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| POLITICAL WRAP
February 27, 1998The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript |
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From the Starr investigation to the death of the McCain-Feingold bill, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot discuss the week in politics.
JIM LEHRER: Now, our Friday night analysis by Shields & Gigot, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot. First, letās begin with Kenneth Starr versus the Clinton White House story. What do you make of whatās happened this week, Mark?
A RealAudio version of this segment is available.
NEWSHOUR LINKS:
February 26, 1998
First Amendment implications of the Starr investigation.
February 25, 1998
Two congressmen debate the postponed campaign finance bill.
February 19, 1998
An exploration of public support for the use of force in Iraq as compared to past conlicts.
February 19, 1998
Two former White House counsels discuss executive privilege.
February 13, 1998:
Shields and Gigot discuss the investigations of Starr and Babbitt.
February 10, 1998
Members of Congress discuss the U.S. government's support of military action against Iraq.
February 6, 1998:
Perspectives on the Starr investigation from beyond the beltway.
Browse the NewsHour's coverage of the White House and legal issues
The Shields and Gigot index page.
Mr. Shields: "I mean, both of these sides have managed to raise mud wrestling to the level of chess, and it's all scorched earth, it's going after each other."
MARK SHIELDS: Jim, watching this is a little bit like we understand the feelings of agnostic watching the Notre Dame/Southern Methodist game, you know, you really don't care who wins. I mean, both of these sides have managed to raise mud wrestling to the level of chess, and it's all scorched earth, it's going after each other. This week I thought Ken Starr went for the bait. He went for the bait by subpoenaing Sidney Blumenthal and turning Sidney Blumenthal into a sympathetic figure, which is analogous to turning sand into silver. I say that very bluntly. Sidney Blumenthal was sort of the Democrats' George Will. Remember, George Will in 1980 advised Ronald Reagan, prepped him for the debate, and then went on ABC and analyzed his performance. Well, Sidney Blumenthal did this on a regular basis for candidates in campaigns. He always fell in love every four years, Gary Hart in '84, Bill Clinton in '92, and so--
JIM LEHRER: As a journalist--
MARK SHIELDS: Working as a journalist, he crossed the line from an advocate to adviser, from writer to speechwriter.
JIM LEHRER: And now he is on the staff of--
MARK SHIELDS: Now, he's out of the closet, or whatever. He's on--he's on the president's payroll. So he brings Sidney Blumenthal in, and now the focus--immediately, the press, of course, squeals--being asked about their sources, I mean, didn't get upset when a Filipino steward was dragooned in, somebody out of the steno pool of the White House, but, my God, if somebody--the First Amendment comes into play and gone after the press--so here's Sidney standing here like Joe Welsh in 1954 in the Joe McCarthy hearings, Ken Starr's made himself the issue. And I really think Stuart Taylor of National Journal and of this broadcast made it right, and it's probably time for Ken Starr to go.
PAUL GIGOT: Think he's given me enough to work with there?
JIM LEHRER: It was one of those--
Mr. Gigot: "He (Kenneth Starr) did manage what I thought was impossible, which is to turn somebody we used to call in the journalist community "Sid Vicious", Sid Blumenthal...into a sympathetic figure...."
PAUL GIGOT: He did manage what I thought was impossible, which is to turn somebody we used to call in the journalist community "Sid Vicious", Sid Blumenthal, because he wrote these ferocious partisan profiles, into a sympathetic figure, let him wrap himself in the First Amendment, and the mistake Ken Starr made--it was an over-broad subpoena, and he made a mistake including the press, because you can investigate anybody in this city; you can't investigate the press. And we all riled together and say, hey, not our sources. The other thing he did was he allowed the White House to change the subject from what should have been big news this week, which is the White House's claim of executive privilege, which has Nixonian echoes, which suggests delay and not cooperating, and that is going on behind the scenes.
JIM LEHRER: That has to do with the testimony of Bruce Lindsey, one of President Clinton's top advisers, possibly even others, Lannie Breuer and others, who work at the White House who have some kind of a lawyer relationship.
PAUL GIGOT: If there's nothing to hide, the implication being, why do you need to claim privilege, and then the other news this week was that the White House got caught not telling the complete story and not for the first time on whether or not the President's attorneys had to hire investigators, in fact, to look into the backgrounds of some of Ken Starr's prosecutors, so Ken Starr does have a point about the White House resisting this, a very big and good point. The thing is he did rise to the debate.
JIM LEHRER: And he rose--why do you think he rose to the bait, what's going on?
PAUL GIGOT: Well, I think that he sees himself in a game which--with uneven tools. He's got a legal process that is by necessity secret. The President is making a political process where he can pile on, and he has so many more tools at his disposal and use the media to really hurt the investigation. You've got a situation where the independent counsel's is fielding hundreds of phone calls, not about the investigation, but about them, about these individuals, about stories that have been dug up about their pasts. And I think that the day was a sense of frustration building, and they decided, wait, we've got to stop this. And they struck back.
MARK SHIELDS: Well, I disagree with--I don't think you have to strike back--
PAUL GIGOT: I'm not saying you have to--
Mr. Shields: "Bill Clinton has been blessed. He is the most gifted politician in our nation's career with the enemies he has."
MARK SHIELDS: --hundreds of phone calls because, I mean, getting hundreds of phone calls, it's like the Martians taking over Los Alamos to Mexico--I mean, what you do is you give 'em to one person to take and that's--every caller comes in, that's where it goes, and you don't spend your time, effort, and energy doing it. You understand this about Ken Starr. I mean, Bill Clinton has been blessed. He is the most gifted politician in our nation's career with the enemies he has. I mean, they are, without a doubt, the most unappealing group of people--I don't care if you're talking about Pat Robertson, I don't care if you're talking about Emmett Turrell, the American Spectator, they're all--they're all over the edge. They're all--I mean, if you got a latent Democratic corpuscle anywhere in your system, it turns you into a fierce partisan when these people come and they accuse the President of murder, they accuse him running drugs into Arkansas, all this stuff that's just right out of Looney Tunes and Twilight Zone. And, quite frankly, what Ken Starr is, is he's tone deaf; he's tone deaf. He's been tone deaf from the beginning and went down to Pat Robertson's law school while Robertson was on-- showing the video, accusing the President of murdering Vince Foster. He goes, he pleads the case to the tobacco companies when the administration is taking on the tobacco companies. While he's the independent counsel, he accepts the Pepperdine offer and just has shown no judgment.
PAUL GIGOT: Those are political sins, though, and political mistakes. They're not legal--and that's a big difference when your job is investigation of a legal--
JIM LEHRER: Look--go back to--but what's been lawless--as you said, I mean, what this whole thing began was an investigation of allegations against the President, et cetera, et cetera, and everybody believed when this began, which was, what, four, five weeks ago now, that this thing would be quickly resolved, that executive privilege, all these other issues have now been raised--the Washington Post had a story a couple of days ago by Ruth Marcus that said this thing could go on for two years.
PAUL GIGOT: Well, it may very well. I think the White House has two dates in mind right now. One is May 27th, when the Paula Jones trial gets underway--they want to get past that because they feel if they can extend this beyond that and win that case, it'll undermine the credibility of Monica Lewinsky in that episode, and then second, the November election, because they feel if they can drag this beyond that, then the jeopardy that members of Congress who are Democrats might feel at any problems the President has would be gone, and by then the President just coasts out the last two years.
JIM LEHRER: Yes. Another issue this week, campaign finance reform, the McCain-Feingold didn't make it, and what happened?
MARK SHIELDS: Well, Jim, we had hearings all last year--Sen. Fred Thompson--interesting hearings--the Senate spent millions of dollars and a lot of time and effort and energy to explore this system, the Senate then went on recess for 75 days, the longest recess since 1965, and then when they come back--they come back and say we're going to keep that status quo. The majority of the Senate wants to change it. Now, let's give them credit.
JIM LEHRER: Fifty-two to forty-eight--
MARK SHIELDS: Fifty-two to forty-eight.
JIM LEHRER: But you need 60 to break--
MARK SHIELDS: But last year $40 million again in soft money in 1997. We have gone in this country from--now costs $16,000 a week--if you're a United States senator and you're going to run for your election, you have to get up and figure out how I'm going to raise $16,000 this week. That's every single week of your six-year term. That's up 32 percent since 1992. And-- people look at it and say it's a cozy system; it's a miserable system; and yet what happened, the decision was made by Sen. Lott and the Republican leadership and the overwhelming Republican caucus to not change.
JIM LEHRER: And the point, in fact, you have expressed it on this program in the past, Paul, that in some ways you and others feel that clearly the Republican majority felt that the--that this Republican leadership--that the status quo is better than what McCain-Feingold would have done, correct?
PAUL GIGOT: I think that's right. I think that there some campaign reforms that could pass, but they would have to be of a deregulatory kind. This was more regulation, rules piled on rules, rules that were supposed to work, even though the last ones that they proposed didn't work, and were avoided, and that was one of the big problems with this politically. You had a leader. The President was the main supporter of this, proposing new laws and, in fact, what happened in 1996 was they had blown apart all the old ones. It doesn't give you a strong public base.
JIM LEHRER: Joe Lieberman, Sen. Lieberman was on this program the other night, and he was a big advocate of McCain-Feingold, of reform of any kind, and he said very sadly that he thought that there was public support for this, that there was no political price that anybody was going to pay for there not being campaign finance reform, do you agree?
PAUL GIGOT: Oh, I agree completely. I think there will not be a single race in November that it's decided on this, and there may not be very many where it is even an important issue, because if you look at every poll, it is low down on the totem pole in terms of what the public wants, and I think part of the reason is the kind of cynicism that a campaign like 1996 engenders, has there been any price, or any accountability for what happened in that election?
MARK SHIELDS: I would say--I would say I think Joe Lieberman is sadly right, but I mean, cynicism didn't begin with Bill Clinton in 1996. I mean, we had, if you want--what people have to see is a direct payoff. What we saw with the soft money is the soft money from the tobacco industry going directly to the Republican Party in 1997, and what happened? In the middle of the conference work, Jim, on the tax bill, on the balanced budget, out of nowhere, no fingerprints, no pride of authorship comes the $50 million gift--gift--right off to the tobacco industry, put in there by the Republican leadership, put in there by Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich but with no fingerprints. Now, if you want to see something direct, that certainly contributes to cynicism. That's cynicism--
PAUL GIGOT: It was an outrage, and it was overturned, and it should have been, there's no question about it, but, you know--
MARK SHIELDS: What's sunlight--
PAUL GIGOT: That's right. That's why a lot of people who don't like McCain-Feingold said, let's have disclosure, more disclosure and openness, so that--
JIM LEHRER: Less regulation, more disclosure.
PAUL GIGOT: Yes. You can give what you want but then you suffer the consequences if you happen to give and it is exposed.
JIM LEHRER: Let me go to another subject quickly before we go. It's a subject that Phil Ponce and his four guests were talking about earlier. Speaking of Trent Lott, how do you explain his strong attack on the Iraq deal this week?
Mr. Gigot: "You can fairly argue that Saddam comes out of this looking quite good, and that the problem is kicked down the road six months, or eight months...."
PAUL GIGOT: For 30 years Republicans had the advantage or a big advantage since Vietnam on foreign policy. They've been trying to get it back ever since the Berlin Wall fell. And I think this week they saw an opening. They saw an opening because while there's relief that the President didn't have to go to war, but we didn't go to war, it's clear the President really didn't want to strike Saddam Hussein, so they took the exit, the U.N. and negotiation gave him--but there's an awful lot to criticize about this agreement. It looks--and I think you can safely--you can fairly argue that Saddam comes out of this looking quite good, and that the problem is kicked down the road six months, or eight months, and Trent Lott was stepping up and saying, it looks like the administration's own policy of containment against Saddam has the seeds of being stopped and ended. This was the beginning of the end of containment.
JIM LEHRER: How do you read the Lott thing?
MARK SHIELDS: The Lott thing--interesting--has said nothing of any significance, importance, interest, for the debate, and before the decision--jumps in afterwards. I think Paul's absolutely right. The Republicans--if you go right to the Wall Street Journal poll, which I did, on education, on the environment, on the economy, the Democrats are consistently running ahead of the Republicans on education, on all the issues that matter--the one place where the Republicans still have that big edge on national defense, national security, foreign policy, and I think this was an attempt to reclaim that.
JIM LEHRER: To articulate it.
MARK SHIELDS: To articulate it, but I really, Jim, I think that I have to agree with Sen. Robb, who was on earlier, I think, if anything, Saddam is weaker tonight. I think the alliance is now there, and the next time, if there is a next time--and there looks like there will be--I think there's going to be a stronger coalition.
JIM LEHRER: Speaking of next time, we'll see you then.
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