Desperate Clinton Team’s Dash for Cash Left It Blind to Political Appearances

When it comes to the relationship between their political leaders and money, American voters have developed a considerable tolerance for the unseemly.

After all, politicians routinely solicit hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign gifts from people with personal stakes in government decisions. Ambassadorships and some other government appointments commonly go to big donors. Members of Congress and executive branch officials regularly deliberate over policy with lobbyists who bolster their arguments with campaign contributions.

Why then, against such a background of acceptance, have the fund-raising practices of President Clinton’s reelection campaign become the political equivalent of a forest fire, leaping ditches and defying all efforts to contain it? What did the 1996 Clinton campaign do that earlier campaigns did not? What lines, visible or invisible, did it cross?

As for the future, does the intensity of the present controversy mean Congress and the White House are finally ready to embrace significant reform?

Nothing is certain in political Washington. But unless fate intervenes or Clinton’s critics grossly overplay their hand, the sheer scale of the coming investigations by the Senate, the House, the Justice Department and possibly an independent counsel almost guarantee that the White House will be struggling to defend itself on legal and ethical grounds for months to come.

And the history of such affairs suggests that no president can emerge unscathed from such a battering, especially when the opposition party controls Congress.

Moreover, while many analysts remain skeptical about the likelihood of substantial reform, some have begun to consider the possibility that the current furor could produce one of those rare moments in history when past certainties break apart and significant change becomes possible.

“Probably the odds are against it,” said Thomas Mann, a campaign finance specialist at the Brookings Institution think tank, “but the possibility exists. If we get sufficient bipartisan embarrassment and if we get the reform community to rally around some achievable goals . . . then it’s possible something will come of it.”

Achievable reforms, he thinks, could include abolition of so-called soft money, restrictions on advocacy advertising that purports to focus on an issue but in fact supports a specific candidate, greater enforcement power for the Federal Election Commission and at least some free television time for candidates. Such changes would be “significant if not transforming,” Mann said.

What gave the controversy concerning Clinton’s fund-raising its initial explosive force were revelations of irregular and possibly illegal contributions that forced the Democratic National Committee to return about $3 million in donations--far more than any party has ever disgorged.

Gradually, however, it has become clear that the root of Clinton’s problems was a series of failures in three areas:

* Failure to control the competitive anxiety that spread like a fever through the White House and the DNC after the GOP seized control of Congress in the 1994 elections. As the president acknowledged in a press conference recently, his reelection campaign was desperately afraid of losing the public contest for votes by losing the private contest for money.

He said the campaign had no choice but to go all-out on fund-raising so that “we would not get buried--literally buried by the amount of money that the other side had at its disposal. . . . We had never faced anything like that before in American politics.”

Convinced that they faced nothing less than possible annihilation, White House and DNC officials pushed far beyond traditional limits, cut corners, reduced their examination of contributors and brushed aside safeguards that had been employed by previous campaigns, Democratic and Republican.

* Failure to restrain Clinton’s personal tendency to carry even ordinary activities to gargantuan extremes. Although others have used the White House to promote fund-raising, such activity always carries with it the risk of appearing to cheapen the office, or put it up for sale. Clinton, with his boundless appetite for doing more, may have crossed the invisible line beyond which a difference in quantity becomes a difference in the quality of an action.

George Bush and Ronald Reagan, for instance, confined their White House fund-raising activities to a small number of large, relatively impersonal receptions for big donors. Clinton has acknowledged participating in more than 100 White House coffee klatches for contributors in 1995 and 1996 alone.

Similarly, where his predecessors numbered their overnight guests in the handfuls, Clinton marched more than 900 people through the Lincoln and Queen’s bedrooms during his first term--many of them major campaign contributors and fund-raisers.

Herbert E. Alexander, professor of political science at USC, says there are no rules to govern the president’s actions in this area--only the chief executive’s own sense of restraint.

“That’s only respect for the institution, and that’s what also was allowed to lapse as big contributors were literally herded into the White House so fast and furious that no one could keep up,” Alexander said.

* Failure to understand the importance of appearances, especially when the president is personally involved.

Artificial as the distinction may seem, for example, President Carter in 1980 insisted that Hamilton Jordan resign as White House chief of staff and move to campaign headquarters to oversee Carter’s reelection bid. By contrast, Clinton kept senior aide Harold M. Ickes on the White House staff even as Ickes took a leading role in the reelection campaign.

Moving his desk to another building would not prevent a trusted presidential aide from involving himself in White House business or vice versa. And politics is part of any president’s thinking about almost every step he takes. But failure to observe traditional proprieties exposed Clinton’s flank.

In addition, where other presidents tried to keep at least the appearance of distance between themselves and the nitty-gritty aspects of their reelection campaigns, Clinton and Vice President Al Gore involved themselves in a surprising amount of detail. Both, for example, took part in the White House meeting at which it was decided to transfer John Huang, then a deputy Commerce secretary, to the DNC so that he would be completely free to solicit campaign contributions.

The Clinton White House also had a different approach to presidential visitors.

Under Carter, Reagan and Bush, White House lawyers and senior aides were expected to keep a sharp eye on who got personal access to the president. In addition to FBI computer checks on all prospective visitors and National Security Council staff examination of those with foreign ties, former senior Reagan aide Michael K. Deaver says White House counsel Fred Fielding’s office evaluated all invitees and Fielding “was a hawk on that sort of thing.”

Robert M. Kimmitt, NSC executive secretary in Reagan’s first term and an undersecretary of State in the Bush administration, testifies to the tight controls on access: “I’m old enough never to say that anything is airtight. But Deaver was so jealous of the president’s time that we had to fight for any time at all.”

C. Boyden Gray, who spent 12 years in the Reagan and Bush White Houses, acknowledges that the president and the vice president entertained groups of major contributors. But he insists that “there never were any one-on-ones with the president. We had pretty firm rules about who spent time with the president, whether it was Reagan or Bush.”

(Tight as the Reagan screen may have been, there was at least one lapse. In 1986, when NSC aide Oliver L. North was supporting lobbyists urging Congress to restore U.S. aid to anti-communist guerrillas in Nicaragua--and secretly financing the rebels--he helped arrange White House briefings for major contributors and pep talks from Reagan himself.)

For their part, Clinton and his aides operated on the theory of the more contact with outsiders the better. Clinton argues that such an approach was an educational antidote to the isolation of the office.

Moreover, where Bush, Reagan and Carter tried to draw a sharp--if arguably artificial--line between fund-raising and policy discussions, Clinton acknowledges talking about a wide array of issues with participants in White House fund-raising events.

With a president so eager to meet potential supporters and a staff so focused on the bottom line, it is not surprising that Clinton sometimes wound up in the company of the likes of Yogesh Gandhi, the self-promoting grandnephew of Mohandas K. Gandhi. And Clinton’s uncritical devotion to such friends as Little Rock, Ark., restaurant owner Yah Lin “Charlie” Trie led him to play host at a coffee to Wang Jun, a Chinese arms dealer brought by Trie to the White House.

The colorful nature of this cast of characters, coupled with the visceral alarm raised by the possibility of foreign influence tainting U.S. elections, not only captured the public eye but made investigations of possible wrongdoing inevitable.

Yet some analysts, including Mann, worry that focusing on possible crimes will reduce the chances of reform.

“When we want to avoid engaging serious questions of public policy, we have a way of criminalizing them,” Mann said. “That is, we turn attention from the adequacy of the laws to charges about people breaking laws. . . . If you criminalize the debate, then you will get a classic defense that does more to avoid the real issues than anything else.”

Times staff writers Ralph Frammolino and Doyle McManus contributed to this story.