Exit Paula
"Frame Game" is an
occasional Slate department based on the premise that who wins in
Washington is often determined by how the issue is framed. The author neither
endorses nor condemns any of the views expressed, however laudatory or
repellent.
At 4:15 p.m. ET on April 1,
CNN reported that Judge Susan Webber Wright was granting President Clinton's
motion to dismiss the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. Within minutes,
Clinton's allies waded into the media to frame the decision. In one scene,
replayed on television throughout the evening, a reporter asked Monica
Lewinsky's attorney William Ginsburg what the ruling meant. "It means that
there never was a Paula Jones case," said Ginsburg. "I trust you'll put the
proper spin on that."
Actually,
reporters didn't have to spin Ginsburg's remark or any other line put out by
the Clinton camp. The Clintonites gave them the spin prepackaged: Clinton was
"vindicated," Wright was the country's most honest Republican, and Independent
Counsel Kenneth Starr had lost the legal excuse for his vendetta against the
president. The most breathtaking spin of the evening--that "there never was a
Paula Jones case"--was swallowed whole. The war of words between Clinton and
his enemies looked, as it so often does, like the ground war between the United
States and Iraq: one side advancing with remorseless efficiency, the other side
fleeing in disarray.
1 "No Merit." Reporters like to show off
their savvy by picking out the most obvious spin they've been fed and exposing
it as such. In this case, the buzzword put out by former White House Counsel
Lanny Davis and other Clinton flacks was "vindication." Journalists were so
fixated on maintaining a skeptical distance from the V-word that they neglected
to screen out subtler phrases through which Clinton's surrogates equated his
legal escape with moral exoneration. On ABC's Nightline , George
Stephanopoulos proclaimed, "This wipes away any question of guilt." Seizing on
Wright's conclusion that Jones' legal case was "without merit," the Clintonites
constantly repeated this phrase to imply that Wright had dismissed Jones' whole
story. By the end of ABC's World News
Tonight , Peter Jennings was
telling viewers that according to the judge, "the charges against the president
had no merit."
The advantage of the "no
merit" line over the "vindication" line was that it enabled Clinton's
supporters to maintain their delicate policy of defending him without having to
vouch explicitly--and perhaps falsely--for his innocence. "I've never believed
[Jones'] story," proclaimed Democratic consultant Mandy Grunwald on CNN's
Crossfire . On CNN's Larry King Live , Davis offered a
magnificently hollow testimonial: "I believe the president's denial."
Jones'
lawyers disputed the "vindication" spin but failed to organize an effective
message of their own. The most promising line, auditioned by Pat Buchanan on
Crossfire , was that Clinton's alleged behavior, even if legal, was
offensive. But Jones' lead attorney, John Whitehead, lacked Buchanan's delicacy
in making the point. Wright had ruled that if Jones' allegations were true,
they still didn't amount to a breach of law. Whitehead simply removed the
hypothetical. "She presumed, basically, what Paula Jones testified, did
happen," Whitehead declared on Larry King Live . "The judge says very
clearly that the attitude of the president was boorish." At every opportunity,
Whitehead graphically told viewers that Clinton had fondled Jones' crotch,
exposed his genitals, and asked her for oral sex. News anchors responded to
these clumsy tactics by turning to other guests and changing the subject.
2 Judging the judge. When a federal
judge acts against you, you can't just profess shock and outrage, as Jones'
attorneys did after Wright's decision. The judge starts with a presumption of
fairness, and you have to tear that presumption down. The Clinton team's
assault on Starr is a textbook example. There were obvious avenues for a
similar attack on Wright: her student-teacher relationship with Clinton in law
school and her previous ruling--subsequently overturned--that Clinton couldn't
be sued until he left office. But Jones' advisers failed to organize a
concerted attack on these points. In one breath, they doubted her integrity; in
the next, they affirmed it.
The Jones
camp also tried to take the focus off Wright and put it back on what happened
between Clinton and Jones in the hotel room. If the case was bogus, asked
Buchanan, why did Clinton's lawyer Bob Bennett offer $700,000 and an apology to
make it go away? Ordinarily, this is a good strategy. But in this case, the
story line of the hour--"Judge dismisses Jones case"--was too strong to evade.
On television, as in court, you need an alternative theory (e.g., that Mark
Fuhrman planted the evidence) to lend coherence and persuasiveness to the
various holes in the prosecution (e.g., that the gloves don't fit). Jones'
advisers failed to put out an alternative story line explaining not just
how Wright had ruled incorrectly, but why .
Consequently and disastrously, the Jones team's expressions
of shock played into the Clinton team's spin: that the surprise in Wright's
decision lay in her defiance not of the facts of the case, but of the politics.
Clinton's surrogates advertised Wright as a Republican appointee, and numerous
media outlets, including NBC, CBS, and NPR, highlighted that point. By saying
nothing about Wright's student-teacher relationship with Clinton, the Jones
camp allowed the Clintonites to define it as adversarial. Wright's successful
petition to Clinton for a better grade became, in Dan Rather's words, an
illustration of her "long, often unfriendly, history with Bill Clinton."
One of the
Clinton team's most impressive feats was to sell the idea that throwing out the
case was courageous. Beginning with Bennett's afternoon press
conference--"Judge Wright should be complimented on her courage to make the
right decision, notwithstanding all of the political atmosphere surrounding the
case"--the Clintonites incessantly lauded Wright's bravery. Network legal
analysts and reporters followed suit, marveling at Wright's "guts" and
"gumption," even as their own instant polls showed the public favored the
ruling. The media's willingness to buy this line was a result, in part, of the
White House's ongoing campaign to depict Clinton as the victim of an inexorable
right-wing machine.
3 Clinton vs. whom?
Jones vs.
Clinton may be the case's official title, but it isn't the matchup the
White House wants. To begin with, it threatens to pit the world's most powerful
man against working women in general, a theme assiduously promoted by
Whitehead. And since Jones is widely regarded as poor and stupid, the very idea
of a contest between them makes Clinton the bad guy. For both of these reasons,
victory over Jones, regarded as such, would actually be a defeat for Clinton.
Hence Whitehead's argument, repeated in several venues, that the ruling would
discourage sexual harassment victims from coming forward. As Buchanan put it,
"the boys in the War Room" had "won a little victory today over this little
girl who is going to be denied justice."
Recognizing this trap, Clinton instructed his aides not to gloat. Even his pit
bulls restrained themselves. Bennett told reporters that the decision spoke for
itself, and James Carville brushed aside Jones as a pawn of larger, darker
forces. The Clintonites had a worthier foe in mind. Crossfire co-host
Bill Press summed up their story line: "Big victory for Clinton, big loss for
Ken Starr." Starr fought off the linkage, telling reporters that his criminal
investigation was "independent of the civil litigation." But the Clinton camp's
message was less nuanced and therefore more effective. On every network,
reporters and anchors talked about Starr's expensive and fruitless
investigation and about his obligation to "put up or shut up," as Rather
expressed it. CNN's Bob Franken declared that Starr and the Jones team were
"joined at the hip."
The Clintonites owed this portion of their victory in part
to shrewd preparation: For weeks, they had argued that Starr was in "collusion"
with Jones' lawyers. Meanwhile, Jones' lawyers foolishly cooperated by
grumbling that Starr was "shadowing" them and hijacking their investigation of
Lewinsky. The Clinton surrogates also held the high ground in the context war.
Starr's investigation of whether Clinton covered up an affair with Lewinsky
arose in the context of the depositions both gave in the Jones case. No matter
how carefully Starr's sympathizers explained the distinction between the two
cases--and even the superior gravity of the criminal case over the civil
case--journalists fell back on the Clintonite spin that, as Tom Brokaw put it,
Starr's probe "grew out of the Paula Jones case" and had therefore lost its
viability.
To this
end, Clinton's allies weren't content to pronounce the Jones case dead. They
proposed to erase it from history, as though Clinton's and Lewinsky's
depositions had never happened. Ginsburg's assertion that "there never was a
Paula Jones case" echoed a Democratic refrain, first delivered by Sen. Bob
Torricelli, D-N.J., that the Jones case--and hence the foundation of Starr's
investigation--"no longer exists." Bill Press, CNN political analyst Bill
Schneider, and the Washington Post soon adopted the "no longer exists"
formulation. The New York Times opened its front page analysis by
saying, "it is now politically inconceivable that Congress will consider
impeachment for President Clinton's alleged lies and obstruction in a case that
no longer exists." The Starr camp's plea that cover-ups should be judged by
their significance at the time they were committed, not by their significance
today, was washed out in a tide of Orwellian revision.
Not everyone in the Clinton camp wants Jones erased.
Carville, who has always been a step ahead of his colleagues in framing
Clinton's fights (remember when he declared war on Starr?), sees Jones' suit as
a weapon that can be turned against its makers. He wants her captured alive.
"Paula Jones is but one part of a larger mosaic," Carville charged on Larry
King Live , weaving together reports that Jones, Arkansas troopers, and
other Clinton accusers had received right-wing money. "I don't want this to end
anything. I want this to go on. Because I want this to be the linchpin of an
investigation of who got paid, how much, by whom, and to say what." The
Orwellians, it turns out, were too modest.
