Is There A Way Out?

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In the days after Starr's report was released, Clinton's approval ratings actually rose--and so did his chances for being impeached. So there was no telling who would be most hurt by the next round. Much of what was offensive in the original Starr report is tame compared with the raw material, if that's possible. This week comes the Complete Clinton Concordance: the videotape of his grand jury testimony; a transcript of Monica Lewinsky's appearance; Clinton's deposition in the Paula Jones suit, letters Lewinsky sent to Clinton, and on and on to 2,800 pages. Tucked inside were Monica's most graphic accounts of her sexual episodes with the President and the effect they had on her; blessed with what seems like a phonographic memory, she provided Starr with a voluptuous libretto of their phone-sex encounters.

But really graphic sex is one thing: really graphic lying is another. As of Monday morning, any terms for any deal would be negotiated against the background music of Clinton's August testimony, playing continuously on every network. It is for this more than anything else that most voters would need to forgive Clinton, since it has much less to do with his conduct as a husband or employer and everything to do with the conduct of his presidency and the enforcement of the law. In the days before his grand jury appearance, just about every last citizen had sent him a postcard asking him to tell the truth at all costs, and most promised to forgive him if he did. The stakes could not have been higher, for this was his last chance: he could maybe brush away lies in his Paula Jones deposition, even the bald public denials and seven months of excruciating evasion. But by August most Americans had concluded that he had fooled around, made their peace with it and just wanted him, for once, to come clean when he put his hand on a Bible and faced the grand jury.

And that's why what followed is so hard to excuse. It's less what he says than how. "I have not had sex with her as I defined it," Clinton told prosecutors at one point in the testimony. Asked if he was ever alone with Lewinsky, he said, "It depends on how you define alone... There were a lot of times when we were alone, but I never really thought we were." Asked if his lawyer Bob Bennett had been correct when he assured the judge in January that "there is absolutely no sex of any kind," Clinton said that was true because "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

It was just that kind of chronic weaseling that led the two top Democrats in Congress to open the week with a primal scream. Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle got together last Monday morning to warn the White House in the most public way possible that unless they reeled in the lawyers and stopped all this "legally accurate" nonsense, the road to impeachment would be short and slick. "Dick and Tom went public," said a colleague, "because the private counseling wasn't working."