THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 6, 1996 TAG: 9610040025
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: 71 lines
The White House has signaled instant retaliation against Kenneth Starr should the independent counsel inspire new character questions about Bill or Hillary Clinton.
The threat, as politics, is understandable. With re-election ever so close, the president is mindful that Starr, using two grand juries, is sifting and resifting the Clintons' relationship with James and Susan McDougal, former Whitewater partners now convicted as felons. Moreover, for one thing and another, the Clintons have been Starr's quarry for a long time.
With something always banging around the attic, missing papers materializing on tabletops and blundering bureaucrats breaching FBI files, the first couple must be filled with exasperation and apprehension.
But it is calculation, not impulse, that marks the White House effort to smear Starr as an unprincipled partisan. The aim is to build a firewall against bad news - an indictment, a news leak, the other shoe in some form finally falling. And so, when asked about Susan McDougal's charge that Starr was ``out to get'' the Clintons, the president said such was quite obvious. But it isn't obvious at all.
Starr's a wealthy Republican lawyer with a client list of tobacco and other interests not enamored of the president. He is a former U.S. solicitor general said to be hopeful for a place on the Supreme Court. But these facts, spun and respun by the White House, don't suggest that Starr is unethical or, as the president implies, corrupt. It's no more (and perhaps less) reasonable to impute bad things to Starr's associations than it is to Clinton's.
The president says there is a ``lot of evidence'' to support a charge that Starr ``wanted her (Susan McDougal) to say something bad about us, whether it was true or not. And if it was false, it would still be perfectly all right. And if she told the truth and it wasn't bad about us she simply would be punished for it.''
Offered with some evidence, this charge could have upended Starr. Offered with no evidence, it demeans Clinton and invites more suspicion.
It's aptly asked why if Starr is such a rogue, Clinton gives him so much new business. In addition to probing Whitewater, his first assigned task, the independent counsel is now looking into the firing of the innocents called Travelgate and the mishandling of FBI files known as Filegate. Under intense scrutiny, the administration handed off both these hot potatoes just as it handed off Whitewater. The administration, in sum, asked for appointment of an independent counsel, provided his agenda and bought some temporary relief.
Since the looting of the thrift industry was a bipartisan business, some wonder why Starr hasn't collared some Republican miscreants. But the court's mandate to Starr is narrow. He was directed to focus on violation of federal law ``relating in any way to James B. McDougal's, President William Jefferson Clinton's, or Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton's relationships with Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, Whitewater Development Corporation, or Capital Management Services Inc.''
Now, to be sure, Clinton is taking some heavy, maybe harsh, blows. Pundit William Safire, an old Nixon hand, warns that a Clinton second term, like Nixon's, would be consumed by scandal. ``Down that road,'' he thunders, ``lies another national nightmare.''
The Wall Street Journal wonders if the president would use his powers ``to frustrate the law, or pardon his wife if indicted?'' Even Richard Cohen, less of a partisan, heard echoes from an embattled Nixon when Clinton attacked Starr's integrity.
It's an open question whether, during that attack, Clinton meant to signal pardons for friendly witnesses. But if he did, he's at grave risk. The White House has succeeded before in putting Starr wrong in public-opinion polls but, ultimately, manipulation won't work. If Starr finds something of substance, the courts will not flinch.
Any president so far off base in reckless allegation as Clinton should tag up and read the rules. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB