There is supposedly a wide gulf between the news pundits and everyone else over President Clinton. The pundits were outraged over the president’s handling of his talk to the nation Monday night. The people were not pleased with the president, but more charitable toward him.
People with an immense capacity for finding the good in everyone are wondering if, this time, Clinton has seen the light. Maybe he meant it when he said he was going to take responsibility for the Monica Lewinsky mess. Maybe, somewhere behind that hangdog look he wore for the TV camera Monday night, there was a genuine ounce of contrition.
Well, think about this.
Back in January, when the Lewinsky deal broke, when the walls were crashing in, when the president was first accused of having sex with a young White House intern, where did Bill Clinton turn for counsel? Dick Morris, whose adventures in toe sucking with a $200-an-hour prostitute forced him off the Clinton campaign in 1996.
On Tuesday, Morris testified before Ken Starr’s grand jury. On Wednesday, Morris blabbed about it in a column he writes for the New York Post.
Granted, the promiscuous and disgraced former pollster for a promiscuous and disgraced president is hardly the rock of authority. But some things Morris wrote in the Post are telling about the way Clinton thinks and acts.
Morris says he talked to Clinton five times on the telephone in the first three days after the Lewinsky affair broke. “I just slipped up with that girl,” Morris reports Clinton said. “Ever since I was elected, I’ve tried to avoid things like this, but I just slipped.”
What to do, what to do, what to do. What did they do? Why, they took a poll.
Morris says he polled whether people believed Clinton had ever committed adultery. He asked whether people thought Clinton had done it more often than John F. Kennedy. He polled whether people would forgive Clinton for having sex with Lewinsky. He polled whether people would forgive Clinton for lying in a deposition. The people said sex was OK, lying was not.
It took Clinton seven months, but he finally got to use those poll results.
From my vantage point, his TV performance Monday night was miserable. Short on apology, short on answers, long on shots at Kenneth Starr. I thought the usually surefooted president missed all his cues. For the first time, I thought it was possible that Clinton will be forced from office.
Now the motive behind the Monday speech seems more clear. It was a command political performance, driven by polls.
The Morris poll said people would forgive Clinton for sex. He admitted to sex. In a gentlemanly sort of way, of course. He admitted to “a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.”
The Morris poll said people would not forgive Clinton for lying under oath. He said he didn’t lie under oath. His deposition was “legally accurate,” he said.
To many people in the news media, including me, the most mystifying and damaging thing Clinton did Monday night was go after Starr, blame the independent counsel for the time and cost and personal misery spawned by the investigation. I thought Clinton looked bad, placing blame not on himself, but Starr.
Ah, but the polls. The polls have been tracking Ken Starr’s public approval ratings for months. They’re in the tank. Awful. Terrible. The polls say people think Starr is a bigger skunk than Clinton. And Clinton jumped right on that in his speech, like Starr was his opponent in a third race for the presidency.
There it is, four minutes of poll-driven soul-baring by the president.
Clinton is banking heavily on the public’s distaste for Ken Starr to get him through this. He’s counting on the poll numbers to do him right, just as they did in 1992 and 1996.
But I wonder if he has thought of this.
At some point, Starr will finish his report and hand it to Congress. And then Starr will being to recede into the background.
And the new sheriff will be Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who has assembled his own crack team of lawyers to carefully examine Starr’s findings.
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I would venture that most people outside of Illinois still don’t know much about Hyde. I doubt that Dick Morris has ever asked a poll question about him. While everyone else in Congress has been yammering endlessly on TV about Clinton and Lewinsky, Hyde has been mercifully reticent. He has refused to do the TV talk shows. He has said not a bad word about Clinton. While Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) was passing instant judgment of Clinton on TV Monday night, Hyde kept his own counsel.
That says everything about Hyde’s commitment to fairness. And that is a huge problem for Clinton. He can’t poll on Henry Hyde. He can’t demonize Henry Hyde.
When Hyde takes center stage as head of the committee’s impeachment hearings, it’s anybody’s guess, I suppose, as to how it will turn out. It’s possible that Hyde could be another Joe Biden, who chaired the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Biden thrilled at the sound of his own voice, and exuded a gratingly false sense of camaraderie. And all the time Biden was being badly outmaneuvered by more clever lawyers and senators who got Thomas to the Supreme Court. That is Clinton’s dream scenario.
But that won’t happen, because Hyde is no Biden.
No, Hyde will be like the late Sam Ervin, the courtly North Carolina senator who charmed the nation as he led the Senate hearings into the Watergate scandal. Ervin was the self-declared “country lawyer” who neatly dissected Richard Nixon in the summer of 1973. Ervin was himself, and people liked it and were inspired by it.
Henry Hyde has refused to play the news media game. He’s quietly preparing to judge the president. In the end, he may be the only hero to come out of all this.