the dust settles and the titillation subsides, what we have, at bottom, is perjury. The president -- symbol of our system of law and himself a lawyer -- twice swore an oath to tell the truth, and twice he lied. He flat perjured himself, and we can't have that. He has to go. "The next minute, I tell myself that when we regain our common-sense equilibrium and are able to peer through the partisan fog, we'll see quite plainly that what we have here is sex. The talk of perjury and impeachment, indeed Kenneth Starr's long, expensive and otherwise fruitless investigation comes down to nothing but illicit (but not unlawful) sex -- and the quite ordinary effort to hide this intensely personal failing. What Clinton did was wrong -- he's already admitted as much -- but surely we aren't going to help the president's political enemies drive him out of office for cheating on his wife. We need to grow up. "Is it fundamentally perjury? Or have we come to this pass because of what was from the beginning a desperate and partisan attempt to get Bill Clinton?" "Was," my colleague ventured, "is no longer relevant. We've gone through something, and the process has changed us all -- changed the president, changed the presidency, changed our sense of duty. The new reality is that he cannot finish his presidency -- or if he does get through it, it won't be in any recognizable form. He can't govern, and for that reason above all others, he ought to step down. Resign." What startles me about this impassioned conclusion is that my colleague not only is -- was -- a Clinton supporter but also believes the Starr investigation was a monomaniacal and intensely partisan witch hunt. Irrelevant now, she insists. The critical fact is that he can't govern. There are legislative matters that he either cannot effectively bargain over -- tobacco, a bill to allow banks to expand into securities and other nonbanking functions -- because of his reduced state, she says. And not just legislation but leadership -- moral leadership -- on matters like his initiative on race that has fizzled to an end, at least in part because his personal troubles kept him from giving it the sort of attention it needed. "A part of what I'm feeling," she said, "stems from the fact that he's been so intimate with us -- playing the saxophone, discussing his preference in underwear. That sort of intimacy makes it that much more a betrayal when he looks us in the eye and lies to us. How can we ever trust him again?" I persist: Trust him for what? Surely she can't believe that the fact that he tried to conceal, by lying, an illicit sexual liaison means he can't be trusted about Social Security or Khartoum. Well, she does believe it -- at least a little. What she believes more is that his predicament costs him the moral standing -- the respect -- necessary to be an effective president. "He should just let Al Gore take over," she says. "So they can then go after Gore on campaign fund-raising?" I counter. She notes that campaign finance abuse is both too nebulous for the public to get a grip on and too bipartisan for the Republicans to make very much hay of it. "You want to talk about what's fair; I'm saying it's gone beyond that." I offered an analogy. "How can you tell somebody he has to leave the house because he's bleeding all over the carpet and ignore the fact that he's bleeding because somebody out there has shot him? I know he put himself in the position to be shot, but they did shoot him." She offers a counter: "Imagine that the person we're talking about is a marathoner. He's losing a lot of blood for reasons that are not entirely his fault. But don't you have to tell him he needs to withdraw from tomorrow morning's marathon? "For me the presidency is more like a marathon, where fitness for the long haul is essential. You talk about it in terms of fairness, as though winning or losing is the most important thing." I suppose I do at that. I believe the president took needless risks for silly reasons, and when he got caught, he lied about it. All bad stuff, and I make no brief for him. But I look at Kenneth Starr -- at what he has done and how and why he has done it -- and I say: No way do I want this man to win. © Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company