Saturday, August 22, 1998

A president who can't say he's sorry

By Martin Schram

Our incorrigibly immature son comes out from his room, saying that after seven months he is finally ready to tell us the truth about what he has done.

We are primed to accept a heartfelt humble apology that his spin doctors have led us to expect in a three-day drip of anonymous leaks. So we are indeed ready to forgive and move on.

But four minutes later, we see, sadly, that this terminally callow commander-in-chief, whom we still want to be proud of, mainly wanted to talk at us -- while really talking to a handful of lawyers and grand jurors in our midst. He carefully uses words that sound as if they were written by his own lawyers so that they will seem apologetic while actually admitting to nothing precise or actionable.

His explanation, in effect, is that he now wants to admit his hand had an improper relationship with the cookie jar. He has apparently taken the position before the grand jury that the cookie jar did indeed engulf his hand -- but he explains that does not fit the legal definition of being caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Now speaking to all of us, our wayward son, brighter than he is smart, carefully shifts back and forth between nondescript, non-incriminating first person beginnings and passive, intransitive endings: "I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression." The closest he came to a first-person acknowledgment of verbal wrongdoing was: "I misled people."

Still, many in our midst came away thinking we heard something he carefully never said. And not just the gullible among us, but even the president's staunch critic, the Washington Times, which the morning after the president's little speech bannered this headline: "Clinton concedes he lied about affair." But Clinton never actually said he "lied" in any of his statements under oath or to the American people. He said only that he gave us wrong impressions and misled us.

Also, TV's talking heads rushed to give us the instant analysis about what we should think now that the president had finally admitted he had a sexual relationship with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky. But wait -- the president never admitted to having a "sexual" relationship in his little talk to the nation Monday night. He admitted: "Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible."

By not copping to a "sexual" relationship, he avoids taking a public position that is, word- for-word, the opposite of when he testified under oath in the Paula Jones civil case deposition that he did not have a "sexual relationship" with Miss Lewinsky.

This of course does not really matter to all of the sensible people in America and around the world. We know he meant to let us know Monday night that he did have a sexual relationship with Miss Lewinsky. And we also know he is able to claim this was technically and legally not perjury because of the combined idiocy of Ms. Jones attorneys and the judge in the case -- who supplied definitions of what constituted "sexual relationship" and couched the questioning in terms of that.

Did these learned legal minds not realize narrow definitions only create narrow loopholes -- just big enough to allow a presidential peccadillo to slip through? Did these learned legal minds not realize they should have couched the questioning of the president in terms of whether the president or Ms. Lewinsky ever engaged in even one "sexual incident" that involved any contact with a part of either person's body that is normally clothed?

The two larger questions remain:

-- Why did the judge did not realize no court should ever permit a president's political critics to ask a president under oath about whether he ever had sex with anyone on a long list of women? (Especially about a consensual relationship in this Jones trial that was about an alleged incident of an unwanted sexual overture.)

-- And why did the president not realize back on Jan. 17 that this was the time to refuse to answer.

So we are left with a president who never admitted he lied, never said he was sorry and never acknowledged that for seven months he is the one who forced a costly investigation upon the taxpayers -- and forced his most loyal associates to pay huge legal expenses because they were ensnared in a grand jury probe while he just said nothing.

And we are left feeling we don't want to impeach our president -- but we want to send him to his room without supper until he tells us he's sorry.

Scripps Howard News Service