The Kink In The Crusade

SATURATION point seems to have been reached in the endless examination of President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. As the 'affair of state' hit another peak—or depth—on September 21 with the coverage of the US President's four-hour videotaped grand jury testimony, many observers balked. Yet, the denouement is still to come. What does the release of the videotape and other documents mean for Clinton? Can he survive? Will he be impeached or merely censured? Will the 'Leader of the Free World'—as Clinton is often called in the US media—be morally crippled as a result of the continuing investigation?

And, of course, who are the likely winners and losers in this equation? Public polls and the White House's own surveys show that a strong majority want to keep Clinton in office and are eager to close a matter they find distasteful. Democrats express the hope that Clinton might be able to capitalise on the public's favourable impression of his grand jury testimony. An overnight poll conducted by presidential pollster Mark Penn showed support for Clinton rising and support for impeachment falling. According to some Clinton aides, Republicans are courting a backlash if they are seen as trying to prolong the matter. "About two-thirds of the public says censure and move on," says one senior political strategist. "That's about as good a consensus as we're going to get on this case."

바카라 웹사이트However, Republicans—many of whom note that the idea of a presidential censure is found nowhere in the Constitution—insist on staying on the current course, which is inevitably moving towards impeachment.

A plan for bringing closure has been pushed by Senator John F. Kerry, a Democrat. He suggested that Clinton should explain himself before the judiciary panel. In exchange, the House should agree to act quickly to end the "water torture" of lengthy impeachment proceedings.

Clinton, who basked, the day after the televised testimony, in warm words from visiting South African President Nelson Mandela, declined to comment on Kerry's idea. But White House press secretary Mike McCurry, while not expressly endorsing the plan, said: "What we want to do is work with Congress to find a course of action that is the correct one, that will have bipartisan support, that the people of Congress together agree is the right course for our nation and that the people of the United States of America will support."

바카라 웹사이트Judiciary Committee Republicans, meanwhile, met behind closed doors, where they discussed how to handle the remaining evidence from Starr that Congress is to release on September 28 and how soon they might recommend beginning an official probe of Clinton's conduct. According to informed sources, the group discussed recommending a formal inquiry as soon as the first week of October, so the House could vote on the resolution before it recesses later that month.

What may have been the most encouraging development for Clinton came in the White House reception for Mandela. The Rev Bernice King, daughter of the Rev Martin Luther King Jr, stood in defence of Clinton, saying: "It's time to leave our President alone". King's sermon provoked chants of "Leave him alone! Leave him alone!" from the audience.

But, even if left alone, will Clinton be too morally crippled to remain President? Or will he reinvent himself as the "Comeback Kid", as he has done so many times in his career? Opinions are divided.

According to Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a research institute in Washington: "Clinton is the biggest loser in all this because his personal reputation has been wrecked and his presidential authority is evaporating." Lichter adds that "nobody has escaped the demeaning influence of this. The scandal is like the Hope Diamond—it glitters and everyone is attracted to it, then it destroys the lives of everyone. Not just the presidency, but the Congress, the legal and judicial process, the media, even the public, is being critic-ised for its schizoid reaction to it. This story is pulling us all into the tar pit of tabloid news. The inquisitors lose because the lawyers under independent counsel Kenneth Starr were shown pressing the President relentlessly about intimate details of his sex life, while many Americans worried about the damage the investigation might inflict on public life. So, too, does Congress lose from this endless ordeal, and the news media as well. The lawmakers ignored the rule that grand jury proceedings should stay secret, as they pushed Clinton's testimony into the public spotlight. And the media's feasting on the spectacle is rubbing the public's face in the seamy details of the scandal."

The nation, analysts agree, is the ultimate loser. In the short term, there are urgent problems demanding presidential attention, and only a faltering, beleaguered leader to cope with them. In the long term, the greatest damage may be more subtle, particularly in the erosion of public trust in the nation's political institutions.

Perhaps the most insidious harm, ethicists suggest, is being done to standards of ethical behaviour in public life. "I think we're at a crisis moment in terms of public perception of public morality. Now what we've got is a real question of will our public morality be crushed, our sense of values, of right and wrong, of what we are teaching our children about public service," says Peter Madsen, executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics at Carnegie Mellon University. "There's a tremendous loss of faith in public institutions, in the political process, and in the judicial process that appointed Starr and overlooked his conflicts and allowed his overzealous exercise of prosecutorial discretion, and the loss of bipartisanship in releasing these documents. Those are grave losses."

Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University, says: "This not only cheapens our public culture, it creates new avenues and levels of political attack." He cites Republicans Henry Hyde and Dan Burton, who confessed publicly to past sexual indiscretions in a ripple effect from the Lewinsky scandal, as illustrations of the danger. "Now all of these folks are explaining: 'Well, my sex scandal is different from Bill Clinton's sex scandal.' To think we may be into this kind of sickening politics is a grim prospect for the future of America."

Analysts fault Starr for prosecutorial excess, the House Judiciary Committee for partisan rancour, the Supreme Court for exposing the presidency to civil-suit harassment, and the news media for abandoning any pretense to standards of discretion.

"How do you halt a downward spiral?" muses Lichter. "The only countervailing influence has to be cultural. People have to get so fed up and angry that there is a revolt. And you're seeing that. The public is angry, is resisting this, but there isn't any impact yet on politics or the news media. I think this scandal has to play itself out and take us as low as we can go, and then when we hit rock bottom, we can go back up. The danger is, we never seem to hit rock bottom. You're putting information about deviant sexual activity on the network news during the day with a parental advisory—so there's not much further we can go."

An Administration insider said he was "sick" of what was going on. "We need to protect ourselves from moral wars to deal with complex issues that affect our lives," he said. "We have become a laughing stock to the rest of the world. If we continue to belittle our own President, why would the rest of the world respect him?" He pointed out that the absence of solid political debate over real issues and the decline of public attention to standard news fare have opened the way to increasingly vitriolic personal attacks. And that what's needed was to restore a veil of privacy over character flaws that do not directly affect public well-being, and to reject those who argue that any facet of the presidential character is indeed public. "We've seen the upsurge of a brand of moralism, which moves out of reasonable control, both because moralistic leaders seize any occasion to promote an agenda of character reform and because few Americans feel confident in rebutting a determined crusader for righteousness," he warned. "We need to go back to issues that should preoccupy us and curb our most dangerous tendencies to excess—which is not sex (where we're moderately restrained) but crusading zeal."