New Appeals for a Return to Civility

It was nearly 10 years ago that Texas Democrat Jim Wright resigned from the job he had coveted for much of his adult life: the speakership of the House of Representatives.

Wright, a fierce and florid partisan who had never shied from a fight, knew he had been cornered after an exhaustive investigation into his financial dealings spearheaded by a young Republican backbencher from Georgia named Newt Gingrich.

As he surrendered his gavel, Wright offered a prophetic final cry of rage: “When vengeance becomes more desirable than vindication, harsh personal attacks on one another’s motives and one another’s character drown out the quiet logic of serious debate. All of us, in both political parties, must resolve to bring this period of mindless cannibalism to an end.”

A decade later, with the curtain finally falling on the fierce battle over President Clinton’s fate--a struggle that has bloodied the accusers as well as the accused--a new generation of politicians is taking up Wright’s cry and demanding an end to what House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) calls “the politics of personal destruction.”

Those appeals may strike a receptive chord with the majority of voters, who throughout the long crisis staunchly rejected the idea that the charges rendered Clinton unfit to serve.

But some experts argue that the forces behind today’s scandal are so deeply ingrained in the workings of the political parties, the interest groups and the news media that they may be unstoppable.

“I will bet that people will claim that this is a turning point,” said political scientist Larry Sabato, the author of a book on the political manipulation of scandal. “That will be the buzz for a few months--until a scandal is used on the first of the 2000 presidential candidates.”

Although the 13-month struggle surrounding Clinton’s relationship with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky has demonstrated that voters resist judging public figures solely on the basis of their private failings, it has also shown again that an ethics investigation remains the most effective way to immobilize a political adversary.

And, most analysts agree, that makes ethical attack an almost irresistible weapon. “It doesn’t stop until the voters force it to stop,” Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux said. “Which is to say, when they actually start punishing candidates who do this.”

American politicians have been accusing their rivals of violating laws of God or man since the days of the Founding Fathers. But since the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, politicians have more systematically manipulated accusations of scandal against their rivals. As political scientists Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter noted in their recently re-released book, scandal has become a mechanism for the parties to pursue “Politics by Other Means.”

During the early 1980s, Democrats warned of a “sleaze factor” in Ronald Reagan’s administration, as they attacked the ethics of his appointees. Later in the decade, Wright fell victim to a Republican drive to portray the House, long a Democratic stronghold, as endemically corrupt.

Liberals next raised the scandal banner when they tried to derail President Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court with Anita Faye Hill’s charge that Thomas had sexually harassed her.

And from the moment Clinton edged onto the national stage in 1991, the GOP, the press and other critics have directed against him a permanent drizzle of personal and political accusations.

Clinton may have given his opponents a particular wealth of targets. But the Lewinsky controversy has illuminated the emergence of a permanent scandal infrastructure, with four transmission belts now conveying a steady flow of accusations and allegations to the public.

The parties. The scandal wars draw much of their fervor from a pattern of atrocity and revenge in the tradition of the Hatfields and the McCoys, or Serbs and ethnic Albanians.

After Gingrich became speaker in 1995, for instance, Democrats promptly launched an ethics investigation against him in retaliation for his strike against Wright. Just as Democrats rallied behind Hill in her sexual harassment claim against Thomas, conservatives sustained Paula Corbin Jones in her similar claim against Clinton. Drawing on the Democratic strategy against Reagan, House Republicans started more than three dozen investigations into the Clinton administration in the last Congress--even apart from the impeachment inquiry.

By breaking the psychological barrier to impeachment, this latest showdown between Clinton and congressional Republicans may produce more powerful grievances than any of these earlier battles.

Liberal activists already have responded by trumpeting reports of adultery involving several of the Clinton’s fiercest critics: GOP Reps. Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, Dan Burton of Indiana, Bob Barr of Georgia and Louisiana’s Bob Livingston. And several Republican presidential hopefuls have attacked Vice President Al Gore for his defense of Clinton during the scandal.

“This fight will give enormous momentum to the cycle for two reasons,” said Ginsberg, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University. “First, it creates a new precedent that you can impeach a president for moral offenses. And second, just as Democratic attacks on Nixon and Reagan taught the Republicans how to conduct their business, so this will teach the Democrats a new level of play against a future Republican president. I don’t foresee any end to this.”

The press. Watergate encouraged many newspapers, magazines and TV news operations to create permanent investigative reporting units--a development that heightened scrutiny of politicians and became a critical source of charges.

In the same spirit, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal has given birth to a vast echo chamber of cable TV talk shows (such as “Hardball”) and Internet publishers (led by Matt Drudge) that provide virtually unfiltered forums for partisans to float unsubstantiated allegations of ethical violations.

Gone are the gatekeepers and standards of the past. In the new environment, almost any allegation will surface somewhere--if not initially on the front pages of the major daily newspapers, at least on a cable talk show, a Web site or the late-night monologues of Jay Leno and David Letterman.

“What we’ve done is create a permanent architecture that depends on scandal and helps manufacture it,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a media watchdog group.

The law. Today’s politicians are subject to a tighter web of ethical and campaign finance laws and regulations--and more attention from prosecutors at all levels--than those who went before.

Most historians would reject the idea that today’s officeholders are inherently more corrupt than previous generations. But the number of state, federal and local government officials indicted by the federal government increased from 45 in 1970 to 824 in 1995.

At the federal level, the key development was the creation of the Independent Counsel Act in 1978 as a response to Watergate. Since then, every presidential administration has faced multiple independent counsel investigations, with Clinton and Reagan--the only presidents since then to be reelected--tied for the most, at seven each.

Even when these inquiries don’t result in formal charges, they cause considerable disruption, and that alone is reason enough for a president’s opponents to repeatedly demand such investigations.

The interest groups. Another striking development in the Lewinsky scandal has been the role of ideological groups. David Brock, the journalist whose reporting first alleged an intimate connection between Jones and Clinton--a suggestion that prompted her lawsuit--has said that his research was bankrolled by conservative Chicago financier Peter W. Smith, who set up a fund to underwrite investigations into Clinton’s sex life.

Whatever Jones’ own initial motivations, her suit was adopted and financially supported by conservative groups such as the Rutherford Institute. Her litigation provided legal justification for a tactic that probably would have precipitated a firestorm if undertaken by the Republican Party itself: the use of private investigators to examine Clinton’s sexual past.

It was that court-sanctioned authority to search Clinton’s past for a “pattern” of sexual misconduct that forced his relationship with Lewinsky into public light and set into motion the events that led to his impeachment.

Inevitably, this escalation on the right has been matched by the left: Hustler magazine Publisher Larry Flynt’s ongoing use of cash payments and private investigators to dig up dirt on the personal lives of prominent Republicans, including Livingston and Barr.

“The interest groups have seen that this can be a successful maneuver,” said Sabato, director of the Center for Governmental Studies at the University of Virginia.

There are indications that some leaders of both parties are looking for ways to edge away from the abyss.

In the House, several of the highest-profile investigations into the administration, including Burton’s inquiry into Clinton’s 1996 fund-raising activities, are scheduled to wind down. Rep. J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), the new speaker, wants to shift the emphasis in oversight from searching for scandal to measuring which programs work.

Some political strategists believe that candidates who attack their opponents’ personal conduct next year may face a backlash. With presidents of both parties now having been burned, many observers expect Congress to narrow or even kill the independent counsel law when it comes up for renewal this summer. And Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation Thursday to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in the Jones case allowing private claimants to pursue civil litigation against an incumbent president.

But for all of these efforts to construct new dams against it, the underlying tide of ethical allegation remains an almost irresistible force--a central current in the modern competition between the parties. Starr is holding open the possibility of still indicting Congressional Republicans are loudly demanding an investigation into whether White House aide Sidney Blumenthal committed perjury in his deposition during the Senate trial.

Even as the wick on the Lewinsky scandal burns down, Drudge and other conservative outlets are trumpeting a set of 20-year-old allegations about Clinton’s sexual behavior. A TV reporter already has asked Texas Gov. George W. Bush, a front-runner for the 2000 GOP presidential nomination, whether he had ever used marijuana or cocaine. (Bush refused to answer.)

And when asked about the House and Senate Judiciary Committees’ plans, their chairmen, Hyde and Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), indicated that they intend to investigate Atty. Gen. Janet Reno’s decision not to seek appointment of yet another independent counsel to investigate fund-raising for Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign.