POLITICAL WRAP

February 26, 1999
		Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot offer end-of-week political analysis.

Feb. 25, 1999: A talk with Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle about his party's legislative agenda. Feb. 23, 1999: A report on the return home of House Impeachment Manager and U.S. Rep. James Rogan. Feb. 22, 1999: The nation's governors have gathered in Washington and along with the U.S. Senate to map out their respective agendas. Feb. 19, 1999: Our pundits discuss the president's first press conference since the impeachment trial. Feb. 12, 1999: Shields and Gigot offer an end-of-trial analysis on today’s vote. Feb. 5, 1999: Our pundits discuss the Senate impeachment trial and the beginning of the "end game." Jan. 29, 1999: Our pundits discuss the partisanship of the trial. Jan. 22, 1999: Mark Shields and Paul Gigot offer end-of-week political analysis. Jan. 19, 1999: Mark Shields and Paul Gigot reflect on the presentation by the President's lawyers. Jan. 15, 1999: Our pundits discuss the Senate impeachment trial after a second day of presentations from the House managers. Jan. 8, 1999: Mark Shields and Paul Gigot offer end-of-week political analysis. Browse the NewsHour's coverage of the White House, Congress, and Political Wrap.   White House U.S. Senate	JIM LEHRER: And to our end-of-the-week political analysis by Shields and Gigot: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields, Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot. First, the hearings this week in the Senate on renewing the independent counsel law. Explain the politics of that to me, Mark.
	Reviewing the indedendent counsel law.
	MARK SHIELDS: Well, it's fascinating Jim that there's no real ideological division. I mean, the Republicans who are on this -- both sides want it to scrap it.. The Republicans who are upset by Judge Lawrence Walsh's six-year investigation of Iran-Contra, the pre-election indictment of Casper Weinberg at $50 million are now joined by the Democrats, upset by Ken Starr's $4 ½ million - four and a half year, $45 million investigation of Bill Clinton. And as is often in the case in Washington, the most sensible voice seems to be that of Howard Baker, the former senate Republican leader and chief of staff of the White House who said, "I think you guys ought to cool it." I mean both sides are pretty heated right now, before they go - JIM LEHRER: Yes. He said, "Go away and think about it. Don't do anything right now." MARK SHIELDS: That's right, yes. JIM LEHRER: But, are they going to do anything? What do you think? PAUL GIGOT: Well, he means let it lapse. JIM LEHRER: Yes, let it lapse, exactly, and then maybe come back and renew it at some -- or come up with something slightly different maybe. I don't know. What do you think is going to happen? PAUL GIGOT: The last time it lapsed, Jim was in 1992 at the end of the Bush administration. And I remember having a conversation with George Stephanoupolos, then working for Bill Clinton in 1993. I caught wind that Jack Brooks, then head of the Judiciary Committee, wanted to reauthorize the statute and I called Stephanpoulos, I said, "now, you aren't really going to urge the president to sign this, are you?" And he said, "yes, we're going to sign this." It's dangerous for executives to do this. And he said, "Well, that's all right. We're going that's why we're going to run the most ethical administration in history." And I think probably Bill Clinton made that mistake -- would consider that one of the biggest mistakes of his administration. I think it's going to die right now. I don't think it's going to be reauthorized. There's a chance that it could still survive, but I think that that would be in the future when we get another scandal. But for now I think it's going to lapse. JIM LEHRER: And the argument -- what do you think the argument, Mark, that we didn't have an independent counsel statute for 200 years, and there was a way of doing it, the attorney general, if he or she decided that the Justice Department couldn't investigate somebody, they would just appoint a special counsel, the attorney general would do it and that worked before, we don't need this big thing? MARK SHIELDS: I think it has a certain persuasive appeal right now. Walter Dellinger, the professor of law at Duke had pretty good point. He said, "We like the idea of an independent counsel when independent sounds like it's non-partisan but we don't like it when it's unaccountable." And I think that's one of the great criticisms, that there's no -- the independence in this case means no accountability. Ironically, Jim, if Janet Reno's original choice, Robert Fiske, former U.S. Attorney from New York, had remained independent counsel, I think that this would have been an entirely different investigation. He was a tough investigator. He prosecuted some very tough characters, unlike Ken Starr who had never been in a courtroom in his life. JIM LEHRER: But we need to remind people what you're talking about MARK SHIELDS: Janet Reno. JIM LEHRER: Yes. Janet Reno -- that was before there was this -- the renewal of the independent counsel. MARK SHIELDS: That's right. JIM LEHRER: She did just exactly what the old system was, and then a new independent counsel had to be appointed and that was Kenneth Starr to replace Fiske. MARK SHIELDS: That's right. PAUL GIGOT: But it was Janet Reno that urged the statute and signing of the statute and in doing so, gave the three-judge panel the opportunity to name the independent counsel, and they wanted somebody who was truly independent. The problem with the statute is that - JIM LEHRER: Independent in this case from the attorney general because the attorney general had appointed Fiske. PAUL GIGOT: Had appointed Fiske. Exactly. What you need -- the problem with the independent counsel statute, why I think it creates such mayhem, is it allows everybody else in the system to pass the buck. Congress doesn't have to do oversight. The counsel's doing it. The attorney general doesn't have to do her job of prosecuting. The independent counsel's doing it. The press doesn't have to dig stories. We wait for the lawyers -- for the witnesses before the grand jury to leak. And the target, like the president, can say, "it's me versus him," and make that person the enemy, which Nixon could never do in Watergate. Well, when he tried he paid for it because Archibald Cox had been appointed by his own attorney general, and that made it much more politically difficult to fire him. MARK SHIELDS: His own attorney general. That'll teach you. PAUL GIGOT: But not very successfully, I might add.
	2000 presidential politics.
	JIM LEHRER: Let's talk -- heaven forbid -- some 2000 presidential politics for a moment. George W. Bush is going to announce something he says in two weeks. Why has he emerged so quickly and so solidly as the front-runner for the Republican nomination? MARK SHIELDS: Well, first of all, there's an emotional need among Republicans to have a front-runner. I mean the Republican Party is a party where its membership looks to its leadership for direction. There's no -- it's no accident, Jim, that over the past ten presidential elections, one year before the nominating convention the Republicans have had a front-runner who led all the other candidates by ten points or more. And in nine out of ten instances the sole exception being Barry Goldwater in 1964, Republicans nominate the front-runner. Democrats are chaotic, absolutely anarchial; they've nominated the front-runner a grand total of two times out of ten. So there's an emotional spiritual need here. JIM LEHRER: But why Bush? MARK SHIELDS: George W. Bush fills a lot of -- there's a great profile here. First of all, Texas, big state, he is personally appealing, and comes -- his dad was president, he's been in presidential politics before. Jim, this is a fellow who got 49 percent of the Hispanic vote. This is a party that, after the politics of both Pat Buchanan and Pete Wilson, the former governor of California and presidential candidate, had alienated a large percentage of the growing Hispanic population, a voting group that ought to be sympathetic to Republicans based upon its traditional and conservative family values. He got 31 percent of the African- American vote in Texas and he got 69 percent of the overall vote. So there's an appeal. He can finance a campaign. He's been through it before. And he is an appealing fellow. JIM LEHRER: How do you explain Bush? PAUL GIGOT: I would agree with just about everything Mark said, astonishingly enough, regarding Bush. And a couple of other things. One, he's not from Washington. The congressional wing of the G.O.P. is shell-shocked. There's no leadership going to come from there. So the party is looking for somebody from outside. George Bush is a governor. He's outside, but he's not too outside. He's obviously got experience. The last experience Republicans had with a candidate who was a two-term governor, Ronald Reagan a pretty good one. He's somebody they rather like. JIM LEHRER: Now, speaking of the governors, Paul, they were here this week. PAUL GIGOT: Right. JIM LEHRER: They met with the president, they did a lot of things, and some people are suggesting that it is, in fact, the governors who are in charge of the Republican Party nationally now. Do you buy that? PAUL GIGOT: I think they're providing the intellectual and political leadership. Unlike Washington, where the Republicans don't control the executive branch, Bill Clinton controls the executive branch and the bully pulpit that comes with it. In the individual states, the governors have that power within the states, so they can set an agenda. And when awe set an agenda, you can -- there's a little easier time trying to put together a coalition. The Republicans in Washington are full of factions and they can't agree on too much right now, so the governors are beginning to -- I mean a lot of the leadership, Republican policy on education, crime, welfare, even tax cutting really comes from the governors right now. The problem, Jim, the irony is the governors are not very powerful here in Washington. Four years ago, they worked with a Republican congress to send power back through the welfare law, through job training and other things. Right now, they were up here this week and I talked to some of them. They're mostly trying to forestall a lot more damage, a lot more rules and regulations being imposed on them. So that's the irony. They're powerful in the Republican Party, but they're less influential in this city. JIM LEHRER: There's also a conventional wisdom, Mark, that whether it's Republicans or Democrats, governors tend to be less ideological because they have no choice, because they have to make decisions, they have to get -- they have to make the -- the trains run on time, symbolically and everything else. Is that true, do you think? MARK SHIELDS: Yes, it is true. Governors are judged on are the highways safe, are there potholes in them, are the schools open, are the colleges teaching, are the prisons rioting? I mean they're very real tests that people have every day. If you're a Republican member of the Congress, you can sit there and be as ideological as you want on whatever issue, whether it's the Internet or something else or school prayer or Democrats can be firearms control. Governors have to make things happen, and they get judged that way. These fellows, the other advantage they have, governors in both parties-- there only two Republican governors -- there are only two incumbent governors who lost in 1998. Both of them were intellectual conservatives - David Beasley in South Carolina; Faub James in Alabama. The pragmatic kind of get-things-done governing consensus, conservative govern consensus in many cases was ratified. JIM LEHRER: Do you agree? PAUL GIGOT: No, I don't agree with that at all. Faub James lost as he came off as a crank who didn't care about economic issues but cared more about the ten commandments. So the ideological point is right there. But Beasley of South Carolina was not overly ideological. He lost because a lot of gambling money came in on video poker. That's why he lost. JIM LEHRER: Okay. Well - MARK SHIELDS: Both of them lost because the Christian Coalition backed them, Jim, strongly and they joined them on the subject of state lotteries -- both Beasley and James. And that was it. You don't see that with Trent Lott.
	Open letter to the American people.
	JIM LEHRER: Speaking of Trent Lott -- what a great segue -- this open letter to the American people that appeared in USA Today this week, a lot of people have been talking about that and the Democrats have been spoke poking fun of it because they say it could be written by Democrats and it essentially says we're going to move on, we're going to fix Social Security; we're going to do all these kinds of things. What happened? Why was this open letter written and what do you think of it? PAUL GIGOT: I don't think much about it. I think what it shows is that whatever problems Republicans have - JIM LEHRER: I should say, by the way, that it was signed-- for those who didn't see it - it's signed by Trent Lott and of course the new Speaker Dennis Hastert - and it's to the American people. PAUL GIGOT: And written for them by some pollster who had run all that wording through multiple focus groups. You can you can read anything you want into that. JIM LEHRER: Let me just read the first part here, "Over the last four years, our nation has been on the right track, our economy is strong and the budget deficit is now a budget surplus. Americans have moved off welfare and on to the work force more than ever before; crime is down," et cetera, et cetera. PAUL GIGOT: We're for motherhood, apple pie, everything - but whatever the Republicans don't trust Bill Clinton. That's a problem. But their big problem is they don't trust themselves. They aren't really sure of what they believe in anymore. They think that Bill Clinton, no matter what argument they make, Bill Clinton's either going to do one of two things, coopt it and get credit for it, or he's going to make it sound like they want to throw grandmother out into the snow bank and make widows and orphans of everybody in America. And so they're shell shocked and they say, "we can't win an argument, so let's not have an argument." JIM LEHRER: Do you read it the same way, quickly? MARK SHIELDS: No, I don't, Jim. In the final analysis, a political party defines itself not by what it's against, whether it's Bill Clinton, his alleged stealing of their philosophical clothes, but what it's for. And if you read that, I mean what you get is that the Republicans are for what the Democrats are for, basically the preamble is a re-election campaign for Bill Clinton, the country's in great shape, jobs are up, deficit's down, country's prospering - and all the rest of it - and we can do everything the Democrats can do at 10 percent off. I mean I agree with Paul, the Republicans have lost their self-confidence -- but they've lost it for good reason, Jim. They were absolutely long wrong and they've been wrong since 1993 in the economy and all the predictions that they made about what was going to happen haven't happened and the country -- we just had 6.1 percent growth last quarter. JIM LEHRER: You get to answer that next week, Paul. We have to go. Thank you both very much.