In a tragic coincidence, the pope, the president and the editor of a big city newspaper die on the same day.
They all go to heaven. The pope is assigned the smallest room in the place, the president gets a little more space, while the newspaper editor is led to an opulent palace. God stops by later and asks the pope how he likes the accommodations.
It’s all right, the pope says, but how come my room is so much smaller than the editor’s?
Well that’s easy to explain, says God. We have 262 popes here, but only one newspaper editor.
I suspect that was a lawyer joke adapted for the occasion, but whatever its origin, it suited the purpose. It was used to kick off a discussion here in which the nation’s newspaper editors beat themselves up for their coverage of the Bill Clinton sex allegations.
They had returned to the scene of the crime. The editors gathered at the Marriott Hotel three blocks from the White House. Remember a couple of years ago, when newspapers and TV stations reported the unsubstantiated claim by ex-FBI agent Gary Aldrich that Clinton slipped out of the White House for romantic trysts at the downtown Marriott Hotel? Yes, same hotel.
Fortunately, the editors’ self-flagellation session ended about an hour before Federal District Judge Susan Webber Wright tossed the Paula Corbin Jones sexual misconduct lawsuit out of court. If word of the ruling had gotten out during the session, the editors might have been lining up for arsenic-flavored Kool-Aid.
Bill Clinton won a lawsuit this week. He also won the war.
There is still the matter of independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigation, and the possibility that he could recommend to Congress that the president be impeached. Forget it. It’s over.
Paula Corbin Jones was a legal case, nothing more. Judge Wright made a legal decision, the right one. Even if Clinton did make a crude sexual overture to Jones, there was no evidence that Jones suffered from the incident. There was no legal case of harassment.
But Whitewater, that’s a political case. Kenneth Starr says it’s only a legal case, but he’s deluding himself. When he winds up his grand jury investigation, he will send a report to Congress. As long as the ultimate judge and jurors are the House and Senate, it is a political case.
Starr has been suckered. He had a possible case of financial fraud in the Whitewater land deal, a case you make largely with bank documents and legal records. But he got suckered–maybe he suckered himself–into investigating the president’s sex life and wound up looking like a Peeping Tom.
The House Republican leadership is approaching the impending report from Kenneth Starr like a Christmas package from Ted Kaczynski . The rules of the House say that anything a special prosecutor hands to a House committee must be made available to every member. If Starr tosses to the Judiciary Committee a report filled with salacious details, a rerun of the failed Paula Jones case, but something short of high crimes by the president, the Republicans will be in a predicament. That’s why House Speaker Newt Gingrich wants to send a congressional delegation to review Starr’s evidence before it is released. He wants to know if he needs the bomb squad to defuse it.
Some conservatives still relish the idea of putting Clinton on trial. But the Republican leadership is starting to realize that if they go ahead with an impeachment process, what they’ll really be doing is running against Clinton for president. That is what Clinton does best. It will be Clinton’s third campaign for the presidency, and he will win it hands down.
The Republican campaign will be based on the findings of a special prosecutor who is reviled by the public, a prosecutor who looks like he is out of control.
Clinton’s campaign will be based on righteous indignation, which he performs superbly.
That’s a disaster for the GOP. Its leaders know that if there is to be an impeachment, it will be directed by the public, not by them. But the public has already discounted what it knows about Starr’s case. The public’s disgust with the whole thing seems to have been justified by the judge’s ruling that threw out the Paula Jones case.
What’s left, and what Republicans are starting to whisper about, is a “Big Bang” theory, that the public knows only 5 percent of what Starr really has.
That seems like a slim thread. And from what I heard this week, some embarrassed newspaper editors would like nothing more than to wash their hands of Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky and start over with Bill Clinton. That could mean press skepticism trained even more fiercely on any new accusations emanating from Starr.
The editors shouldn’t feel embarrassed. In some cases they reported seedy stories that may or may not have been true. Their alternative, though, was to bury information that people were going to hear anyway from several other sources. They have been reporting on a president who has a deeply flawed character. They have, by and large, offered this information in context, as allegations, not necessarily as fact. They put the information out there and let the public judge it. And that’s what the public has done.
The official word from Starr is that the Paula Jones ruling has no impact on his investigation. Starr goes on. But there’s every reason to believe that it is over. He can’t win.
What a week for Bill Clinton. He went on an African safari and bagged the hunter.
