Into the Woods, but Republicans and Public See Starkly Different Forests

It spoke volumes last week when Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-Ark.) protested that White House Counsel Charles F.C. Ruff opened the defense in President Clinton’s impeachment trial by offering too much detail. “[Ruff] used a microscope to go after individual details,” complained Hutchinson, the most able of the House prosecutors, “ignoring the overall scheme of things.”

Ruff didn’t totally ignore “the overall scheme.” But Hutchinson’s lament still pinpointed a pivotal dynamic. As another bitter partisan crescendo approaches, both the political and legal struggles over Clinton’s fate have become a contest between the forest and the trees.

In their presentations to the Senate, the House prosecutors were big on the big picture--the forest. In succession, the House speakers portrayed all the disparate branches of the case--from the job search for Monica S. Lewinsky to Clinton’s grand jury testimony--as a vast plot controlled by the president to subvert Paula Corbin Jones’ sexual harassment case.

“Think of this all as one big obstruction,” Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.) counseled the senators. “The big picture is what you need to keep in mind.”

Hutchinson had the same advice: The case’s many twists could be understood only as part of a “scheme,” a “conspiracy” and a “web of obstruction,” all “personally constructed by the president.”

Rep. James E. Rogan (R-Glendale) chimed in with a portrait of the president as a liar so inveterate that he repeatedly perjured himself even in the statement to the grand jury when he admitted to “inappropriate intimate contact” with Lewinsky.

Constructing that ominous backdrop allowed the prosecutors to cast every event in the most sinister light--even when specific evidence of wrongdoing was thin or nonexistent. McCollum, for instance, said that “the circumstantial evidence” indicated that Clinton reviewed “15 . . . drafts” of Lewinsky’s affidavit in the Jones case--although Lewinsky testified that Clinton told her he didn’t need to see the document and no direct evidence suggests he ever did.

Rogan likewise insisted that Clinton deliberately lied to the grand jury when he said his sexual relationship with Lewinsky began in 1996, not 1995, because the president thought the affair would be politically “less combustible” if people believed it began when Lewinsky was an employee, not an intern. But Rogan offered not a shred of evidence to prove that was Clinton’s intent.

This is what determined prosecutors do when they have a room full of smoke but no smoking gun--no direct, irrefutable evidence of a crime.

Last week the White House did what defense attorneys do when they have a client whose clothes all smell of smoke--even if no one can find a match on him. They reversed the lens and narrowed the focus.

To the extent the White House had a competing portrait of Clinton--an alternative forest, as it were--it pictured him as a flawed yet ultimately law-abiding man whose goal was to avoid embarrassment, not obstruct justice. But his defenders put most of their energy into examining the individual trees in the House case, minutely detailing each blemish in the bark.

Did Clinton direct his secretary, Betty Currie, to retrieve his gifts from Lewinsky? Currie testified that Lewinsky called her.

Didn’t cell phone records show that Currie called Lewinsky on the crucial day? The call occurred after Lewinsky testified the gifts were exchanged--and besides, it lasted a minute or less.

Did Vernon E. Jordan Jr. intensify his efforts to find Lewinsky a job on the December 1997 day when the judge in the Jones case ruled that Jones’ attorneys could question other women about sexual contacts with Clinton? No, the White House said, his meeting with Lewinsky that day had been scheduled for weeks--and he was on a plane to Amsterdam by the time the order came down.

On it went for three days, as the White House probed every weak spot in the prosecution’s case. The president’s defenders didn’t knock down every tree in the House presentation. To take one example: Even though the defense showed that the House fell short of proving that Clinton intended to tamper with a witness when he met with Currie after his Jones deposition, the White House never offered a convincing alternative explanation of his purpose in the meeting.

But as a second line of defense, whenever the bark inspection faltered, the White House pulled back from the trees and offered its own big picture argument: that the offenses alleged, especially when based on such conflicting testimony, didn’t justify what Clinton attorney David E. Kendall called “the awesome responsibility” of removing a president.

That argument squarely aligned the defense with the opinion that most Americans have expressed through the long controversy. Indeed, in the political battle, the two sides have reversed the roles they are playing in the legal contest before the Senate.

To most Americans, it is the congressional Republicans who are missing the forest for the trees--obsessively focusing on this tawdry affair amid a presidency that a stunning 81% of the country now considers a success, according to a Gallup poll last week.

Poll after poll underscores the point: The GOP’s problem is not that Americans condone Clinton’s behavior, endorse his ethics or even dismiss the Republicans’ case. The problem is that most Americans continue to see in Clinton other qualities they admire, value his performance on a wide range of issues and consider his offenses primarily private failings that do not justify his ouster from office.

Those judgments are grounded in a powerful public insistence on perspective--on maintaining the proper proportion between the forest and the trees. That’s exactly what Republicans appeared to have lost entirely last weekend as they enlisted special prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr to force testimony from Lewinsky. With dizzying fervor, the House managers enormously escalated the confrontation even as Sen. Robert C. Byrd’s (D-W.V.) call for dismissal signaled that they will never acquire the votes to convict.

In this seedy story, Clinton long ago lost, broke or simply tossed away his moral compass. But as they prepare to extend yet again an impeachment process that the public has unequivocally rejected, it is the congressional Republicans who still seem most lost in the woods.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.