|
|
||
 
|
|
|
Decision No Cause for CelebrationDavid S. Broder and Peter BakerWashington Post Staff Writers Wed., Dec. 03, 1997; Page A27
Even before the decision came down yesterday, President Clinton issued strict instructions to his chief of staff on how the White House should react if Attorney General Janet Reno rejected an outside investigation into fund-raising calls: "People should not be gleeful." With good reason, according to politicians and analysts in both parties. By declining to seek appointment of an independent counsel, Reno spared Clinton and Vice President Gore a potential disaster. But the controversy surrounding the financing of their 1996 campaign seems likely to dog Clinton for the remainder of his presidency and still threatens Gore's bid to succeed him. "I frankly don't think this matter ends," said White House press secretary Michael McCurry. "It will continue to be a subject of discussion. It will continue to be . . . a matter of inquiry for the Justice Department. It will continue to be a source of partisan political attacks on the president and continue to be an item which some news organizations choose to investigate. I mean, I don't think anything is going to change much, to be candid." The dour assessment on a day that provided otherwise welcome news grew in part out of the realization that even without a special prosecutor, by its own count the White House is under investigation on a variety of fronts by no fewer than 20 Republican-led congressional committees or subcommittees. Moreover, even Reno's decision did not come without a political catch. While she found no reason to trigger the independent counsel statute, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh made known his disagreement with that judgment, handing Republicans and other critics a tailor-made argument to dismiss her move as partisan. Within minutes of her announcement, Common Cause President Ann McBride upbraided Reno for "turning a deaf ear" to the head of the nation's premier law enforcement agency. Still, had Reno gone the other way, matters would have been much worse for the White House; and Gore, more so than his boss, stood to suffer acute political damage regardless of the ultimate legal outcome. Previous independent counsel probes have dragged on for years, and this one surely would have lasted well until the presidential election season. Far beyond the immediate issue of the 40 telephone fund-raising solicitations Gore acknowledged making from his White House office, an outside probe would have kept alive, at least in the political arena, the larger questions surrounding the tactics employed by the Clinton-Gore campaign to collect large sums of campaign cash. "Absolutely, he is better off," said Tom Rath, the Republican national committeeman from New Hampshire, home of the first presidential primary in 2000. "He doesn't have to fight a two-front war – with lawyers on one side and politicians on the other." Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster whose clients have included former Arizona governor J. Fife Symington III, who resigned after being convicted of filing fraudulent financial documents, said, "It is not a happy thing to go through an election, as he did, when you're under federal investigation." But McInturff reinforced Rath's view that "the tarnishing of Gore's image has already happened; the visit to the Buddhist temple will remain in people's minds. The question has been planted and it won't go away." The impact on Clinton, on the other hand, seems less direct. To date, the campaign controversy has only dented his strong standing in the polls. With no more elections in his future, the primary political concern was the effect a special prosecutor would have on his ability to govern and his historical legacy. According to a number of pollsters and scholars of the presidency, Clinton came away from the Reno decision as strong – or as weak – as he went into it. "I'm not sure it will make a difference," said Jeffrey Tulis, a University of Texas political scientist. "He seems to me remarkably unfazed by all of this. But if you think he's not accomplishing much now, he won't be able to do more because of this" decision. "He's already learned that it is very difficult to translate a relatively strong position in the polls into getting things done in Congress," agreed Charles O. Jones of the University of Wisconsin. "Even if she had asked for an investigation, it would only have made him marginally more impotent." Linda DiVall, a GOP pollster, saw negative fallout for Clinton, Gore and the Democrats in general. "The credibility of the attorney general is now in question," she said, "and that is as damaging to Clinton as John Mitchell's downfall was to Richard Nixon." Mitchell was the attorney general implicated in Watergate and imprisoned. "This has the potential to be a significant campaign issue next year," by "intensifying the anger of core Republicans against the whole Clinton administration," DiVall said, and raising the issue of political ethics "among women, moderates, suburbanites and other swing voters." With the possibility of an independent counsel now ruled out, though, the White House will paint the remaining probes as simply Republican smears and hope the public tunes out the issue as mere Washington politics. "The public is not paying as much attention to all this as the Republicans would like," said Ed Sarpolus, a Democratic pollster in Michigan. "As long as the economy is good, they will pass this off as typical of what politicians do. They don't see that what Clinton and Gore have done has harmed them personally." Yet Republican McInturff warned that "Al Gore may be happy that this won't drag on for another three years, but he ought to remember that when Nixon rid himself of a special prosecutor, it started his downfall. Especially with the FBI director dissenting, this is huge." © Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company Go to Campaign Finance Report | Go to Politics Section
|
||||||||
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
