Losing It
Bob Dole, at least, seems to
have wrestled with his conscience before opting to launch bitter attacks on
President Clinton's "character." That does not appear to be the case with Newt
Gingrich. "On Inauguration Day, they're breaking the law and doing drugs,"
Gingrich told an audience at a restaurant in Roswell, Ga., a few days ago,
referring to unspecified members of the Clinton administration. "Two days
later, they're in the White House. This must be the most disciplined set of
addicts in the world, because none of them has ever used drugs once since they
joined the White House staff." The accusation that the White House is filled
with drug addicts is a classic political smear--ugly, utterly unsubstantiated,
and almost certainly false.
It's
understandable, of course, that conservative frustration levels should be
running high these days. For a party that thought it was leading an unstoppable
revolution less than two years ago, it can't be much fun to be saddled with an
old gray mare of a presidential candidate like Dole, or to be faced with the
possibility of losing control of Congress to an opposition they believe to be
not just wrong, but on the wrong side of history. That said, many Republicans
are acting like sore losers already, becoming unhinged--there's really no other
word for it--at the prospect of a Democratic resurrection. Some--including, in
recent days, the Republican nominee himself--are drumming up scandal in such a
biased and hypocritical way that they risk sacrificing both their credibility
and their dignity for the sake of a lost cause.
The charges are flying fast and furious--misappropriated
FBI files, drugs, even "money laundering." Bill Bennett said a few days ago
that a second Clinton term could produce "something like we went through in the
Watergate era," adding, "I believe this administration is one of the most
corrupt in recent American history." Only the weaselly
qualifications-- something like ... one of ... recent --save this remark
from transparent falsehood (by leaving it meaningless). But the implicit
comparison to Watergate is a shoddy historical absurdity, coming from Mr.
Intellectual Standards.
In the
last week, Dole and his surrogates have focused on two new issues that purport
to embody the flawed ethics of the administration. What these lines of attack
have in common is that for all the hysteria with which they are being
expressed, they have yielded little evidence of presidential misbehavior, let
alone deep problems of "character."
The most recent, and bitter accusation has to
do with campaign contributions from Asians. Here's Gingrich again, speaking on
Meet
the
Press just after the Los
Angeles
Times broke the story that an Indonesian couple had given nearly half a
million dollars in soft money to the Democratic Party: "This makes Watergate
look tiny," Gingrich said. "I mean, this is a potential abuse of the American
system on behalf of an Indonesian billionaire in a way we have never seen in
American history." The speaker's wording was sly as ever--what isn't a
"potential" abuse? Dole's campaign manager, Scott Reed, used the same weaselly
language when he issued a statement attacking the "administration's potentially
criminal actions in squeezing money out of the Indonesian Lippo conglomerate,"
going on to ask the president, "Why have you used U.S. foreign policy in
Indonesia as a fund-raising tool to help secure illegal campaign contributions
from a foreigner?" Dole himself then scored the administration for failing to
answer this and other when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife questions. In fact,
reporters who have been trying very hard to unearth evidence that the
contributions were illegal, or that the Clintons' connection to the Riady clan
has had an effect on American foreign policy, have so far come up
empty-handed.
Of
course, it would be nice if we lived in a country where the political parties
were not allowed to take half-a-million-dollar contributions from anyone. Under
our current system of campaign finance, however, the Indonesian connection is
merely and sadly typical. As recently as the last presidential election,
Republicans faced a similar embarrassment when Michael Kojima, a Japanese
businessman, gave them $500,000 which, it turned out, he owed to creditors and
in child-support payments. Neither the Democrats nor the press made nearly this
big a deal about it. Since contributions from foreign nationals residing here
legally are allowed, it's hard to see what--other than a whiff of yellow peril
in this case--distinguishes them from big donations by domestic interests.
(William Safire has been carrying on about "rich aliens" in a truly ugly way.)
The Democratic Party did accept, and subsequently return, an apparently illegal
contribution in a separate instance, from a South Korean businessman who lacked
a green card. But then, returning funny money is par for the course in
presidential campaigns. Back during the primaries, Dole accepted and returned
$27,000 in illegally bundled money from a company called AquaLeisure, whose
chief has since pleaded guilty to two felony charges in the case.
The real difference between foreign and domestic soft money
seems to be that American companies get better value in exchange. Dole's
biggest backers include the CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, the agribusiness
concern whose executives recently pleaded guilty to price fixing, and the Gallo
wine family. In those instances, unlike in the Indonesian one, there is strong
evidence of a quid pro quo, or at least mutual back-scratching. Dole has done
explicit and valuable favors for both companies, sponsoring the notorious
ethanol boondoggle for ADM, and helping the Gallos (who have given various Dole
organizations more than $1 million since 1986) with family-specific tax breaks
and regulatory fixes. For some reason, no one considers these to be Dole
"character" issues. If Dole were ahead and Clinton behind, there's little doubt
that the details of these relationships would now be front-page news. But,
being the underdog, Dole is so immune to such assaults that he can send out
Charlie Black--whose professional specialty is lobbying on behalf of corrupt
Third World dictators like the late Ferdinand Marcos--to spin the press on how
the Democratic Party's taking Indonesian money demonstrates Bill Clinton's
flawed character.
The
campaign contributions are at least in the realm of the troublesome. The pardon
fuss, on other hand, is simply absurd. "Here's how to succeed in obstructing
justice," William Safire wrote in a recent column in the New
York
Times . "1) publicly disparage all investigators as partisan miscreants,
as Clinton now does; 2) encourage co-conspirators to resist prosecutorial
pressure by arranging for hush money; and 3) hint at post-election pardons."
The only problem here is that 2) is an unsupported fantasy, and that 3) is
simply wrong. Clinton has done nothing to hint at pardons. He has never brought
the matter up publicly, and there's no evidence he's done so in private. When
asked, he's said he hasn't thought about it and won't discuss it.
In the first presidential debate, Dole
comically demanded that Clinton say "no comment" when asked about pardons,
which is more or less precisely what Clinton has done. Dole later changed his
position and demanded that Clinton explicitly promise to rule out pardons if
re-elected. "He better make it very clear--no pardons, no pardons to anybody he
did business with who may be in jail," Dole said on the eve of the final
debate. Dole's spokesman justified this turnaround by arguing that Clinton had
obviated his "no comment" with an answer (a couple of weeks earlier) on the
News Hour With Jim Lehrer.
Here's what Clinton actually
said: "My position would be that their cases should be handled like others,
they should go through--there's a regular process for that, and I have regular
meetings on that, and I review those cases as they come up after there's an
evaluation done by the Justice Department." In no significant way does that
comment differ from a "no comment." Of course, a no-pardon promise would be
meaningless; Clinton could simply break it on his last day of office. And if
his character is as bad as some Republicans contend, there's no reason for them
to think he would hesitate to do so. It might also be pointed out that Dole
supported the political pardons meted out by Gerald Ford, when he served as
Ford's running mate in 1976. Likewise in 1992, he applauded the Bush
administration's lame-duck pardons of Caspar Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, et
al.
"These people are so
power-hungry and so shameless they'll do anything to win," Dole said at a rally
in Glendale, Calif., the day after the debate (before leading the audience in
the chant: "It's Our Money, It's Our Money, It's Our Money"). It's hard to say
whether this is really true of Bill Clinton. But in the closing days of the
campaign, it stands as an apt description of his faltering Republican
opponents.
