December 23, 1998

Wag the Elephant

The Republicans framed a guilty man. Guilty of ordering acts of war in defiance of constitutional and UN prescriptions. Guilty of ignoring genocide in Africa and then of lying about his lack of action. Guilty of exploiting existing loopholes to destroy the campaign finance system. Guilty of signing punitive welfare legislation. Guilty of expanding the death penalty and shrinking civil liberty protections. Guilty of endorsing an immigration law that denies due process to deportees. Guilty of waffling on global warming. Guilty of suppressing a needles-exchange program that could save lives. Guilty of bumbling health care reform. Guilty of repeatedly abandoning and betraying key constituencies and allies.

Actually, the Republicans did not really have to frame him. On the particulars of Bill Clinton's slippery performances at the Paula Jones deposition and before the Kenneth Starr grand jury, the case against the President is not without foundation. But the GOPers elevated a low crime to an unreasonably high level by deeming it impeachment matter. They have been after him for the wrong reasons. And many of his supporters have been behind him for the wrong reasons.

Last week was beyond bizarre. Impeachment. War. Sex. As the second impeachment in history slowly turned inevitable, the President changed the channel by attacking Iraq. Next, Speaker-to-be and Clinton-chaser Bob Livingston was forced to confess his extramarital trysts. Then he outed himself out of Congress, rather than remain a poster boy for the family- values-frothing GOP. (Livingston joined the ranks of such libertine Republican leaders as Henry Hyde, who admitted having an affair, J.C. Watts, who fathered a child out of wedlock, and Dan Burton, who during an affair sired a child as well, and Helen Chenoweth, who dabbled with a married man.) Shortly after Livingston bailed, as bombs were falling on Baghdad, Representative Tom DeLay, the Republican whip, praised Livingston as a great American, asserted that impeachment (which has cost the GOP two speakers...so far) must go forward, and proclaimed that "this is God's country and I know he will bless America." If this is indeed God's country, the Almighty must be a practical joker.

On the less prurient fronts, all sides scrambled for advantage. With Clinton overseeing the pre-impeachment aerial assaults, liberals and Democrats, who in recent decades have not been deferential to executive power, rushed to defend a president who was acting unilaterally and using military force in suspect fashion, and many called for delaying the impeachment vote to support the nation's military leader. Conservative and Republicans, who in the past rallied around a president whenever military action was under way, decried or questioned Clinton's strike, several bashing away at the commander-in-chief.

Don't divide the nation in a time of crisis, the libs warned. We cannot afford to have a liar leading us in a time of crisis, the cons replied. But what crisis? This was a push-button war. Several dozen military personnel on jet fighters may have mached in and out of harm's way, but the troops were mostly technocrat-warriors who dispatched cruise missiles from positions of far-from-the-explosions safety. CNN's dramatic "nightscope" shots of downtown Baghdad--oh, look there goes a car at three in the morning, let's get it!--may have produced feelings of anxiety among the video-consumers of this clean war and made it seem as if the United States was up against some green-hued netherland of evil, but there was nothing for us at home to worry about. Not unless you cared about dead and injured Iraqis and the exercise of excessive presidential power.

Clinton's Hail-Mary attack screwed up everybody. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a hawk, at first came out sounding like a peacenik-symp. And as Clinton's bombers prepared for Day Two, Jesse Jackson led an anti-impeachment rally in front of the Capitol that morphed into Clinton boosterism. From the stage, a preacher called for "justice and mercy and grace and forgiveness" regarding Clinton, and he attacked the "mean-spiritedness" of the Republican impeachers. But what of the air strikes? There were no shouts of protest from the stage, nothing of Clinton's mean-spiritedness. Most of the crowd had been turned out by black churches and unions, and demonstrators held signs that read, "Protect the Constitution" and "We Are All For Clinton." Representative Jose Serrano, the Bronx Democrat, declared, "We are not going to lose our president." Jackson echoed the sentiment: "Give us back our president." That paragon of virtue Al Sharpton, flashing a beaming smile, sat among the luminaries throughout the event. (He had the best line of the day. In criticizing impeachment as overkill, he shouted, "You don't take a sledgehammer to kill a cockroach.") Representative Bob Borski, a Democrat from Philadelphia, shouted, "This is not about Bill Clinton. It is about who he represents....He represents Social Security. He represents education. He represents basic civil liberties."

What were these people thinking? Clinton was waging war without consulting Congress or gaining the backing of the UN--and they were praising and embracing him. ("Why do Americans embrace Bill Clinton?" Jackson asked. "Because they embrace the Bill Clinton that is within them." Sounds like this issue is very personal for the reverend.) And Social Security? The same folks who were sounding off for Clinton have been huddling for weeks in fear that Clinton will act on his desire to privatize a piece of Social Security. In fact, those fretting that bipartisan Social Security "reform" will weaken the program and enrich Wall Street money managers can find solace in impeachment. If there is government paralysis or bad blood between Clinton and congressional Republicans, the prospects for a lousy Social Security deal diminish. Progressives worried about Clinton and Social Security might want to cheer on impeachment.

And what was all this our president stuff? Clinton broke with the unions on Nafta, GATT, and China. He does appear at Congressional Black Caucus galas--without looking uncomfortable--but he did not listen to his CBC pals regarding the welfare bill or Rwanda. He would not move on Haiti until Randall Robinson of TransAfrica waged a hunger strike. Let's not forget Lani Guinier. Or Clinton's support for more wasteful Pentagon spending. Yet speakers at the rally proclaimed that his agenda was their agenda. This is one sympton of impeachment-stress disorder: the confusion of strategic alliances and tactical commonality with actual affinity. The main impulse driving the demonstration was the proposition that the enemy (Clinton) of my enemy (right-wing Republicans) is my comrade. Such thinking--natural as it may be for besieged communities which have cause to fear the radical right--can be dangerous, especially if one takes it so far one loses perspective on the enemy's enemy.

Clinton's ill-scheduled raid was an unacknowledged embarrassment for his defenders on the left. Last Tuesday, at Harvard, Robert Reich and Alan Dershowitz joined others to denounce the impeachment drive. (Great, Clinton has on his side the fellow who championed O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, and Claus von Bulow.) At NYU, academician Sean Wilentz, Toni Morrison, Alec Baldwin and other liberals banded together. In Los Angeles on Wednesday, Barbra Streisand, Rob Reiner, and Norman Lear appeared at a lackluster rally. Jack Nicholson pronounced Clinton a "compassionate" man.

Only in Hollywood. Ask the Rwandans, the immigrants deported without due process, or the people on death row about Clinton's compassion. In a wonderful media free-association, The Washington Post article on the celebrities- against-impeachment event was placed next to a profile of Denis Hailday, the former U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. He resigned in August to protest the fact that the sanctions against Iraq have led to the deaths of 239,000 children under the age of five. By the way, this is the conservative estimate. "We are knowingly killing kids," Hailday notes, "because the United States"--he could easily say, Clinton--"has an utterly unsophisticated foreign policy." Send that clip to Jack.

Here's an intriguing question: which is the greater threat to the Constitution? A partisan impeachment vote against a scoundrel who has been pilloried for the wrong transgression, or the presidential use of life-taking force in a non-emergency situation that is not sanctioned by Congress or the U.N.? Are Willentz, Jackson, Morrison, et. al. griping as vociferously against the latter as the former? If not, then let's start up a new outfit: Leftists for Warmongers.

Of course, not all anti-impeachers are pro-Clintonites. But Monicagate and impeachment mania have pushed many to the edge. Republicans in the House have absurdly equated Clinton's prevarications about his personal improbity with presidential lies about break-ins and secret wars. Across the divide, many of those who have argued against impeachment have denied the reality of Clinton's misdeeds, some claiming errantly that the scandal is only about sex (not lies) and that the president is a victim of an ill-defined phenomenon dubbed "sexual McCarthyism." Blinded by the troubling excesses and inanities of Kenneth Starr and his GOP cheerleaders, Representatives Maxine Waters and Bobby Scott, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, could not bring themselves even to support censure against Clinton.

It's been a time of miscalculations. The President was crass. Where was the pressing need to bomb hours before the impeachment debate? Don't accept the excuses about Ramadan. Clinton could have bombed earlier, since nothing in the Butler report that apparently triggered the strike was not already known to the Administration weeks earlier. Or he could have bombed after the holy month was over. Would Iraq have managed to achieve a strategic advantage in that short time? The timing of his raid deserved questioning and scorn. His Administration lied about the attack in Sudan. Why believe him now?

And in the other corner, the Republicans are crazy. "As an American," a Democratic staffer on the House Judiciary said before the vote, "I am saddened and pissed off that impeachment is happening; as a Democrat I am happier than a hog in shit. This plays into the stereotype They're mean, and they're extreme." He had a point: what's more extreme than impeachment?

A few blips in the polls last week provided the pro-impeachers slight cause for optimism. But the GOP is on a dangerous course. Republicans, in a sign of nervousness, argued that by the next election the impeachment vote would be long forgotten. That's difficult to see. On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said that there would be no censure deal in the Senate and that a trial would occur. Should that come to pass, a trial--"Ms. Lewinsky, did the President's hand ever make contact with your genitalia?"--could stretch into next summer. The event should be memorable enough to leave an impression with most voters. Moreover, will George W. and the rest of the GOP presidential contenders want to have to answer questions about the Republican impeachment drive through at least the first half of 1999? (Dismiss it and you piss off Republican party activists; support it and you could alienate voters in the general election.) The impeachment trial spectacle will define either Clinton or the Republicans--or both.

The Republicans have done all they could to dumb down the impeachment debate--which, granted, few Democrats wanted to see conducted on serious- minded grounds. It is not nutty to assert that if a president undermines the right of a citizen to pursue a lawsuit (even a baseless one) or if he violates his oath before a grand jury, then impeachment is worth consideration. That doesn't mean the President ought to be beheaded for his Monica-related sins. But the GOPers foolishly put known liars at the head of the charge (remember a man named Newt Gingrich?); they exploited rather than they explored Starr's over-the-top report; they relied on Starr's evidence without conducting a true inquiry. They displayed more glee than deliberation. Instead of crafting a serious and somber national conservation, the Republicans focused on silly matters. Why all the hand-wringing over Clinton's contrition? A President who has done something truly impeachable ought not to be allowed to apologize his way out of a jam. Would the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 have been right to drop everything had Richard Nixon confessed and begged for forgiveness? ("I'm sorry. I am a crook?")

With Livingston's confession of adultery, the party of anti-Clinton outrage appeared more hypocritical than ever, even if Clinton's problem is technically not infidelity but inaccurate testimony. And--don't ask me how I know--there may be other GOP values-pushers to fall. (The White House is not behind this. Follow the money. Larry Flynt's offer of up to $1 million for evidence of congressional philandering has loosened many a tongue.) As the Republican Party becomes known as the party of fornication and broken vows, it will have a tougher time pursuing its crusade against Clinton and arguing that he cannot be trusted. Yet the GOP is blind to its own foolishness. After Livingston delivered his first come-clean speech, Watts, who won't say whether he provided financial support for his out-of-wedlock daughter, hailed the remarks, which were designed to preempt media stories, as evidence Livingston was accepting "personal responsibility." But Livingston told the truth only because Hustler was on his heels. These guys are clowns--phony moralists--and the public may catch on.

Perhaps in a better world what Clinton did should be an impeachable offense. But Washington is a culture of lies. In such a land, Clinton's Lewinsky falsehoods do not seem serious enough to warrant up-ending a national election--especially when many of the up-enders are miscreants in their own right. Alas, the whole affair has befuddled partisans and prompted sloppy thinking in all quarters. The day before the House debate on impeachment began, Representative David Bonior, the Democratic whip, declared on the floor: "There is something about the whole process that shows a lack of judgment, a lack of proportionality, a lack of common sense." Bonior was slamming the Republicans' handling of the impeachment vote and their bully- like denial of the opportunity to vote for censure. But he could have been speaking about the whole sordid, sorry shebang. Monica has driven many mad. Some of her victims vote to impeach; others sacrifice principles for political positioning; and one launches air strikes that kill.

-- David Corn