Day Of Deliverance

(6 of 7)

The sixth year of a Democratic presidency ought to be a ripe hunting ground for G.O.P. candidates. The party holding the White House almost always gets trounced in midterm elections, on account of a thinning agenda and a sense that the best is over. But this year the trends aren't cooperating. The Republicans are running behind the Democrats in generic polls about the election, as much as 10% in some surveys. No one, especially the G.O.P., wants to be marketing scandal during the autumn. Better, as a Gingrich strategist put it, to intone, "'We have the papers; we're reviewing them. We have the papers; we're reviewing them.' That's what we would say. Over and over."

House Republicans, a volatile and skittish group by nature, were worried enough about their re-elections to pass a massive, old-fashioned, pork-laden, budget-busting spending bill last week. The rallying cry was, "Take care of your district!" Meaning, "Protect your seat!" In district after district where Clinton is running plenty strong atop a buoyant economy, the President is a Wizard, a witch doctor, the guy with spooky, powerful voodoo; he can outlive, outlast, outmaneuver anything, even multiple, degrading, humiliating sex scandals. The G.O.P. members see the stories and then look at his numbers and look back at the stories and their heads just spin. What does this guy eat? they wonder.

The problem for Clinton is longer term: Paula Jones may have lost the case, but she went a long way toward winning the war about what kind of legacy Bill Clinton will carry into history. Perhaps it is easier to see now why all those bimbo hunters and Dustbusters were necessary. As a Clinton adviser put it, "Just think of what they got into the public arena. They did very well. Some of it is irreparable." This adviser, who goes back to the earliest days of the Clinton campaign, suggests that Jones' lawyers, knowing they lacked any kind of case, just decided somewhere along the line to open Pandora's box, dump it all out there, burn down the house.

Always campaigning, Clinton argues that his winter of woe has made him better prepared to give his second term the focus it has lacked: "Every President since George Washington has talked about how the country deserves the President to free himself of his own personal concerns and become totally obsessed with the public interest. It's been a test. But I've tried to do that." In a very real sense, says adviser Paul Begala, the judge's decision is "both a shield and a sword." Clinton will now lay out in a series of speeches things still to be done, missions to be accomplished, and challenge Congress to work with him. Fix tobacco, fix Social Security and Medicare, address education, find common ground on an array of foreign policy challenges; in short, remind Americans what he means when he says he is just trying to do his job--as well as set up a possible campaign against the Republicans and the do-nothing Congress this fall.

Maybe that would work, but then again, nothing in this long winter and early spring has played out the way it was supposed to. Clinton's adversaries were hard pressed to find the bright side, but Senate majority leader Trent Lott made a go of it: "I assume that since this appears to be good news for Clinton," he said, "his poll numbers will go down."