Issues of gun control divided the public almost as sharply as the abortion issue. Each, in turn, was closely associated with particular religious viewpoints. A growing number of Americans seemed concerned about family values and social maladies including abortion, drugs, illegitimacy, and street crime, which were broadly linked to a decline in the spiritual side of American life.
The nation had slowly but steadily moved toward attitudes more favorable to religion, and generally—though not universally—expressed at the polls concerns against normalizing what were once considered objectionable or even deviant lifestyles. In early 2001, the Pew Charitable Trusts concluded a broad study of the role of religion in public life and found, “Americans strongly equate religion with personal ethics and behavior, considering it an antidote to the moral decline they perceive in our nation today.”60 This was accompanied by an “equally strong respect for religious diversity…[and] tolerance of other people’s beliefs.” Nearly 70 percent disagreed with the statement that the nation would “do well even if many Americans were to abandon their religious faith,” and a similar percentage wanted religion’s influence on American society to grow, whereas only 6 percent wanted it to weaken. Nearly 80 percent supported either a moment of silence or a specific prayer in public schools; and at a ratio of two-to-one the respondents agreed that prayer taught children that religion and God were important. Two thirds of the respondents were not threatened by more religious leaders becoming involved in politics. Majorities of Americans sensed a bias among journalists against Christians and 68 percent agreed that there was “a lot of prejudice [in the media] toward Evangelical Christians.”
The spiritual renewal had started perhaps as early as the 1980s, when a Gallup survey found that 80 percent of Americans believed in a final judgment before God; 90 percent claimed to pray; and 84 percent said, “Jesus was God or the Son of God.”61 Most of the growth that had occurred in American Christianity came from one of two sources. First, Hispanic immigrants, who tended to be Catholics, brought renewed energy to the Roman Catholic Church, which, with 60 million members, was the largest denomination in the United States. Second, independent/nondenominational churches grew at astronomical rates. The largest churches in America—that is, a group of similarly minded believers at a single location—included Willow Creek (20,000 members) in Chicago, Crenshaw Christian Center (22,000 members) in Los Angeles, and Southeast Christian Church in Louisville (17,000 members). Focused on “soul winning” through modern methods—contemporary music, abundant church athletic and musical activities, large youth programs—these churches kept two groups who had abandoned the mainstream churches years earlier—males and young people.
A sure sign of a church in decline is the absence of men and a preponderance of elderly women. The newer churches had tapped into the call for men to be family heads, and, assisted by such independent programs as Promise Keepers, they emphasized strong traditional families with a male family leader. At the same time, the use of contemporary music, innovative teaching methods, and teen-oriented Bible messages brought millions of American youths to Christianity. By 1991, a survey showed that 86 percent of teens said they believed “Jesus Christ is God or the Son of God, and 73 percent considered regular church attendance an important aspect of American citizenship.” An even more surprising, perhaps, statistic showed that nearly one third accepted the Bible as the literal word of God.62
Ever attuned to image and style, Clinton early in his presidency had suddenly begun attending church regularly. But Clinton best employed religion during the impeachment scandal, when he brought in several spiritual advisers, such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson (who at the time was secretly conducting his own extramarital affair) to help him deal with his “mistakes.” In fact, the spiritual renewal that had begun percolating through the United States had not quite come to a boil by 1996, when Clinton campaigned for reelection, or even by 1998, when he was impeached, but the general sense of moral unease with the president’s actions certainly came into focus after 1999.
“I Did Not Have Sex with That Woman”
The buoyant economy was a tremendous fire wall for Clinton against any Republican challenger in 1996. It was ironic that, having come into office criticizing the Reagan policies, Clinton now claimed credit for them and fortified his reelection bid with them. Perhaps aware that any candidate would be a sacrificial lamb—the “Mondale of 1996”—the Republicans nominated warhorse Robert Dole of Kansas, who had walked point for Gerald Ford in 1976. Dole had paid his dues, and minor challenges from other candidates had failed to gain traction. Already the question before the electorate was clear: would any candidate running on “character issues” be sufficient to unseat a president in a booming economy in peacetime?
Ross Perot returned with another independent campaign as the nominee of the Reform Party. However, in 1996, the issues differed dramatically from those of 1992: budget deficits were gone or disappearing; unemployment had plummeted; and free trade no longer seemed a threat. Perot severely hurt himself by failing to attack Clinton’s credibility and character problems, leaving Dole as the only real alternative to Clinton.
Dole lacked Reagan’s charm and grace, and, though not without humor (Dole later appeared in clever Pepsi, Visa, and Viagra commercials), the GOP standard-bearer seemed too old (he was younger than Reagan, at 73, but seemed to lack energy). His vice-presidential nominee, tax-cutting advocate (and former Buffalo Bills quarterback) Jack Kemp, lacked the aggressiveness to attack weaknesses in the Democratic platform. Above all, Dole and Kemp still operated out of fear that lingered from the 1995 government shutdown, when the Democrats had successfully demonized Republicans as opposing children and the elderly.
Clinton’s vulnerability lay in the serious character weaknesses—the lies about extramarital affairs had already become well-documented. Equally important, the Democratic National Committee had developed a strategy for burying the Republicans under a tidal wave of cash, from any source. Clinton rode the crest of that wave. Slowly at first, then with greater frequency, reports of Clinton’s unethical and often illegal fund-raising activities began to appear in the press. Concern about money from the communist People’s Republic of China, funneled through John Huang into the Clinton/Gore coffers, percolated through newsrooms, but the media never closed the loop of equating the cash with policy payoffs by the administration. Huang’s cash payments were the most serious breach of government ethics since Teapot Dome and, more important, were grounds for a special prosecutor, but the Clinton Justice Department was certainly not about to conduct such an investigation.
With the Clinton media team in full spin mode, each new revelation was carefully managed by several loyalists who received talking points by fax machines each morning. They were immediately dispatched to the television talk shows to claim that (1) everybody does it, (2) there was really nothing illegal about the transactions, and (3) the allegations were merely Republican efforts to smear Clinton. Without a tenacious—or, more appropriate, vicious—press to look skeptically at every administration defense (and defender), as it had in the Watergate era, Clinton successfully swept aside the most damaging issues of the campaign.
When the votes were tallied in November, Clinton still had not cracked the 50 percent mark, netting 49 percent, whereas Dole received 41 percent and Perot snatched 8 percent. Clinton increased his electoral margin over 1992 by 9 electoral votes, indicating the damage done to him by the ongoing scandals.
Even after his reelection, the character issue haunted Clinton in the form of an ongoing thorn in his side named Paula Corbin Jones. Named in The American Spectator “troopergate” story as having had an affair with then-governor Clinton, Jones set out to prove that something quite different had happened. In 1994, Jones filed a civil lawsuit against President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment during a political event at a Little Rock hotel while Clinton was governor of Arkansas. While working a meeting at the Excelsior Hotel in 1991, Clinton sent troopers to ask her to co
me up to a hotel room to meet the governor, and Jones claimed that once she had entered the room, and realized that only she and Clinton were there, Governor Clinton exposed himself and asked her to perform oral sex on him. Jones refused, left the room, then alleged that she had suffered “various job detriments” for refusing his advances.63 The lawsuit proved historic because in 1997 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Clinton’s legal claim that a citizen could not sue a president. Quite the contrary, the Supreme Court unanimously concluded “like every other citizen who properly invokes [the District Court’s] jurisdiction…[she] has a right to an orderly disposition of her claims.”64 Or, stated another way, no citizen is above the law.
Jones’s legal team began the discovery process, during which it gathered evidence and took depositions. Understandably, one of the questions the Jones legal team asked Clinton in his deposition required him to identify all the women with whom he had had sexual relations since 1986. (He was married the entire time.) Clinton answered, under oath, “none.” Already Gennifer Flowers and former Miss Arkansas Sally Perdue had claimed to have had an affair with Clinton (Flowers’s affair occurred during the time in question), but the Jones team found several others. One of them was Juanita Broaddrick, who contended that in April 1978, Clinton had raped her while he was attorney general of Arkansas, and while she had told a coworker at the time, she had not pressed charges.
In fact, one relationship was still going on at the time of Jones’s suit—regular sexual liaisons at the White House between Clinton and a young intern, Monica Lewinsky. Most Clinton biographers disagree over whether Hillary knew about the ongoing liaisons or whether she was kept in the dark.65 (She would have protected her husband to prevent their loss of power.) The fact that a president of the United States would boldly lie about his relationship with Lewinsky to representatives of a federal court would have gone unreported except for the work of an Internet sleuth, Matt Drudge. Drudge, who styled himself after Walter Winchell, the journalist who virtually invented the gossip column, ran a Web site in which he posted the latest rumblings from newsrooms around the country. He learned that Newsweek magazine had found out about the Lewinsky affair, but had determined to spike the story. Drudge ran with it, forcing the major media outlets to cover it and, in the process, establishing himself as the vanguard of a new wave of Internet reporters.66
The Clinton-Lewinsky case, therefore, became as significant for the change it heralded in journalism as it had done for the actual facts of the case. Already Rush Limbaugh had exposed the details of the Clinton health-care plan on AM radio. Now an unknown Internet reporter had broken a case that the major partisan press refused to uncover. Talk radio and the Internet joined a couple of conservative papers and the Fox News Network to provide, for the first time in fifty years, a genuine opposition press in America. The dominant liberal media would no longer control the spin of public events.
Meanwhile, a wave of indignation spread about the president’s involvement with a young intern. Clinton concluded that he could not tell the public the truth because it would destroy him politically. In a televised appearance he blatantly lied to the nation, “I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky!” It harked back to Nixon’s famous statement to the American people that their president was “not a crook.”
Clinton’s team revived the successful “nuts and sluts” strategy that had worked well in the early 1990s with Gennifer Flowers: painting Lewinsky, Jones, and Perdue as crazy or promiscuous. Yet no sooner had the first blast of public scorn receded when another woman, a supporter of the president’s named Kathleen Willey, appeared on a national television news show to claim that Clinton had harassed her too, pinning her against a wall while he groped her in the White House.
Starr’s investigation now had to shift gears. Independent counsels are charged with the task of investigating all episodes of obstruction of justice, including any new charges that arise during the original investigation. That, after all, was exactly what had sunk Nixon: investigations of subsequent infractions, not the burglary. The new allegations required Starr to investigate the Jones claims as well, and he was ordered to do so by the three-judge panel that had handed him the Foster and Travelgate cases. Starr’s investigation was no more about sex than Al Capone’s arrest had been about income tax evasion. Rather, it was about Clinton’s lying to a grand jury—lying under oath. In fact, had Starr chosen, he could have packaged the Lewinsky/Travelgate/Whitewater/Foster/and John Huang finance abuses into a giant RICO case (racketeering charges that did not require a single criminal behavior but which covered a wide pattern of abuse).
Public opinion polls still reflected high job approval for Clinton, but his personal approval ratings started to sink. The public seemed willing to ignore the president’s behavior as long as no obvious evidence of lying to investigators surfaced. However, Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress, containing Clinton’s DNA, surfaced, ensuring the public that neither Congress nor Clinton could get off without making difficult choices. Lewinsky, in one of her encounters with the president, had saved the dress she wore that night. Once again, the major media knew about the evidence and buried the story, and once again Matt Drudge pried it out of the pressrooms.
Drudge’s revelations showed that the president was on record as having lied in front of a federal grand jury—a felony, and certainly grounds for removal. On August 17, 1998, he made a public apology to the nation. Having just weeks earlier flatly lied, he now admitted that “while my answers [to the grand jury] were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information. Indeed, I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.”67 Even the apology, though, which included numerous explanations and rationalizations, was itself a political deflection to take the edge off the evidence that Starr was about to deliver.
In order to make abundantly clear the nature of Clinton’s lies, Starr’s report had to provide highly specific sexual details. The same critics who complained about lack of specificity in previous allegations suddenly wailed about Starr’s evidence being too specific and personal.
Clinton counted on the House members, including many Republicans, to refuse to examine the Starr Report when it was finally submitted in September 1998. To his surprise, almost all Republicans and many Democrats examined the evidence. What they found was shocking. Not included in the public Starr Report that had hit newsstands shortly after it was delivered to Congress was confidential material relating to the rape allegations by Juanita Broaddrick. When combined with Kathleen Willey’s testimony about Clinton’s thuggish behavior toward her, it painted a portrait of a multiple offender and, possibly, a rapist. One House member said that what he had read nauseated him. There was bipartisan support to begin impeachment proceedings, with the House voting 258 to 176 for the inquiry. Even after the November elections shaved a handful of votes from the Republican ranks, the actual floor vote to impeach saw five Democrats join the House Republicans to vote for two articles of impeachment: obstruction of justice and lying to a federal grand jury. (It could easily have been three counts: later, Judge Susan Webber Wright would state that Clinton had submitted a false affidavit in her hearing as well, but she did not make this fact known until after the impeachment process. Wright was a Clinton appointee, and a former student of his when he had taught at the University of Arkansas.)
At that point, the media failed in its job of presenting facts and educating the public. Constitutionally, the purpose of the House investigation is to determine whether laws have been broken that pose a threat to the integrity of the legal system or whether the offense rises to the constitutional level called high crimes and misdemeanors. Simply engaging in behavior detrimental to the office of the presidency can be interpreted by the House as a “high crime”—different from a statutory crime. Whether or not an act is an impeachable offense is strictly within the jurisdiction of the House, according to the Constitution. Once the House has turned out articles of impeachment, the trial takes pla
ce in the Senate, whose sole constitutional duty is to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused—not to render judgment on the seriousness of the crimes. Clinton and the Senate Democrats counted on flawed public understanding of the Constitution, combined with the willing alliance of the media, to cloud the procedures. When the Senate trial began in early 1999, the House sent thirteen “managers” to present the case, pleading with the senators to examine the confidential material. The House managers, led by Henry Hyde of Illinois and counsel David Schippers, a Democrat, were convinced that an objective person reading the Broaddrick and Willey accounts would conclude that Clinton had lied and had done so repeatedly and deliberately, and that he posed an ongoing threat to other women in the White House. But Schippers was stunned to hear one senator state flatly that most of them had no intention of even looking at the evidence, and that even if there was a dead body in the Oval Office, “You wouldn’t get 67 votes to convict.”68
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror Page 131
