‘Frontline’ Looks at Fund-Raising Abuses

A PBS special report on the most egregious political fund-raising campaign since Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection should provide a warning to viewers: This program contains little, if any, new information.

In “Washington’s Other Scandal,” Bill Moyers and his “Front-line” crew devote the entire hourlong program to dramatically replaying some of the now-familiar abuses of the 1996 campaign.

We see President Clinton exploiting loopholes to secure tens of millions of dollars for his reelection; the Democratic National Committee soliciting illegal contributions from foreign donors; wealthy Republican contributors secretly laundering donations through front organizations; and Democratic operatives attempting to “fleece” a naive band of Oklahoma Indians desperate to become players in Washington.

They are all stories that have been thoroughly explored over the last two years by news organizations, congressional committees and the Justice Department. Yet, despite the paucity of fresh material, the program is must-see TV for anyone concerned about the increasingly corrupting influence of money in the electoral process.

The PBS report also should be mandatory viewing for Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, who is weighing once again whether to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the 2-year-old allegations of illegal fund-raising, and every member of Congress who has joined in the machinations by the Republican leadership to kill sweeping campaign-finance reform legislation.

Unfortunately for voters, the Republican-led Congress currently seems more interested in the details of the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal than reforming the outright abuses of the campaign finance system.

“These White House videotapes reveal the heart of a Washington where money--not sex--is the obsession,” Moyers says at the outset. “The story is not what two consenting adults did in private, but what our two political parties are doing to an unsuspecting public.”

The program focuses on the methods and motives employed by both major parties to violate the spirit of Watergate-era laws in raising hundreds of millions of dollars for political advertising.

The program exposes the hypocrisy of Clinton pledging to clean up campaign abuses while personally orchestrating one of the most aggressive political fund-raising operations in history and Senate Republicans vowing to probe campaign violations while shutting down the investigation without scrutinizing their own party.

The story is told through candid interviews with former Clinton political consultant Dick Morris, former White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes and former DNC Chairman Donald Fowler, who seem to concede that they sought to evade limits and use large “soft-money” donations for prohibited expenditures so long as they did not technically violate the law.

The program relies heavily on excerpts from more than 100 hours of footage shot by a government video crew that recorded private conversations at the now infamous White House coffees and Clinton fund-raisers. These discussions, which were not intended to be made public, were turned over last year to the Senate committee investigating campaign abuses.

At one coffee, a developer is seen in the White House trying to hand Fowler several checks. The DNC chairman rejects the money, saying, “As soon as this thing is over, I’ll call you and we’ll get it done.”

* “Frontline” airs tonight at 9 on KCET-TV (Channel 28).