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Dixie dynamite
Most South Carolinians just wish the Confederate flag flap would go away.
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[01/18/00]

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[01/14/00]

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By Peter Edelman
[01/14/00]

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The "partisan rancor on a titanic scale" that convulsed Washington during the Clinton years -- despite the fact that ideologically there was little difference between Clinton and Dole -- was due, he argues, to the influence of two apparently opposing ideologies: feminism and the Christian right. What these movements had in common, he says, was "the idea that the private lives of public people mattered as much as their stands on issues." When this now-morally legitimized obsession with the personal collided with a voracious, competitive news media looking for an excuse to peddle sleaze, the results were predictable. As Toobin sums it up: "And so the forces were arrayed. Politicians shunning policy for cultural warfare. The media using sex to sell. And all of it destined to end up in court."

Toobin probably overstates the influence of feminism's "The personal is the political" on the national agenda -- the logic of anything-goes capitalism (to paraphrase Marx, all that is solid melts into sleaze) was a stronger force, and in any case the media was quite capable of sinking to the bottom all by itself. But he's clearly right about the confluence of social forces that allowed the debacle to occur. And he's dead-on when he argues (as he has in the New Yorker) that it was the advent of an imprudently broad doctrine of sexual harassment that legally unzipped Clinton. In a concise excursus, he shows how federal sexual harassment law (which Clinton helped pass), because it doesn't distinguish between consensual sex in the workplace and actual harassment, empowered Jones' lawyers, and later Starr, to go on a virtually open-ended fishing expedition in search of Clinton's bedmates.

(One hopes that the notorious refusal of some feminist leaders to defend Jones resulted not from a Machiavellian desire to save a "pro-woman" president but from some awareness, however faint, that the well-meaning law they wrought and the sexual behavior of human beings, even when "power imbalances" exist, are not one and the same thing. The same holds for those sputtering CEOs who filled the nation's letters pages with outraged missives asserting, "If I did the same thing Clinton did, I'd be fired." Perhaps they might question whether the law itself might be the problem.)

As Toobin tells his engrossing tale, he throws out juicy tidbits and ogle-worthy quotes unearthed from the case files, as well as some fascinating speculations. Describing Lucianne Goldberg's fascination with the gory details of Clinton's encounters with Monica, he quotes her as saying, "Do you think there's a taping system in the Oval Office? ... The slurping sounds would be deafening." And he quotes someone as saying, after meeting Linda Tripp, "That woman is a fucking cunt. If you want to get in bed with that bitch, you're going to pay for it eventually." This statement would perhaps not be noteworthy, except that the person quoted is one of Starr's prosecutors. As for the speculations, he concludes, for example, that both Clinton and Jones lied about the event that started the whole thing, their infamous encounter in the Excelsior Hotel: Based largely on his assertion that Jones didn't report the incident until some hours after it took place, he argues that a consensual sexual encounter probably occurred.

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Of his other two main targets, Toobin has a trickier task in characterizing Starr, a shrewd jurist who played his ideological cards very close to his chest. He resolves the issue by making a subtle double claim: Starr, he writes, was at once "a consummate Washington careerist who navigated the capital more by self-interest than ideology" and a "committed conservative" who "came of age at a time when the legal and political systems were merging and one had to take a stand with one side or the other to chart a route for personal advancement." Toobin argues that "politely but unmistakably, Starr had done just that, and by the time he was named independent counsel, he had long ago signed on with many of the people who wanted Bill Clinton destroyed."

More than for ideological zealotry, though, Toobin savages Starr and his team for plain incompetence -- although he also believes that the incompetence was due in large part to the zealotry. In some of the strongest passages in the book, he charges Starr's team with "an obsession with meaningless atmospherics and tendentious 'signs' to their adversaries, an unhealthy interest in using the media to send messages, and a predilection for canine zeal over solid prosecutorial judgment." (In a cackle-inducing aside that may be worthy of Freudian analysis, Toobin asserts that when rumors that Starr was having an affair emerged, what really enraged the independent counsel was that "everyone -- everyone! -- thought the rumor was inconceivable.")

Among many other examples, he scores Starr's competence most harshly in his analysis of how he handled the crucial issue of Monica Lewinsky's immunity. Above all, he argues that Starr's fatal miscalculation was in not granting it early on, in February 1998. "Starr's obsession with toughness and devotion to the Washington conventional wisdom led him to disaster," Toobin says, going on to argue that Starr and his team rejected the Lewinsky deal because they "were convinced she was withholding additional evidence of Clinton's criminality ... The persistence of this myth says more about the fanaticism of those who believed in it than about the evidence against the president." The delay only allowed "the country to come to terms with the fact that the president probably did have an affair with the intern -- but that he had managed to do a pretty good job anyway."

Finally, there is Isikoff, the former Washington Post and current Newsweek reporter to whom Toobin grants the dubious honor of being one of only seven "Key Players" (the Clintons, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg are the others) listed in the front of the book. Toobin accuses Isikoff of being an uncritical water-carrier for the anti-Clinton forces. He reminds us that there were "three important moments in the case when Clinton's enemies used Isikoff to launch attacks about the president's purported sexual behavior: First, Cliff Jackson had given him the exclusive with Jones; second [Jones attorney] Joe Cammarata had set the reporter on the trail of Kathleen Willey; now, finally, Tripp and Goldberg were giving him the biggest story of all [Lewinsky]."

Next page | "Chief among the antiheroes was the president of the United States"