|
|
 | |
 |
 |
| POLITICAL WRAP | |
 October 2, 1998  | |
 | The House Judiciary Committee released more documents today on the Clinton-Lewinsky matter, including transcripts of secretly recorded conversations between Ms. Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot and Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant discuss the political impact of the latest revelations.
|
| JIM LEHRER: And now to Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot and Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant, sitting in tonight for Mark Shields. Tom, based on what we just heard, excerpts from all these 4600 pages and anything else that you may have read of them today, did we learn anything significant in this case? TOM OLIPHANT: Oh, yes, a great deal. A lot of it goes to detail and to nuance. I think this is a presentation today whose effect is going to be to harden positions, however, rather than to change them. They're going to be some things out of today's release that are going to keep people like us occupied at least through the weekend, if not into next week, particularly things like the credibility of Linda Tripp, the relationship between her, her camp, her publicist, her one-time publicist, and Kenneth Starr's office. There are some - we have never really had a look at Betty Currie's testimony in detail, and I think the ambivalent nature of it is what is the principal news today. I think we've had about six weeks now since the President's grand jury appearance, and it's pretty clear that no matter what your point of view on this case, you can make your argument by inference but you can't prove it with evidence. JIM LEHRER: On either side. TOM OLIPHANT: On either side. JIM LEHRER: Paul. | |||||||
| | ||||||||
|  PAUL GIGOT: I think the most interesting thing about Betty Currie's testimony is not the ambivalence but how much it changed. If you look as she appeared five or six times over the course of five or six months, and when you look at her testimony in January, it was the most damaging to the President. That's when she said these were the questions the President asked me that I felt were statements; I was never alone with her, right - but over time she - she became somewhat less cooperative. That's interesting. JIM LEHRER: Look, both of you, before you became columnists, used to be reporters. If you had to write a lead - PAUL GIGOT: Still do it occasionally. JIM LEHRER: Still do it occasionally. If you had to write a lead from all of this today, what would it be, Paul? PAUL GIGOT: I guess it would be that what we saw today mostly reinforced the Starr Report in the sense that what the Starr Report said, has been backed up now, is backed up by the supporting documents and this testimony. Remember, the White House came out and said at the start that this was a spun report, that they took the worst things out, and tried to spin it so that it looked really bad. In fact, if you look at the documents and the testimony, it does back up the essential facts of the case. JIM LEHRER: What would your lead be, Mr. Oliphant? TOM OLIPHANT: Could I play editor for a second - something I - the lowest position on the journalistic totem pole, as far as I'm concerned, but I would - I would argue that perhaps that's a tad judgmental on my fellow columnist's part. I always thought the trick with a massive document dump like this just to start somewhere with something that appears to be new, and I think I might pick Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp's argument about whether or not there was sex between her and the president. The purpose of a lead is to start the story, not necessarily to summarize it accurately. But what Paul said about Betty Currie was very interesting. It's very important, but, again, it's susceptible to this different interpretation, depending which point of view you're coming at, and you can see it right in this section that Kwame just read from. On the one hand she's talking about the president trying to indicate we were alone together, right? That's in the Starr Report. What isn't in the Starr Report is the exchange that follows, where she sort of says that she feels that what the president is saying was basically correct and talks about the general area versus the specific area. You are left with this on the one hand, on the other hand time will tell kind of story, which is every reporter's least favorite story. JIM LEHRER: A wash for pundits and reporters, then, and supporters and advocates and everybody on both sides? PAUL GIGOT: People are going to be scouring this for fact and inference and state of mind. One of the details that comes out is that the president called Betty Currie at home perhaps after midnight, she recalls, the day the story broke. JIM LEHRER: Yes. That was the night of January 20th, when it was going to come out in the Washington Post the next day. PAUL GIGOT: That's right. JIM LEHRER: And the LA Times. PAUL GIGOT: And says, can you get hold of her, and she then tries to get ahold of Monica repeatedly, finally does, and Monica says, I can't talk to you, but that is interesting to me, because it goes to the president's state of mind, his preoccupation with - obviously, with the fact that this was going to come out, what Monica was thinking, and if you're looking for evidence that the president had a motive to cover it up, there it is. JIM LEHRER: Now, the White House made a statement late today which said that this was designed to embarrass the president even more, but it proved beyond a doubt - didn't prove beyond a doubt - I'm paraphrasing - proved that Starr had loaded his report against the president. TOM OLIPHANT: Yes. I think there was one additional element in the material that Greg Craig, the new sort of quarterback at the White House, a fresh face at least in this story, had. There was also a fairly long argument about why in the White House view all of the material in this body of evidence we have now does not rise to what they feel is the appropriate level of impeachable offense, which leads me to wonder that maybe what this story is going to get in the coming days, as picking up on Greg Craig's appearance late this afternoon, is perhaps some new faces to argue the pros and cons. It's getting a little stale. I think some of the temperature has come out of this argument. And when the presentation before the House Judiciary Committee begins next week, we will have some fresh faces. The majority counsel for the committee and the minority - as they summarize, this may be the last chance to really affect public opinion before we all take a break for the elections. JIM LEHRER: What do you think is going to happen on Monday? What should we look for on Monday when the House Judiciary Committee meets? | | ||||||
| Monday's vote. | ||||||||
| PAUL GIGOT: I'm looking for a fairly sober event, as congressional hearings go. That means only mildly raucous. I think it's going to be interesting to me, because we're going to get the first look at what the Republican and Democratic counsels think about the evidence, their perception of how strong is the case, does it rise to the level of something worthy of investigating impeachment? On the Republican side, I'd look - do they throw out a couple of things that Starr alleged - they say we looked at this, we don't agree with Starr. JIM LEHRER: Do you think that could happen? PAUL GIGOT: I think a couple of the -
PAUL GIGOT: Sure. Abuse of power - JIM LEHRER: There are 11, just to refresh everybody's memory, that Starr said may be impeachable offenses. PAUL GIGOT: That's right. Then on the Democratic side I think one of the interesting things is that at first the Democratic Counsel Abby Lowell did not want to present this to the whole committee, wanted to present it only to the Democrats, and Chairman Hyde said, no, we'd love to have the benefit, we, Republicans, of your analysis as well, and so the country will see it. I think what will be interesting there is how much do the Democrats through Abby Lowell take the White House defense and how much distance do they put between themselves and the White House, how much credence do they give, for example, to the perjury charge? Do they concede that, or begin to concede that? JIM LEHRER: It's a case of picking and choosing for them as well? They say, well, we don't think that's anything, but maybe we ought to look at this one, so - PAUL GIGOT: That's right. Very interesting here, just a quick point, the Democrats do not have to - you know, they're not saying we aren't going to vote for an inquiry right now. They're saying we're going to vote for a time limit on the inquiry, which is very significant. TOM OLIPHANT: Well, what will actually happen, of course, is the alternative that the Democrats presented on Friday will be formally rejected, as it will be on the House floor. JIM LEHRER: And that was time limit - TOM OLIPHANT: And narrowed scope. JIM LEHRER: And narrowed scope. TOM OLIPHANT: And it probably should be, given the seriousness of any impeachment question, but just to take the flip side of what Paul just said, it'll be interesting to watch how the Republicans play it in the committee too, whether the emphasis of their arguments is on the importance of going forward, in other words, if the emphasis is on the inquiry idea here, as opposed to whether or not anybody is claiming that a case has been made as of now, and I would bet you anything the heavy emphasis will be on the former. JIM LEHRER: And is there any question when they take a vote whether it's late on Monday or on Tuesday that they will vote for an inquiry? TOM OLIPHANT: None whatsoever. It's what we call a lie-down in this game. PAUL GIGOT: You know, the interesting question will be how many Democrats vote for the Republican resolution. JIM LEHRER: And then it goes - it's scheduled to go to the full House by the end of the week. Any question there? | ||||||||
|
| ||||||||
| JIM LEHRER: What's the plan for after the vote in the House, as we sit here, do you know? What happens? Do they go away for an election and then come back after the election or in January, or what? PAUL GIGOT: Well, not in January. I think the members go away to campaign, particularly anybody who has a real race gets out of town, but I think the judiciary staff continues to work and sets the stage and some of the members will stay as well and work, particularly the ones who care most about this and what to pay closest attention, and then I think that the chairman will probably --at some point will sit down Mr. Conyers, the ranking member, and decide to come back in November, after the election. JIM LEHRER: And have public hearings? PAUL GIGOT: I would think. I would think. What kind of hearings will be up we don't know, but - up in the air - but there will be hearings, I think, with this Congress, with this lame duck Congress. JIM LEHRER: Now, Tom, much is being said that this has been the obsession of Washington and Congress and et cetera. There are other things happening that we're missing, and one of the things, of course, is the budget and the appropriations and the tax cut debate. What are we missing there? TOM OLIPHANT: Well, we're not missing a great deal. A lot has been happening and not happening. I would argue, Jim, that the absence of attention to congressional developments nationally in the last week or two is the big price that President Clinton has paid for his behavior. There were issues before this Congress, whether it was tobacco a few months ago or HMO regulation more recently, that you probably could have had a much more spirited debate about it in the country. It isn't happening right now. It may happen in the next few weeks. But the fact that it hasn't I think is the big cost to President Clinton of what he did. JIM LEHRER: Do you agree? |  | |||||||
|
 PAUL GIGOT: I agree with that. One of the things that - Republicans are very fortunate that they have Bill Clinton to mobilize their base for them, because they haven't been doing a lot to write home about here, and I mean - just a good example, the House passed a tax cut; the Senate has decided - the Republican Senate has decided we'd rather not vote on that - they're going to bury it. And because we don't want to take on the president on Social Security, the same Republican senators are saying - JIM LEHRER: Because the president is saying we don't want to use that surplus for tax cuts; we want to use it for Social Security and all. PAUL GIGOT: Republicans are looking at the polls that show them they have big leads right now among voters - senior voters - men and women above 55. The last thing they want to do is give any ammo on Social Security and you know, the same Republican senators that say we can't take on the president last year, he's too tough, he's too strong, now say we can take on the president, he's too week. We don't want to change the subject. TOM OLIPHANT: Yes. However, again coming out of this vote next week, I think the major question in the final month of the campaign is, whether the inability of the Congress to agree on some of the specific spending bills before it now, results in one after another of them being folded into a package that becomes more and more giant and includes perhaps some conservative junk that leads to another government shutdown crisis. It's not out of the - it's not out of the realm of possibility yet. I think the president would love it. PAUL GIGOT: He'd veto it if they changed the wrong comma. JIM LEHRER: Paul, Tom, we have to go. Thank you. |  | |||||||
| |||||
 | |||||
| |||||
|
|
| |||
| |||||
| |||||
| Support the kind of journalism done by the NewsHour...Become a member of your local PBS station. | |||||
JIM LEHRER: Is that right? 
TOM OLIPHANT: None whatsoever. It's over. The interesting question will be what the aftermath is like. I would argue that within the last week some of the political steam has been going out of this story. It has not had the country's rapt attention the way it did in the latter part of August. So the atmosphere after the House votes I think will really be more important than the vote and the debate itself. 
