Sunday, October 25, 1998

Elites are wrong on Clinton scandal

By Morton Kondracke

The Monica Lewinsky scandal has hit high culture. Distinguished writers regard it not as a tale of tawdry sex and perjury, but of American freedom menaced by ayatollahs, McCarthyites and Salem witch hunters.

The menace is Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, who is pictured as the leading agent in a right-wing Puritan conspiracy to remove that most precious of all American liberties.

It's not freedom of belief or expression, according to authors ventilating in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times, but the right to engage in sex anywhere, anytime, including in the Oval Office during working hours.

If the intellectual elites have anything to say about it, the Clinton scandal will become a more polarized cause celebre, a lever for deeper cultural division -- and, eventually, a distorted piece of historical mythology. Someday, there'll be an opera.

The archetypes being drawn by authors such as Toni Morrison, Arthur Miller, E.L. Doctorow and Ethan Canin are of a flawed but humanistic leader entrapped, victimized and, possibly, martyred by forces of antediluvian religiosity.

Polls suggest a majority of ordinary Americans comes out in the same place as the intellectuals -- that Starr is biased and Clinton ought not to be impeached -- but at least most ordinary Americans think Clinton is untrustworthy and deserves censure or "censure-plus."

By contrast, a distinguished group of international glitterati declared, referring to Clinton, that "a statesman is answerable to public opinion or to the law only for his public acts. All else is solely a matter of his own conscience."

This statement assumes citizens have no right to an opinion, or the legal system to take notice, when a president lies to the public and, though he is the chief law enforcement officer of the land, lies under oath in a court proceeding.

Organized in Paris, the statement was signed by notables from South African Bishop Desmond Tutu to foreign actors such as Gerard Depardieu and Anthony Hopkins to Americans like opera diva Jessye Norman and actress Lauren Bacall to, unforgivably, U.S. historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

This group, like the celebrated authors who have opined on the case in U.S. publications, expressed a theme increasingly common among Clinton's defenders -- that anything he did pales in comparison to the "arbitrary and unjust procedures" of Starr and congressional Republicans.

The "feral Republicans," as they were referred to by Morrison in one of the most over-the-top of all the Clinton defenses, are "smelling blood and a shot at the totalitarian power they believe is rightfully theirs." According to Morrison, writing in The New Yorker, Clinton is, "white skin notwithstanding, our first black President," and is being subjected to "lynching" or even "crucifixion." Morrison wrote that Clinton is "black" because he is the product of a poor, single-parent Southern home, loves junk food and has special empathy with African-Americans.

But what she implies is actually a damning judgment about black males -- like Clinton, they just can't avoid marital infidelity and reckless irresponsibility. If that's so, there's little hope of reversing the 65 percent rate of out-of-wedlock births among blacks.

Doctorow wrote that Starr reminds him of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Starr's pursuit of him "smells of entrapment," and his Republican allies are bent on "unseating a democratically elected president with all the legitimacy of a coup d'etat."

"If Mr. Clinton is impeached or forced to resign," Doctorow wrote in The New Yorker, "American Puritanism, with its punitive lusts and its theocratic visions, will be reborn for the 21st century."

The liberal intellectuals are simply out of their minds with outrage that values other than free sex might hold sway with Congress.

There's no question in my mind that Starr was relentless, even excessive, in his pursuit of Clinton. His methods deserve challenge in the forthcoming House Judiciary Committee impeachment probe. On the other hand, the record shows Clinton knowingly and premeditatedly committed perjury on two separate occasions. He was not entrapped.

The first time, when he gave a deposition in the Paula Jones civil case in January, he was not surprised by questions about his relationship with Lewinsky, leading to his false denials under oath. He'd been forewarned she would be a witness. Indeed, before she or he testified, they discussed what they'd say.

Even more unforgivably, he had seven months to think about his story before he was called to testify before the Starr grand jury on Aug. 17. He discussed the options with his lawyers. And, under oath, he lied again.

Is this impeachable? Well, the Constitution provides that bribery is an impeachable offense. Isn't perjury just as serious, involving as it does contempt for the legal system? Let the intellectuals rant.

Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.

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