FUTURE OF THE LITTLE BOY IN THE WHITE HOUSE
Still, the Starr report changed my mind about one thing. I now believe that Mr Clinton didn't inhale. Just as, for the most part, he doesn't ejaculate. Just as, in Hillary's smoke-free White House, he doesn't actually smoke, but merely dunks his cigar in whatever flavouring happens to be to hand and chews the tip awhile. In Mr Clinton's many activities, there is rarely, in Ken Starr's euphemism, 'completion'. Only now is he preparing to make an exception, to go all the way, to thrust on to a terrifying climax, until he and we are spent: Bill Clinton is determined to step down as president on 20 January 2001 — and not a day before.
So there's no end in sight to what he calls `this journey we're on. I hope this will be a time of reconciliation and healing, and I hope that millions of families all over America are in a way growing stronger because of this.' Gee, thanks, Mr President. No matter how many silver bullets you pump into him, his rotting corpse rises at dusk the following night to announce yet again that he is a 'broken spirit' who has `sinned' but that 'good can come of this for our country' now that he has vowed to get `to the rock-bottom truth of where I am and where we all are'.
And where we are, he is: l'etat, c'est lui. It's nice of him to want to take us for a ride, but 'this journey we're on' gets awful wearisome: a Marie Celeste of a presidency adrift on an ocean of semen with nothing on the horizon but a few floating thongs and cigar butts. If you can't actually see the point of continuing on this 'journey' with the President, flip open the volume of poetry Mr Clinton gave both Monica Lewinsky and the young Hillary Rodham, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
I am stern, acrid, large, undissuadable but I love you, I do not hurt you any more than is necessary for you.
There's the Clinton position in a nut- shell. Besides, it's our fault. As the Presi- dent put it: 'I've tried to do a good job taking care of this country even when I haven't taken such good care of myself and my family.' If the American people — his extended family — hadn't been placing so many demands on him, maybe he would have spent more time in the residential quarters trying out his passive smoking rou- tine on Hillary.
It's not 'just about sex', but it is just about Bill. And Bill is so large and undissuadable that he's turned Washington into a kind of parallel uni- verse: liberal defenders of an interpretative reading of an evolving Constitution which apparently supports abortion and gay marriage are suddenly, when it comes to the impeachment clause, 18th-century literalists, insisting that the founders only had in mind arcane offences like leaving your oxen untethered outside the assizes. Madison wasn't talking about oral sex with interns, they scoff; the intern hadn't been invented. The argument is that what President Clinton did is so tawdry and sleazy and trivial it doesn't meet the seri- ousness required for impeachment. This may be true, although, if so, it's also the case that Mr Clinton is so tawdry and sleazy and trivial he doesn't meet the seri- ousness required for the presidency. Nonetheless, this is a personal matter, his supporters maintain; it's unconnected with the government of the Republic.
Well, they're half right. It's a government matter, but it's also personal. That's why Mr Clinton and his attorneys seem to be entering simultaneous guilty and not-guilty pleas: the President is an abject sinner . . . but he didn't do anything; he's a liar . . . but he's not a perjurer. It would make sense politically to concede the latter point and cop a plea from Congress for mere censure. But it makes no sense personally: it would put him in great legal jeopardy, by making it certain that the Court of Appeals would resuscitate the Paula Jones suit. If he lost, he's looking at at least a million bucks. This guy's already broke, and he must wonder whether Barbra Streisand's going to renew her subscription to his legal defence fund once he's out of office. Any- way, it's not just money. Impeachment is a political act, but there's nothing very politi- cal about the Starr report: its tone is prose- cutorial, which suggests that the independent counsel, in the event that Congress chickens out, will serve the Presi- dent an indictment the day he leaves office. That's potentially five years in jail.
Bill Clinton has played a dazzling game: he passed Go, he collected $200 from cam- paign donors, he's got a huge hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue that he's raking in big rents on, he's landed on Monica's Commu- nity Chest . . . but what he needs right now is a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card and there's none in sight. You can (just about) make the case for the Watergate and Iran-Contra pardons (though at the time President- elect Clinton attacked the latter): these were political acts committed in office. But Mr Clinton's are non-political and, in the case of Mrs Jones, predate his time in office: there's no reason why his potential liability should end just because he's no longer president. In any event, if Mr Clin- ton steps aside, the one thing President Gore's not going to do is pardon him: for one thing, he doesn't want to make the same election-losing mistake Gerald Ford did in pardoning Nixon; for another, it's only politically acceptable to pardon some- one if you're squeaky clean yourself, and by the time he becomes president Al Gore is likely to be under investigation by his own independent counsel.
In other words, whatever his protests that this is his 'private life' and nothing to do with his political stewardship as presi- dent, Mr Clinton knows he's much better off getting it treated as a political matter while he's still president. His best bet is Impeachment by Congress: he needs the support of just 34 Senators to survive and, if last week's report is the best Ken Starr Can do, he may just limp through. There would be enormous costs to the nation, of course, but also enormous benefits: 'this Journey we're on' would be even longer, affording more opportunities for 'reconcili- ation and healing', as every American gets to feel his pain. Like Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton now travels everywhere accompanied by a small boy — albeit, in his case, metaphorically. The kid first reared his head at a Florida fundraiser on the day the Starr report was delivered to Congress. 'I was over at the Hillcrest School,' said the President, 'and I was shaking hands with all these little kids out there, and this kid that reminded me a lot of myself when I was that young said, "Mr President, I want to grow up to be president. I want to be a president like you." And I thought, I want to be able to conduct my life and my presidency so that all the parents of the country could feel good if their children were able to say that again. I'll never forget that little boy.'
Nor will the rest of us be allowed to: the boy popped up again at Mr Clinton's `National Prayer Breakfast'. It'd be a cuter vignette if the President had got the little feller's name, but Slick Willie's wingin' it these days and he's short of loyal opera- tives to nail down the detail. For my own part, I found myself recalling another young boy, from a year or so back: 13- year-old Brandon Power. He was one of 14 teenagers from Woburn, Mas- sachusetts, who swiped an ailing neigh- bour's muscle relaxants from his mailbox and then overdosed on them. Because Brandon was middle-class, photogenic and relatively articulate, he was sprung from the hospital by star news anchorman Peter Jennings and whisked to the White House for an ABC 'Town Meeting' special called `Straight Talk on Drugs'. Having parlayed a theft and an overdose into instant celebrity and an audience with the Presi- dent, Brandon looked his head of state in the eye and, without an ounce of shame, told him he ought to do something about the US Postal Service, which was to blame for delivering prescription drugs to sick old men in the first place. It seems young Brandon was a passive victim of circum- stances beyond his control: after all, if it weren't for the Post Office's ruthless poli- cy of leaving things in people's mailboxes, he and his chums would never have stolen those muscle relaxants.
Bill Clinton stared deep into 13-year-old Brandon Power and saw — himself. Instead of reminding the cocky little punk of the mail-tampering portions of the Federal Code, the President, in front of a national radio audience, chose instinctively to flatter him: 'Maybe something can be done to label them clearly . . . maybe have the Post Office deliver it to the door . . maybe not leave it in the mailbox. I'll talk to them about it and see if there's anything else we can do.' Terrific. So, because it's unreason- able to expect Brandon to quit stealing, we should inconvenience his neighbours and the rest of the country instead. The most relaxed muscle in both Master Power and Mr Clinton is, it seems, their moral com- pass.
Brandon's strategy was identical to the President's. In a confessional age that cele- brates growth through healing, the stan- dard line is: no pain, no gain. In fact, you can make quite a lot of gain for very little pain. A better motto for our times would be: no shame, no blame. As the President's Apology Tour has descended into ever more blubbery effusions, one thing stays the same, the evasion of responsibility: 'I'm trying to make it right. And I'm determined never to let anything like that happen again.' Not 'I'm determined never to do it again', just not to let anything like that Monica? Ken? DNA tests? — happen to him again. Once upon a time, every little boy wanted to grow up to become presi- dent. This little boy became president, but without ever growing up.
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