Fund-Raising Brouhaha Puts Clinton Under Siege on Eve of Likely Triumph

Haley Barbour, the tart-tongued chairman of the Republican National Committee, spends the better part of his waking hours figuring out ways to torment Bill Clinton. Last week, he came up with a new one. He’s started calling the president “Stonewall Clinton.”

Stonewall Clinton?

That’s not exactly the name Clinton was hoping would apply at the end of this campaign. He was thinking more along the lines of “Landslide Clinton”: the first Democrat to carry Arizona since 1948, or Virginia since 1964; the man who swiped back Florida and Texas from the GOP; the architect of a new Democratic electoral majority that would give Al Gore the leg up in the year 2000.

Instead, at what should be a moment of triumph, Clinton finds himself suddenly under siege.

For months, the presidential campaign has been so fixed in its orbit that many assumed it would take a meteor to disrupt its trajectory. The meteor seems to have belatedly arrived in the form of revelations from this newspaper and others about a hive of questionable Democratic National Committee fund-raising efforts.

If Raymond Chandler were alive, the list of specifics might make good raw material for a Philip Marlowe novel: a $250,000 contribution that had to be returned to a South Korean company, a mysterious $425,000 contribution from an Indonesian couple living outside Washington, a fund-raiser in a Buddhist temple and a distant relative of Mahatma Gandhi who scrounged up $325,000 for the DNC while he owed $10,000 in back taxes. Not to mention allegations that an American diplomatic representative tried to strong-arm contributions in Taiwan.

These interconnected, still widening controversies have almost certainly arrived too late to save Bob Dole, though they may help him avoid a historic blowout by recapturing some of the ordinarily Republican-leaning states that had been tilting toward Clinton even late into October.

The head wind may also push Clinton below the 50% level in the popular vote--the threshold of majority support that he desperately wants to cross. It has also provided a modest gust of wind for Ross Perot, whose campaign, just days ago, seemed to have as much prospect as an elephant has of becoming airborne.

But, even if tomorrow brings Clinton victory, the charges--and even more so, the White House response to them--have cast a cloud that’s unlikely to clear any time soon. In Washington, it isn’t only partisans like Barbour who have unearthed that resonant Watergate-era coinage to describe the Democrats’ response to the swirl of questions. “The president’s approach so far,” said Fred Wertheimer, the former president of Common Cause, “has been a stonewall.”

There’s that word again.

Clinton supporters say it’s unrealistic to ask him to demand a full public airing of all the party’s dirty laundry in the supercharged atmosphere of a campaign’s last days. That argument would have more merit if the White House track record offered any hint that its non-responsive response would change one iota the day after the election.

Faced with any accusation of wrongdoing, the Clinton White House typically digs in, circles the wagons and shoulders its weapons. On almost any charge, the White House’s first instinct is to attack the accuser. Its second instinct is to delay the release of information, providing as little as it can, as slowly as it can. It operates by the commandments of the trial lawyer: life is combat; never surrender a point until the cost of defending it becomes unsustainable; never resolve today what can be delayed until tomorrow.

“There are always a couple of ways to deal with these kind of problems,” said Wertheimer. “In the past, the one that has been the most successful has been to move quickly to get all the information out to the public and then let it go from there. But the Clinton pattern seems to be . . . to try to avoid it, to contain it, to deflect it and only when it comes down to the last stage, to get the information out to the public.”

Is that too stern a judgment? Consider the sequence of events as the questions about DNC fund-raising have accumulated over the past few weeks.

Two weeks ago Sunday, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation” that he was “certain” the committee would make available for questioning by reporters John Huang, the party fund-raiser most intimately involved in these questionable transactions. Then, a few hours later, a party spokeswoman announced that, in effect, Dodd’s promise was inoperative. Huang remained out of sight.

By the end of that week, it wasn’t only reporters who couldn’t find Huang. For several days, federal marshals, seeking to serve him a subpoena to testify in a related case brought by a conservative legal institute, couldn’t locate him either.

While Huang stayed out of sight, infuriating the judge overseeing the case, the White House was virtually struck mute. Mike McCurry, the White House press secretary, could barely conceal his disdain for the suggestion that the president bore any obligation to unequivocally call on his fund-raiser and former Commerce Department employee to step forward. “I don’t know where he is,” McCurry said dismissively at one point.

The only substantive response from the White House was to call on the Federal Election Commission to investigate the questions about the DNC--though it is fully aware that the FEC conducts its investigations at a pace usually measured in geologic time.

Finally, in a crescendo of arrogance, the DNC sought to wiggle through a loophole to avoid a routine preelection report of its contributions and expenditures--before quickly reversing course under a hail of criticism. Huang eventually delivered his deposition--though he’s remained unavailable to the press. (Late last week the DNC finally permitted questioning of its executive director, who acknowledged deficiencies in its oversight of fund-raising but left many specifics still not addressed.)

As for Clinton, he hasn’t answered any questions about the subject either. And in his defensive speech on campaign-finance reform last week, he offered no response more specific than the blanket declaration that “we have played by the rules” in raising money. Besides, he suggested, the Republicans are just as bad.

Up to a point, Clinton has a point. Fund-raising rules have collapsed on both sides. Should Americans really be more worried about a $425,000 contribution from an Indonesian gardener to the DNC than the $2.1 million that Philip Morris Cos. Inc. has poured into the Republican National Committee--or for that matter, the $1.7 million that trial lawyers have lavished on the DNC?

Clearly not. But that doesn’t absolve Clinton of his responsibility to get out the facts, and clean his own house, on the specific questions lingering about the DNC’s prospecting among Asian and Asian American sources.

Yes, Clinton is a candidate in the heat of a campaign. But he is also the nation’s chief executive with a responsibility to uphold the laws; when he loses sight of that overriding obligation--as he did in his silence during Huang’s disappearance--he flirts with the comparisons to Richard Nixon.

What’s been missing from Clinton’s public response has been any sense that he views these questions as anything other than a political problem. If he’s angry that anyone in his orbit bent or broke the law in their eagerness to pile up contributions, he’s done a good job of hiding it.

John Podesta, a former White House aide who spent years dealing with the assorted ethical allegations that have rained down on Clinton, says the White House responds so politically to questions like this precisely because Republicans have so plainly viewed charges of scandal as a political tool. It’s hard to argue with that: Just as Democrats did during the Reagan years, congressional Republicans now consciously use their investigatory power to try to weaken the president.

But the White House has turned that burden into a crutch, an all-purpose excuse for delay and denial. When senior White House advisor George Stephanopoulos was challenged recently on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press” about the DNC fund-raising, his immediate response--so instinctive it seemed on his lips before the question ended--was to attack Dole, and for good measure, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), for fund-raising irregularities too. Sure, there are a lot of glass houses in Washington. But Clinton compounds his problems by reaching first for a stone whenever anyone asks whether his own windows are clean.

The Washington Outlook column appears here every other Monday.