SHIELDS & GIGOT

November 13, 1998
	From a Paula Jones settlement, to impeachment hearings, to possible action against Iraq, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot analyze the week's political events.

Nov. 13, 1998: The latest on the showdown with Iraq. Nov. 9, 1998: Newt Gingrich's departure and the GOP leadership shakedown. Nov. 5, 1998: The Judiciary Committee announces that Kenneth Starr will testify.. April 1, 1998: A judge dismisses the Paula Jones case. Jan. 22, 1998: The presidential scandal in historical context. Browse the NewsHour's coverage of Shields & Gigot, the White House, the Starr Investigation, and Coversations on Clinton.       Yahoo coverage of the investigation. Articles of Impeachment White House	MARGARET WARNER: Mark, how much support does the President have on the Hill for taking this action in Iraq, if he does it? MARK SHIELDS: The President has a free hand, Margaret. That does not mean he will be immune from second guessing from the Republicans from not going too far from the Democrats, from perhaps inflicting too many civilian casualties. But right now, the Congress are silent accomplices, are cooperative, however you want to put it. With the exception of Sen. Arlen Specter and Sen. Joe Biden , who we've already heard from, there's very little even discussion. MARGARET WARNER: Why have so few members spoken out on this one way or another? PAUL GIGOT: I think partly the election lull and preoccupation on the Republican side with recriminations and elections. That's part of it. I think Republicans haven't really had a voice on foreign policy for a while, however. You see Dick Lugar, the senator from Indiana, speaking up and saying he wants to make sure that the President goes far enough so that we just don't have a token bombing and then declare victory and come back, Saddam survives. He wants to make sure that we have a strategy behind us, and the President really hasn't laid out that kind of a strategy, so that could lead to some second guessing, but I agree with Mark. The President has a lot of leeway off Saddam -- is in the minds of most Americans an authentic threat, and George Bush demonstrated that and he had the American public behind him in 1990. And I think the public will support what the President tries to do. MARGARET WARNER: And do you think the President or the administration is right sort of politically not to go for authorization on the Hill? MARK SHIELDS: No. I think it's always -when Americans are being put at risk, when the country is at war, when foreign casualties are being exacted, I think it's always good to have a national consensus going in. I think it's a good idea - not a good idea - it's just sensible to know what our policy objectives are and what are we trying to achieve. But I think that there's no question the President does have that free hand now. The "Wag the Dog" charge is not made after the election, which might have been made during a campaign -- the allegation that the President is doing it for domestic, political purposes. And let's be blunt about it - Saddam Hussein now occupies personally the position that the country of Iran once did in United States foreign policy - demonizing - and he's a man who's managed to unite both the Democrats and the Republicans, and he is virtually without defenders or apologists or advocates in the international community.
	On the legal front.
	MARGARET WARNER: And the other big news today, Paul, was on the sort of - I guess we have to call it the presidential scandal front - the President settled his lawsuit with Paula Jones. Kenneth Starr sent new evidence to the House impeachment inquiry concerning another woman, Kathleen Willey, and also reindicted Webster Hubble. Now will any of these affect the impeachment process? PAUL GIGOT: Potentially the Willey filing could. It's been sent up to Henry Hyde, and they get to look through it up on the Hill and see if it fits in at all to what I think - to a pattern obstruction of justice that Starr talked about and referred to in his Monica Lewinsky filing. MARGARET WARNER: And just remind us about the Willey case very briefly, that she says the President sort of groped her in the Oval Office, and there are allegations that - PAUL GIGOT: That's right. It's a charge of sexual harassment that she made against the President, which he denied. But in this case most of the evidence relates not to that fact or that charge but to what happened afterwards and the fact that some people perhaps associated with the White House or the President may have obstructed justice by trying to keep her quiet. That is the essence of the - of some of the documents and testimony in this case. But keep in mind, Ken Starr did not file this as a referral, that is, he did not say that he thought this was an impeachable offense. And that has to make you wonder whether or not the evidence is there to make a big case. MARGARET WARNER: Do you think any of these three events affect the impeachment process long-term? MARK SHIELDS: Probably the impeachment process, I think, is now the impeachment deal. And what will that deal be? I mean, on election day, November 3rd, Margaret, we had a Republican electorate. According to exit polls, it was the profiler who was a lot less favorable to the President than with the general public or registered voters in the country and yet 2/3 of them did not want an impeachment. So what we're looking for is an exit strategy at this point. The Paula Corbin Jones decision makes it easier. It removes the possibility that the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals might reopen that case. That gets that off the table. I think it does make a deal more plausible. I think it's the real test of Bob Livingston's leadership. It's going to be a first real test coming in. MARGARET WARNER: The speaker to be.
	A political eulogy?
	MARK SHIELDS: The speaker to be on the Republican side, whether, in fact, he can work out a deal with Dick Gephardt, the House Democratic leader, who's got to worry about his left within the Democratic Party, and Livingston has to worry about his right in the Republican Party. I think in the left - or one obstacle of it is that the left of the Democratic Party there's a growing exoneration caucus, those who basically say, hey, we won in November, he's our guy, and let's drop it. But I don't think that's satisfactory. PAUL GIGOT: Lent is over. MARGARET WARNER: Do the Republicans - Paul, going into this week, when they're going to finally hear from Ken Starr, do they have an agreed-up strategy among themselves for concluding this, or is it two or three different camps? PAUL GIGOT: I very much disagree with Mark. The Republicans have a strategy and Bob Livingston has a strategy. It's whatever Henry Hyde's strategy is. They're going to leave it to Henry Hyde. Bob Livingston does not want the first act that he has to-- to get in the middle of this and upset everybody, so he's going to defer to Hyde, and he should defer to Hyde. Hyde's been handling this exceptionally well, in my view. And what Henry Hyde's strategy is, is he's not going to do a deal, at least not in the House. His strategy is bring Ken Starr up, let him testify, let the Democrats ask their questions, attack his probe if they want, let Starr make his case. And then probably put together two or three articles, maybe only one, but some articles of impeachment, put them before the committee, and let the committee vote. And if the committee sends it on to the House, let the House members vote, and let the process come forward, because he's concluded that the idea of a deal, the censure notion, actually does more harm to the presidency than an impeachment process, because what you're allowing the Congress to do is to get political cover for itself, we did something, we censured the man, but at the same time creates a precedent where every Congress every time it doesn't like something the president does can just flail away with a censure. MARGARET WARNER: Let's talk now - we've already mentioned Bob Livingston a couple of times, Mark. The speaker - how did he nail this down so quickly? Just a week ago we were talking about Newt Gingrich withdrawing, and how different will he be from Newt Gingrich? MARK SHIELDS: Just one little item - just to let Paul know I disagree with him - what - what he's outlined is not a strategy - he's outlined - let's play it out - the House Impeachment Committee, which is, you know, essentially the Menninger Clinic waiting room on both sides of the aisle, and it's not - it's not a deliberative body. There are not the votes in the House to impeach; there are not the votes in the Senate to convict, and the likelihood of their being there unless they still hope for the President to admit the Oklahoma City bombing at some point is seriously unlikely. What happened to Bob Livingston was Bob Livingston had the advantage; he was already running for speaker - that Newt Gingrich had term-limited himself, that he, Bob Livingston had announced against Dick Armey, so he had been in the race. He was blessed with a foe in Chris Cox, who was endorsed by the Wall Street Journal in a very fulsome editorial on Monday but was pulled out of the race before the editorial even hit the streets. I mean, so he didn't have - he didn't beat somebody; he beat nobody. And Livingston is a formidable guy. He is an institutionalist. Is he different from Newt Gingrich? His voting record? No. But unlike - as one of his colleagues said to me today about him - who's worked very closely with him - he said, unlike Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston's opponents are not his enemies; they are his opponents, and he believes in the institution. He believes that the institution has to work, but he's as fiercely conservative as Newt Gingrich ever was. PAUL GIGOT: He is conservative. The question is, is not his voting record, it's - it's the way he approaches the job. I mean, Newt Gingrich was - we're probably seeing a driver of a car, if it's the House of Representatives - Newt Gingrich wanted to design the car, that was his specialty, and the question of Bob Livingston, is he a driver, or is he a mechanic? Is he so focused on the details and the process that he doesn't understand - this is the fear some Republicans have - that you need ideas, need a reform agenda - and what gives a lot of Republicans pause - even though they're all voting for him and nobody else had the votes to challenge him - but there's some disquiet, there's still some question - what gives them pause is he comes out of the Appropriations Committee, which is the spending committee, which is a perfect committee for a Democratic majority. I mean, Democrats keep their majority by taking tax dollars in and spending them, creating the - a case for incumbents. Republicans, supposed to be the party of fiscal discipline, they can't build a majority like that, they have to build a majority on themes of reform and the private sector, and they need ideas. And if they don't keep moving with those, the Democrats on spending can always outbid them, so there's some real doubt about whether Livingston has the ideas to drive an agenda. Now, maybe he does, but that's some of the doubts within the Republican Conference. MARGARET WARNER: So how important are the other leadership fights that aren't settled, Mark, I mean, say for majority leader? MARK SHIELDS: Well, what's fascinating about the Republicans is that all of a sudden Dick Armey - the House Majority Leader - is being challenged. He's being challenged in part not simply because of failed leadership or whatever else, but because during the coup against Newt Gingrich in the summer of 1997, he was an active participant until he realized he wasn't going to be the choice of the insurrectionists and the rebels; they were going to turn to Bill Paxon, at which point he got religion and went to Newt Gingrich and confessed this and pledged his fealty. Tom DeLay, by contrast, the House Republican whip, who was in it up to his eyebrows, admitted it, didn't deny it, is not being challenged, and I think that probably says something about both men, but what's most fascinating of the candidacy to me, anyway, of Jennifer Dunn of Washington and the - a member of the Ways and Means Committee, a member of the leadership, former Republican state chairman in Washington, a pro-choice Republican, who is being urged and recommended by people who argue for diversity. Now this is a new concept in Republicans, and JC Watts is being pushed - the only African-American on the Republican side in the Congress - is being pushed as well to a leadership position because he - of diversity. And I find that rather fascinating because - if I'm not mistaken, Republicans had argued against Bill Clinton when he boasted that his cabinet looked like America, his demographically balanced cabinet, and this is sort of an intriguing time. Nobody knows who has the votes, Margaret. I mean, the reality is that the vote for leadership position is an intensely personal one. It's based upon whose carpool you're in, who was nice to your child, whether, in fact, you travel home with somebody, went on a foreign trip with. It has little to do with ideology. MARGARET WARNER: So personal, not ideological? PAUL GIGOT: I think more personal than ideological. There are some ideological fights here, but Mark wants to wrap the Republicans because they're the white Southern men's caucus, and then they get a few diverse faces and he says, my God - MARK SHIELDS: But diversity is always a Democratic - PAUL GIGOT: And the use of the past tense is being pushed - nobody is pushing JC Watts. JC Watts is going out and getting the job. Jennifer Dunn is not saying appoint me for affirmative action. She's going and getting it, or trying to. MARGARET WARNER: All right. MARK SHIELDS: But what's the case being made for her? MARGARET WARNER: We've got to leave it there. MARK SHIELDS: Okay. MARGARET WARNER: Sorry. Have a good weekend.