Investigation Is Way of Life in Politics Now

While White House officials last week were coping with the numbing news that the Justice Department may appoint no fewer than three new special prosecutors to investigate allegations against the Clinton administration, they at least had plenty of company in their misery.

Consider a few other snapshots from the campaign trail in the first week of September.

In Kentucky, Republican House candidate Gex Williams, already battered by charges that he benefited from a sweetheart land deal, faced a new radio ad from his opponent accusing him of misrepresenting his academic background in his official state biography.

In Las Vegas, Democratic congressional candidate Shelley Berkley was hit by a new Republican Party television ad that said she “advocates corruption” and cited allegations that she improperly encouraged her employer to provide favors to local politicians while working at a downtown casino.

On the same day in Ohio, the campaign of Bob Taft, the Republican gubernatorial nominee, acknowledged improperly soliciting a public employee for a donation. One day before that, George Ryan, the GOP gubernatorial nominee in Illinois, was fending off Democratic attacks regarding letters he wrote two decades ago seeking clemency for a convicted murderer. Topping off the week, Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), a fierce critic of President Clinton, moved to preempt a magazine investigation by announcing that he too had strayed during his nearly 40-year marriage, ultimately acknowledging fathering a child out of wedlock.

Marking just a week’s harvest, this bounty of allegation and imbroglio--arriving as independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s four-year investigation of President Clinton moves toward its conclusion--underscores the extent to which accusations of scandal have become a pervasive, almost inescapable, presence at all levels of American political life.

Ethics Used as a Weapon

These allegations may be proliferating because politicians are, as some believe, less honest than in earlier generations. But many critics see something else at work: an ethical process that has spiraled out of control as both parties have made it part of their core political strategies to routinely accuse opponents of violating assorted laws, commandments or both.

“Questions of ethics and integrity have become partisan political weapons, as opposed to values and moral standards,” says Fred Wertheimer, the former president of Common Cause, a group that presses for reform in Washington.

Although the politics of scandal have reached hurricane force in the Clinton era, the wind has been strengthening for years. Since the law creating the independent counsel was enacted in 1978, every president has faced multiple investigations from special prosecutors.

The Clinton and Reagan administrations have faced the most independent counsel investigations--seven--but Clinton would hold the dubious honor of the top spot himself if Atty. Gen. Janet Reno authorizes any of the three inquiries now under consideration.

It is not only the president and top Cabinet officials who have found themselves in the cross hairs. According to Justice Department statistics, the number of government employees and politicians indicted on allegations of corruption at the local, state and federal level skyrocketed from 45 in 1970 to 824 in 1995. And, as last week’s examples suggest, allegations of impropriety have become an occupational hazard for candidates at virtually all levels.

Effect of Watergate

Why have ethical controversies become so pervasive in politics? The most obvious reason is that the post-Watergate ethics reforms--the rules governing campaign finance, lobbying and gift-giving--have imposed penalties on much of the political activity that was accepted in earlier generations. Political candidates and consultants often complain that it has become difficult to make it through an entire campaign without at least technically violating the campaign finance laws--and generating critical headlines in the process.

But Wertheimer, now the president of Democracy 21, a public policy group, argues that the problem has not been over- but under-enforcement of campaign finance laws. The widespread belief in the political community that “the laws would not be enforced,” he says, has encouraged candidates to ever more aggressively ignore the fund-raising limits. That process, he argues, produced not only the abuses that have provoked the demands for investigations into the Clinton and Bob Dole presidential campaigns of 1996 but similar (if less dramatic) problems for other candidates down the ballot.

The media’s growing appetite for scandal has encouraged the trend. Post-Watergate disclosure laws have provided the press more grist by increasing the availability of information on campaign and personal finances. And in the quarter century since Watergate, many media outlets have permanent investigative units that specialize in unearthing allegations of wrongdoing against politicians.

Also, opposing campaigns now spend more time digging up unsavory information about their rivals, partly because they believe that reporters--from local papers to the national networks--are more likely to cover ethical controversies than policy arguments.

“It’s the same old waltz,” says GOP media consultant Mike Murphy. “If I have a choice between announcing a plan to cure cancer or attacking my opponent over some crazy ethical thing, I know the ethical thing will always get coverage. So the need gets fed.”

Attacks Now Seen as Routine

In Washington, the politics of scandal appears fed by a deepening hostility between the two parties. The persistence of divided government--control of Congress and the White House has been split between the parties for all but six of the last 30 years--has provided an institutional incentive for more intense investigation. And in an environment in which both sides increasingly equate politics with war, each now sees attacks on their opponents’ ethics not as an extraordinary step but as a routine component of their basic weaponry--more like an M-16 than a nuclear bomb.

“There is no sense of collegiality, and there are certainly some folks who are out for blood,” says Benjamin Ginsberg, a political scientist at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University and co-author of a book on the political use of scandal. “That is reflected in the intensity and the shamelessness, on both sides, of these investigations and smear campaigns.”

Republicans such as Murphy trace this calculated manipulation of scandal back to Democratic efforts to discredit Reagan by trumpeting an alleged “sleaze factor” in his administration. Democrats such as pollster Mark Mellman point toward the Newt Gingrich-led effort in the 1980s to uproot the Democratic House majority by portraying the institution as endemically corrupt.

Clinton Providing Plenty of Fodder

Whatever the starting point, the result has been a steadily escalating cycle of attack and counterattack that has reached a crescendo in Clinton’s presidency. From the firing of White House travel office employees to his relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky, Clinton has provided his critics no shortage of ethical targets. But it also is true that Clinton’s foes have long viewed ethics as his Achilles’ heel and have devoted enormous effort both to unearthing and making public accusations against him.

In the House alone, Democrats count 55 investigations of the administration since Republicans assumed control of Congress in 1995.

“There’s no question in my mind that there is a systematic effort to attack this president based on alleged ethical lapses, and that has been their strategy from the day he emerged from the pack in New Hampshire in 1992,” says Mellman.

So dense are the overlapping investigations that they have begun to feed on themselves, a process evident in the preliminary inquiries that Reno has launched to decide whether to appoint special prosecutors aimed at Vice President Al Gore and former top White House aide Harold M. Ickes.

In neither case is the investigation now focused on allegations that the men violated an underlying statute, such as accepting a bribe or illegally soliciting contributions. Rather, Gore and Ickes face the prospect of exhaustive further inquiries because of allegations that they misled investigators in earlier rounds of investigation.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt finds himself confronting an independent counsel investigation concerned not with whether he broke a law in refusing an Indian casino gambling license but with whether he misled Congress in his description of the decision-making.

Though inquiries into political wrongdoing often have turned on allegations of perjury, critics see in these circular investigations something far more troubling: “a cascade of investigations-of-investigations [that] creates a maze of infinite jeopardy,” as author Jonathan Rauch wrote this year.

In an interview last year before the Senate began its hearings on 1996 campaign fund-raising, Ickes himself had expressed fear that the proceedings were partly intended to leave him and other administration officials “mousetrapped into perjury” through multiple grillings under oath.

With both parties now having been burned by lengthy investigations, some critics of the independent counsel law believe that the two sides may agree to curtail it, or even let it lapse, when it comes up for renewal next year. But congressional Democrats who have seen Clinton ground down may be hesitant to eliminate a weapon they might someday wield against a GOP president, and congressional Republicans might be reluctant to disarm against a potential President Gore.

In the meantime, in campaigns every day, the drumbeat of ethical allegations pounds on as the election approaches. On Thursday alone, the two U.S. Senate candidates in Georgia challenged each other to prove that they are drug free. And in Massachusetts, each of the two contenders in the Republican gubernatorial primary accused the other of financial improprieties.

“It’s very difficult,” says Ginsberg, “to break out of a cycle like this.”