Is There A Way Out?

(4 of 8)
So the White House called in the one team it knew the lawmakers could not ignore: the lobbyists and moneymen who grease the wheels of re-election. The team includes Washington's most persuasive operators, men who normally earn $400 an hour to bend laws for corporate benefit. These men are themselves denizens of the Congress, outsiders who move easily through the ranks of Democrats to gather intelligence and who raise enough campaign money for candidates to get their attention when they need it.

Deputy chief of staff John Podesta assembled the team, including former Clinton Hill lobbyists Howard Paster and Pat Griffin, as well as Tommy Boggs, the king of Washington lobbyists. In regular contact with lawmakers and their top staffs, members of the President's shadow lobbying enterprise are in a good position to test Clinton's fortunes. Separately, businessman Terry McAuliffe, Clinton's close friend and principal fund raiser, is known to have phoned hundreds of Democratic financial supporters to rally support for the President. They, in turn, are calling in their support to Democratic lawmakers. And it would be hard for lawmakers to miss the implicit message: You want my money? We want your vote. Or at least, hold your fire before all the evidence is in. This has been especially important with Senators and Congressmen in close races who are rumored to be thinking of calling on Clinton to resign.

The prospect of Clinton's testimony and another couple of thousand pages of pornography horrified them. "I don't want to look," says Virginia Democrat James Moran. "I feel dirty when I read this stuff. I feel as though when someone walks into the room it's something I should throw under the desk." South Carolina's Ernest Hollings told fellow Senator Joseph Biden: "Joe, I can't even talk about this with another man."

And that is just among Democrats. The possibility of judicious, bipartisan proceedings dissolved when Republicans accused the President's allies of declaring open season on anyone who presumed to sit in judgment of him. The disclosure of Chairman Henry Hyde's adultery of 30 years past in the online magazine Salon represented a knife in the heart of compromise. The House G.O.P. leadership fired off a letter to the FBI asking it to investigate the White House for trying to intimidate lawmakers, without being able to prove it was behind it. The White House put out frantic calls to its Hill Democrats trying to assure them that it hadn't leaked the story--Podesta called Hyde himself--but as spokesman Mike McCurry admitted, the perception in Washington is that "the White House lies about everything; our credibility is zero."

The prospect of total war, with all its collateral damage, was enough to bring some of the leaders up short. By Thursday afternoon top Democrats began working secretly on the escape plan that would force the President to accept some severe punishment short of impeachment, in return for some protection against prosecution once he leaves office. Selling that deal would have to involve the help of the permanent graybeards on both sides--men like Bob Dole, who has put in a call to Clinton already, Bob Strauss, Colin Powell, George Mitchell--men who have the moral horsepower to haul their crankier colleagues along.