See Democrats Tottering--Except Reno

After a year of hearings, investigations, goofy press conferences, second-guessing Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, Buddhist fund-raisers, White House coffee talk, Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers, shady Teamster deals and shadowy figures skipping the country, it’s time to ask a question: So what? What’s it all add up to?

The campaign fund-raising scandal was supposed to be the Big One, the earthquake that would swallow up the Clinton administration. It wasn’t. But the story created a lot of tremors being felt all over U.S. politics. There’s still a whole lot of shaking going on.

The bottom line is, no major indictments. Not Bill, not Hillary, not Al. And, so far, no major figure on the White House staff or at the Democratic National Committee. The thing President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore feared most--an independent counsel--didn’t happen.

The fund-raising calls from the White House were never the issue. Those charges were ludicrous. No prosecutor could have turned them into a serious case against the president or vice president. So why was an independent counsel such a threat? Ask Kenneth M. Duberstein, chief of staff in the Reagan White House during the Iran-Contra investigation. Duberstein recently said, “Having a special counsel opens everything in the White House to scrutiny.” By which he meant: everything. Influence peddling, foreign subversion, money laundering--everything. For Clinton, an independent counsel meant another Whitewater. For Gore, it meant political death.

Reno warned that her decision not to request an independent counsel “does not mean a person has been exonerated or that the work of the Campaign Finance Task Force has ended. We will continue to vigorously investigate all allegations of illegal activity.”

But it can’t investigate “covered persons” under the independent-counsel statute, like the president and vice president. If, in the course of doing its work, the task force finds “specific and credible evidence” of wrongdoing by a covered person, it will trigger a request for an independent counsel. But after a year of inquiries, the likelihood that new evidence of criminal behavior by the president or vice president will “turn up” without a new investigation does not seem very strong.

The biggest remaining threat is that Reno will appoint an independent counsel to investigate Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt on allegations that he traded Indian gambling licenses for political contributions. Why does that threaten Clinton and Gore? Because “having a special counsel opens everything in the White House to scrutiny.”

Of course, hearings in the House of Representatives are still going on. And on. But they’ve turned into a partisan slugfest. The Senate hearings started out last summer with a sensational charge. Chairman Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) asserted that the Chinese government was pursuing a sinister plot to subvert U.S. politics. But it was never proved. In the end, the Senate hearings ran out of gas. “I’m not going to have hearings just for the sake of having hearings,” Thompson said at the end of October. So much for making this issue his springboard to the White House.

Meanwhile, Clinton’s job ratings have suffered not a bit. Well, maybe a bit. He started off the year with a 62% job-approval rating just before his second inaugural. He’s ending the year at 61%. As for Gore, he continues to dominate the Democratic field for 2000, running way ahead of all other potential candidates in the polls.

Campaign-finance reform got exactly nowhere in Congress. Meanwhile, the voters’ worst suspicions were confirmed. Remember when Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) asked businessman Roger Tamraz at the Senate hearings, “Was one of the reasons that you made these contributions because you believed it might get you access?” Tamraz’s reply: “Senator, I’ll go further. It’s the only reason.”

Maybe the voters didn’t learn anything new about Clinton, but the fund-raising stories confirmed his image as a typical money-grubbing politician. Who, when he gets in trouble, blames the system. “The real problem,” Clinton said last March, “is that these campaigns cost too much money, they take too much time and they will continue to do so until we pass campaign-finance reform.” Is that the real problem? Or is it that a desperate drive for big money drove the White House right up to, and possibly over, the edge of the law?

There is one place where the fallout of the campaign fund-raising controversy has been keenly felt: Democratic Party fund-raising. It’s virtually collapsed. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time for Democrats. Since they no longer wield the power of the majority in Congress, business contributions are way down. In 1992, business political-action committees gave Democratic congressional candidates $25 million. In 1996, the total was less than $17 million.

As a result, congressional Democrats have become more and more dependent on organized labor. In 1992, Democrats raised one-third of their campaign money from labor. In 1996, nearly half. We saw the result last month when “fast track” came to a head and congressional Democrats had to choose between the White House and labor. A popular two-term president found himself with very little influence over his own party.

The fund-raising scandal originated in the Clinton White House and its frenzy to raise money to reelect the president. Congressional Democrats saw little of that money. The irony is, they’re the ones paying the price. The fund-raising scandal is driving a wedge between Clinton and the one institution capable of carrying on his legacy, the Democratic Party.

The only member of the administration who seems to be escaping unsullied is Reno. Which is odd, because the public does not agree with her decision. Most Americans believe she should have appointed independent counsels to investigate both Clinton and Gore, according to a Gallup Poll taken just after her announcement. But most Americans also believe she made her decision based on her reading of the facts, not because she was trying to protect Clinton and Gore.

Reno is not a political creature. That’s both her strength and her weakness. Washington insiders see her as “out of it” politically. But the public admires her non-political image. They see her as “one of us,” not “one of them.” As a result, Reno never has been personally close to Clinton. No surprise there. Clinton is a completely political creature.

During Clinton’s first term, Reno’s independence created problems for the White House. She infuriated the administration by requesting independent counsels to investigate Clinton’s role in Whitewater as well as allegations against three Cabinet officers. The public saw her as someone who marches to her own drummer. She’s nobody’s crony. So while her independence was damaging to the president, it protected her. After he got reelected, Clinton wanted to dump Reno. But she refused to walk the plank for him.

Now the situation is reversed. Reno’s independence is protecting the president. Republicans can’t make much headway with the argument that she’s Clinton’s political crony. The one argument they can make is that she’s being too legalistic and technical. And that she’s missing the big picture: one that looks like a systematic effort by the White House to subvert the campaign-finance law. “She’s got to take off the green eyeshades, the nit-picking about where somebody was standing when they made a phone call, and look at these things in general terms,” Thompson said. “This is a monumental scandal.”

Reno’s habit is to focus on the law and pay no attention to the political reality. As she said earlier this year, “I take everything based on the evidence and the law. I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. And so the best thing I can do is ignore the politics.”

Ignoring the politics got her in trouble with the White House during Clinton’s first term. But now it suits the president just fine.