The Price of Survival

As America picks up the pieces after the Right's bitter pursuit of President Clinton, Ed Vulliamy goes behind the scenes in Washington to unravel the real story of his acquittal
America awoke with relief to a new political landscape yesterday, in which the President is not being impeached and - bar an astonishing move by Kenneth Starr to bring a criminal indictment - not under investigation either.

There was a feeling of a country living at Ground Zero, even though it is uncertain quite what the fall-out is going to be ; whether it will be toxic or not. For the language of politics has been debased, however banal the scandal has really been; however deeply it bored and annoyed the American people, among whom there is now a belief that the Presidency has been devalued by the President, by Congress and by the majority Republican Party on Capitol Hill.

The office of Independent Counsel will now probably go the way of dyplodochus. Washington DC is a town that has been torn asunder by partisan hatred - a house of glass in which private lives are public from now on.

But there have been concrete political changes: two Republican House Speakers - Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston - have bitten the dust and the Republican revolution on Capitol Hill has been brought to a halt.

And in this changed world new faces have emerged as potential leaders of the Democrat Party, men who with temperate sagacity defended their President on what was - in the event - no more than a charge of infidelity to his wife (which Clinton had admitted and apologised for anyway).

Some have decided to abandon the whole messy business of the Washington Beltway's politics: the word filtering from the White House yesterday that many are ready to call it a day in a world of politics they feel has been defiled, even if they did stand by the man at the epicentre of the storm.

And all that can go wrong for Clinton now is for Kenneth Starr to bob up tomorrow, as he has threatened to do, with a criminal indictment. Stranger things have happened - although he was warned against that project by even the most ardent of the prosecutors in the House, Henry Hyde, last Friday night.

As a bereft Congressman Hyde said: 'I don't think that indicting him and trying him criminally after all we have been through is going to be helpful to this country'.

The question is - what now?

The most pressing issue will be the relationship between Capitol Hill and the Presidency in a town now plagued by rancour. Politicians and people will want to know whether the two can work together after strong suggestions from the Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott that the answer will be that they cannot do so after what he called 'this sordid affair'.

Clinton - for public consumption - said he would herald a 'time of reconciliation'. But the abyss between the White House and the Capitol may still be too wide for the President to get straight to work on the now pressing agenda for his remaining 23 months in office. The indications are that urgent programmes on social security, welfare, education and other matters will be paralysed.

And the difficulties will not be confined to the Republicans. Cracks among the Democrats remain. Many from Clinton's own party were unhappy with the President's apologetic Friday statement after his acquittal. They are ready to make it clear to the him that he does not have a free ride.

'History will judge his actions and significant lapses of judgment harshly,' said Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut. 'I thought [Clinton's latest apology speech] fell a bit short', said North Dakota's Brian Dorgan, harking back to a tune we have heard often over the past 13 months.

The speeches insist generously that 'there are no winners and losers' at the end of Monicagate. Except perhaps for the two main players, the President and Monica Lewinsky.

Lewinsky has gone from lovestruck, un-hip, grubby, grasping chick with a crush on the President to almost a grande dame through her confident and estimable cross-examination by the Senate.

Suddenly she is starting to act her age. She talks fast, she's driving around in a new 4X4. Her book will be out soon. And when she walked into an LA restaurant the other day there was a round of applause and a chorus of cheers.

But what happened? That is a harder question to answer than 'who won'. For the Right, the answer will be especially difficult to reckon with. The Right fell foul of its own militants, its own stubbornness, and its own conspiracy.

The Republican Party allowed its agenda to be unswervingly dictated by the fringe right-wing within its ranks, at the cost of listening to signals from the public mood.

There was a convergence of influences. One was the Christian Right, from which Kenneth Starr hailed, with its moral agenda. Then there were the Arkansas Gang, old-time racists like 'Justice Jim' Johnson, a judge and KKK-endorsed candidate in a gubernatorial bout, who could not stand the young Clinton. The Arkansas gang clubbed up with a generation of the new Right in Washington - the Georgetown dining set - who likewise hated the Southern upstart, and with big money from such conservative sugar-daddies as the Scaife Foundation and the tobacco lobby.

It was a motley crew, but one of sufficient power and influence within the Beltway to generate - in league with the mass media - an unstoppable momentum even on Capitol Hill. For the Republicans it proved to be suicidal.

There were moments when the Republican Party could have diluted and modified Kenneth Starr's crusade. Even if that meant not publishing the entire Starr report and dumping it on the Net. But the party - trapped by a primary system that rewards its right-wing fringes - became stuck in the momentum of a crusade. It was a journey that had begun with the Whitewater investigation and moved on through various other sleazy goings-on among the Clinton entourage - but ended with the Republicans putting all their eggs in the Paula Jones basketcase, only to move on quickly with the discovery of Monica Lewinsky.

Quite how the whole case came to rest on a knife-edge between total acquittal on one hand and the cogency of the Lewinsky case on the other was a combination of tactics and conspiratorial blunder. The judges and political contacts behind the scenes who appointed Kenneth Starr wanted it that way.

On the President's side, it was a long, protracted campaign. Never before has so much brain power, so much political nous and savvy, been mobilised over such a concentrated issue but essentially trivial issue.

Indeed, it seems an age ago when the White House imploded on that January weekend 12 months ago when the Lewinsky scandal erupted. And yet, as Democrat and White House aides now reconstruct the strategy that finally won the day, that was when the fightback began.

Hillary Clinton took hold of and kept the reins, bringing in a circle of people who would prove crucial to the following year's events. the drafting in of David Kendal, Sidney Blumenthal and others close to Hillary in the very early stages would play an important role in the complex chemistry of the Presidential defence.

The strategy was a synthesis between the defence's two wings: the legal one, headed by Kendal, and the political one, headed by Blumenthal and the First Lady herself. There was not complete agreement. Early on, the lines were drawn. Kendal and the legal wing favoured a cautious approach that left no hostages to fortune, and saw benefits in making concessions along the way. Hillary and Blumenthal favoured a militant approach, which conceded nothing until it was unavoidable and absolutely necessary and took the offensive against Kenneth Starr in person and what the First Lady called the 'vast right-wing conspiracy'.

The forging of a strategy which would stitch the two wings together was first tested over the summer weekend that President Clinton was due to give his televised broadcast to the nation - his 'confession'. Kendal and his own political advisers urged caution, and more than a modicum of remorse. Hillary and Blumenthal urged no compromise, and a flagrant counter-attack on Kenneth Starr.

The hawks appeared to have got their way in the broadcast of 17 August, and yet the challenge to Starr was tempered by an admittance that the President had been lying to the nation for months. At the same time the parallel legal defence proceeded with careful attention to the fine print: whatever Clinton's secretary Betty Currie, confidant Vernon Jordan and Blumenthal were or were not briefed upon by the President, the blocking of Starr before the Grand Jury, and later the House prosecution. By and large, this strategy worked. The 'Wag the Dog' factor in the bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan was for the most part dismissed. Even the Republicans were sheepish about making much of the idea that President Clinton drew blood in order to distract public and political attention from his own crisis - why on earth should the intelligence communities and the Pentagon co-operate in such a venture?

And yet there are signs that this issue has not been laid to rest. One ingredient in the current argument between Christopher Hitchens and Sidney Blumenthal is an article in the upcoming Vanity Fair, in which Hitchens reopens the file convincingly and worryingly. Moreover, a senior insider formerly close to the President told The Observer last week that he did not, in the event, think either of the attacks on Afghanistan or Sudan would have been carried out were it not for the sex scandal.

Once the case got to Capitol Hill, a different set of obstacles appeared. Clinton has not had a good relationship with his own party in Congress over the past six years, and even White House aides were last week pointing out that Friday's voting hides the fact that sufficient numbers of Democrats in the Senate at least were ready and willing to throw Bill Clinton overboard.

Senator Joseph Lieberman spoke for many when he called Clinton's behaviour 'immoral' and 'disgraceful'. Some privately argued that the President should resign. In the event, even Leiberman voted with the party line.

And thus began the most complex stage of the campaign. With the scandal now bereft of real politics - it became nothing but a raw battle for power and survival.

It was at this point that the White House now lost direct control of its campaign to save the President.

Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader, was among the Democrats most offended by Clinton's behaviour, and a sharp critic of what his aides call the White House's 'legal hair-splitting' over definitions of sex.

But ironically - in no small measure - he turns out to have been among the President's saviours. Daschle had been contacted by the President months before the impeachment and asked if he could produce a list of 34 Democrats who would sign a letter saying they would not convict whatever the evidence. 'It was tantamount to jury tampering,' said one Democrat Congressional aide this week. Daschle junked the idea.

Meanwhile, however, Daschle was holding a series of secret meetings with his rival and opposite number, Trent Lott, the Republican leader, to try and hold off the respective hardliners in both men's parties.

Daschle began to realise that Lott, too, wanted out of impeachment and - for all his conservatism and antipathy towards President Clinton - did not want to go down with the Republican folly. After meetings and phone calls, Lott began to make concessions to Daschle that he was under no obligation to make, such as a veto on witnesses - which kept the Hitchens-Blumenthal row off the menu. Daschle now knew that Lott had realised that no party can win with just its core of loyalists. And now, as the Republicans' own pollster Frank Luntz says: 'Once, the GOP [Republican party] was identified with low taxes, a balanced budget and a strong defence. Now, the Republican Party is the party of Monica Lewinsky.'

Lott conceded to Daschle at one meeting, that the party was 'battling to get our message out'. Accordingly, he made every move he could to bring the trial to a quick finish. At the end, however, he was impenitent, delivering a savage attack on the President last Friday night over this 'sordid saga' and calling into question whether or not he, as leader of the Senate, can in future work with him.

In the final reckoning, Clinton survived because he was and is popular. Had he not been able to appeal to poll figures which were remarkable in their stubborn consistency - culminating in an 81 per cent approval rating last month - it is unlikely that the backstage pull-and-push within the White House and on Capitol Hill would have fused and worked.

America is a socially conservative society in may ways, but it is also a libidinous, tolerant and libertarian one that had come to regard Ken Starr, Congress, big government, and the head of the executive as its prey. That, in essence, is how Bill Clinton pulled off his great escape.

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