A Charade of Scandal for Clinton

WASHINGTON —  It is getting extremely difficult to write about the White House fund-raising scandals with any sense of urgency--and that is the most urgent thing about them. In trying to gauge the impact of the recent news, you think you are viewing two different countries: one populated by part of the politically attentive public, straining, inch by agitated inch, to push Atty. Gen. Janet Reno into asking for an independent counsel, and the other, far bigger, inhabited by a public-at-large, announcing with a deafening roar of silence that it could care less.

Most citizens have other things on their minds, but that is not all. If there is one class that people mistrust more than politicians, it is the media; so the fact that journalists across the ideological spectrum are hopping up and down about this thing gives the public yet another reason to want no part of it.

So nothing much is going to happen to President Bill Clinton as a consequence of the current flap. Vice President Al Gore, playing the traditional vice-presidential role of scapegoat, will have his political chances hurt; but those chances may not have been so bright in the first place. The current scandals will stay interesting less for the changes they may bring than for their exemplary character as a political anatomy lesson.

Even jaded scandal observers must admit our leaders have shown more than the usual moral tackiness in raising funds and in accounting for it afterward. Clinton has staunchly defended the White House coffees he attended for Democratic contributors and potential contributors, and he has repeatedly said he could not remember if he made fund-raising calls from his working quarters at the White House: “I can’t say, over all the hundreds and hundreds and maybe thousands of phone calls I’ve made in the last four years, that I never said to anybody while I was talking to them, ‘Well, we need your help,’ or, ‘I hope you’ll help us.’ ”

But it turns out, according to a story in The Times, that Clinton used White House phones to solicit money from several major Democratic donors in 1994--and that Harold M. Ickes, a former aide, was in the room when he made the calls. The disclosure follows the discovery of White House documents showing that the president had been asked to solicit funds during the 1996 campaign. When presented with those documents indicating that he had been working the fund-raising phones with some frequency, Clinton--well, did a Clinton, to wit: “I believed then and I believe now what we did was legal. But I am absolutely positive that we intended to be firmly within the letter of the law.”

Clinton’s spokespersons, while not attempting to dispute Ickes’ recollections, continue to assert that any such calls “are entirely legal.”

Also during the ’96 campaign, Gore met in his office with a Democratic fund-raiser and the leader of a Buddhist sect. The vice president then made a fund-raising trip to Los Angeles, where he spoke at the sect’s temple and sect members made out checks to the Democratic National Committee. Some had been pressed to do so and were reimbursed out of temple funds, which is unambiguously illegal. The official response to this? The temple gig was not a fund-raiser but “community outreach.”

Then came news of the fund-raising phone calls from the vice president’s office. When they came to light, Gore said that (a) there were a few of them, (b) he had paid for them with his “DNC credit card,” (c) there was, in his now-famous phrase, “no controlling legal authority” declaring his actions illegal, and (d) he was proud of what he did. It turned out that there were more than a few calls. He dialed 86 numbers, to be exact, from lists prepared by the DNC. And there was no DNC credit card.

Throughout, White House spokespersons say this whole ruckus turns on two technicalities. One is an old law that forbids political fund-raising on federal government property, a statute designed to keep politicians from shaking down federal workers that might well not apply where the solicitor at one end of the phone connection is on government property while the solicitee at the other end is not. The other main charge is that some of the funds raised by Clinton and Gore ended up in the DNC’s “hard money” account, earmarked for electing Democratic candidates; the distinction is coming to seem ever more metaphysical.

Both points are well taken. It is quite true that all the clucking about possible illegalities is, in good part, an excuse to explore the larger territory of Clinton administration fund-raising. But the ground is worth exploring.

Take, for instance, the matter of soliciting political funds on federal property. The law is old, but it is not some unknown enactment dusted off specially to attack Clinton. Administrations over the past 25 years, certainly, have been well aware of it. White House counsels to successive presidents routinely warned their charges about it. For the Clinton administration to have run afoul of the statute means either it has no institutional memory or that people in this White House have simply stopped caring about prohibitions they deem quaintly out of touch with modern hard-ball politics.

Or, take the issue of the president and vice president making those fund-raising calls in the first place--no matter where they were sitting. Strange as it may seem to the non-political, presidents and vice presidents in the recent past have not done much direct phone solicitation. (There was, of course, the incident with Vice President Spiro T. Agnew and the brown paper bag, but that was in the nature of fulfillment of a previous commitment). No, it is customary for subordinates to do the dirty work.

Is it hypocritical to make something of the difference? Of course, but it is hypocrisy with redeeming social value. A president, contrary to popular belief, is human. If he has not made actual personal begging, wheedling voice contact with his donors, it is far easier for him to stiff them afterward when they seek his help.

This ingratitude produces a small amount of independence in our highest officials--a quality we should not sneeze at these days. But the current generation of politicos, raised without yesterday’s starchy political pieties, has no use for such subtleties.

Finally, there is the business about the evading and dancing around the fund-raising realities after the fact. It is one thing to cover up; that is the essence of politics, and not always in the pejorative sense. It is something else when a president or vice president covers up after having lived through 25 years of the age of political scandal--covers up, that is, knowing people will be suspecting cover up, looking for it and probably finding it. That is what has happened to Clinton and Gore: Almost as quickly as an explanation is floated, the emerging documents and Nexis searches expose it as insufficient. But they persist--as if knowing that the whole process has become a universally acknowledged charade.