BUT, SHE'S THE DEVIL IN DISGUISE :

"Harken!" the scandal angel sings. (Charles Murtaugh, 7/03/02)

[H]ere's the beauty part for the Democrats: it doesn't matter whether or not Bush broke the law in his insider trading. The scandal here is moral, rather than legal: Bush was intimately connected with a corporate accounting scandal precisely akin to those now in the headlines, and costing tens of thousands of jobs. If the Democrats focus solely on the legalistic question of how Bush made his eight hundred large, they'll be making a Starr-esque error. It really didn't matter whether or not Clinton lied to the grand jury about his affair, the real Lewinsky scandal was that he'd been having the affair at all. The conservatives were right: character matters.

In Harken-gate, it makes little difference whether Bush broke the law by waiting thirty weeks to alert the SEC of his stock sale, instead of the required two or three (yawn... eyes... glazing... over... must... follow... the money...). What will be harder for Bush to shake off between now and 2004, particularly if the corporate accounting scandals continue to drag down the economy, is his guilt-by-close-association with a book-cooking energy company.

The estimable Mr. Murtaugh seems to make the same errors here that we Republicans made in regard to Bill Clinton and Whitewater and to combine them with the ways in which the Democrats misunderstood the Clinton scandals :

(1) Assuming "guilt by association" will work :
There's little difference between this current book-fixing scandal and the Savings and Loan scandal. You've got the nexus of big money and politicians and shady dealings. Republicans assumed that Bill Clinton would pay the price just for being associated with an S&L, but he didn't. Hard to see why things should be tougher for Bush, who people generally think is honest, than they were for Clinton, who even his supporters knew was a cheat and a thief. Mr. Murtaugh seems to disassociate the Clintons from the S&L policy question, but this seems wrong for two reasons, first that the Democrats made an issue of S&Ls, even dragging Neil Bush into the campaign, and, second, because for a Democrat to be involved in fleecing the little old ladies who had their life savings in S&Ls was a jarring idea, while the notion of a Republican oil man doing well in the stock market is kind of ho-hum.

(2) It doesn't matter "whether or not Bush broke the law" :
Democrats will go to their graves believing that Bill Clinton didn't actually break any laws. That's fine. But they also believe that Republicans don't believe that Clinton broke any laws and that the GOP was just using the investigations as a way to "get" Clinton. So now they think they can just whip stuff at a wall and sooner or later something will stick.

Unfortunately Slick Willie dodged prosecution, so we'll never know the extent of his wrong-doing, but a few things we do know. His business partners in Whitewater all went to jail. In turn, they either testified against him (Jim McDougal) or refused to testify because they didn't want to incriminate him (Susan McDougal). Mr. Clinton himself was stripped of his license to practice law for his actions in the Lewinsky matter (Mr. Murtaugh more or less concedes the perjury charge). And he has never denied raping Juanita Broaddrick. It takes a pretty massive effort of self-delusion to convince yourself, even after all of those facts are in, that there was nothing "illegal" in the Clinton scandals and that it was all just partisan politics.

In the end it does actually matter whether you did something wrong or not. If there is a crime buried somewhere, evidence and accusations keep bubbling to the surface. If not, the well runs dry fairly fast. Democrats in this case have to try to show that a member of a company's board of directors truly knew what was going on with its books--which the current scandals suggest is manifestly untrue in most cases. Before they head out after this one, they'd better convince at least themselves that there's a crime here to be gotten to eventually

(3) It's the character, stupid :
Other than Carville, Begala, and Hilary, no one's left who says that Clinton was not receiving favors from Ms Lewinsky--even Clinton himself conceded it. We know with the greatest degree of certainty to which man can aspire that Bill Clinton behaved immorally.

On the other hand, there's no allegation here that George Bush knew anything that prompted him to sell his stock (a full two months before the negative report that Mr. Murtaugh mentions), nor any accusation that his late reporting of the sale was intended to hide anything. That does not mean that he didn't do something immoral. But it does mean that we're a hell of a long way away from anyone proving anything. And since the case has already been investigated and already raised against him during the presidential campaign, there has to be some question of whether there's any fire here or only smoke.

(4) Someone cares :
Even with everything we knew about Bill Clinton no one cared. As long s stock prices stayed high and people sort of liked the guy, in that lovable rogue kind of way, the scandals could never touch him. We've a certain sense in today's society that our public figures, and likely ourselves, are so corrupted that just about any evil is to be expected of them (and us). And Democrats lowered the bar so far during the Clinton years that it seems fair to wonder just how heinous a crime, especially one that occurred before the President took office, would suffice to alienate supporters and voters enough to do him real harm. The Democrats have won--we've defined deviancy down so far that our presidents are free to rape women; our clergy are raping kids; our corporate executives are little more than dapper thieves; etc., etc., etc.

If the current accountancy scandals leave us with a battered economy in 2004, President Bush will lose because the economy is bad, not because of any financial shenanigans. But if the economy is okay, none of this will mean much.

(5) Scandal politics works :
Democrats look at their loss of the Senate and House in 1994 and their failure to regain either electorally and think to themselves that the GOP rode scandal to power. For them to acknowledge that the Republican Revolution was about ideas would be to contradict everything they believe about themselves (they're good), the voters (they like liberalism), and conservatives (they're evil reactionaries). Even though Bill Clinton served his full eight years, Democrats think the GOP won the last six of them by using scandal as a whip to keep him in line.

Conservatives know, on the other hand, that the focus on scandal threw Republicans off message and ended up eventually costing them the Senate and nearly the House. The 1998 midterm election is an object lesson in what happens to a party that forgets its ideas and runs on scandal. Instead of propounding a new Contract with America and letting the scandal take care of itself, the GOP thought it could coast on just Bill Clinton's problems and by historical standards the election was a disaster. They lost seats in an election where they should have made out like bandits.

This story could similarly distract Democrats at just the time, four months before a midterm, when they should be presenting core Democrat ideas. They could fail to drive home government health care, government Social Security, government schools, taxes on the wealthy, etc., at the precise time that those positions have the most appeal to voters, an economic downturn. Instead, by focusing on scandal, they'd be asking voters, who they just spent eight years telling everyone does it and it's no big deal, to suddenly turn around and take this rather old, rather bland story seriously. That seems a recipe for disaster too.

(6) Bush can be put on the defensive :
There's one huge difference between the Clinton years and the Bush years and Democrats underestimate that difference at their own grave peril. The 90s were a time of fatuous peace and plenty. The 00s are a time of war. The greatest political danger that the GOP faced when it attacked Clinton was that the stock market might not like it and investors might get pissed. The greatest danger that Democrats face, and we've already seen it play out a few times, is that they'll attack President Bush at the same time that al Qaeda does or at the same time that he attacks Iraq. And most important from a purely political standpoint, he controls the timing of the latter possibility. When Bill Clinton lobbed a few cruise missiles at Osama bin Laden Republicans may have been skeptical but they saluted and lined up behind the President. Imagine that the Democrats get on a roll with charges and accusations about Harken and then a few truck bombs take out the George Washington Bridge and the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels. Here's your sound bite : "The Democrats can go ahead and dig into these stories from the 80s, we've got a 21st Century war to fight and a country to defend in the here and now." End of scandal.

(7) Republicans will defend Bush because they don't care about corporate accountability :
Until a few years ago--specifically until the day those Republicans went on a rampage in Florida when one county election board tried closing its doors--I'd have said that Republicans could even be counted on to assist in an investigation of wrongdoing by one of their own, so long as credible evidence was presented. After all, Republicans played active and constructive roles in Watergate and Iran-Contra even though their own were implicated. Republicans aren't just the moralizing party because they think it's fun to preach at people, they moralize because they're moralists.

But it seems possible that out of the crucible of the Clinton scandals and the 2000 elections a different kind of Republican party may have emerged, one that's more comfortable playing naked power politics in order to keep power. Looking back a few years from now, we may well say that the willingness of the Supreme Court's conservative wing to use a judicial theory it despises in order to seat George W. Bush in the White House marked the beginning of an epoch when Republicans started fighting just as dirty as Democrats always have.

If that is the case, then don't look for many Howard Bakers, Lowell Weickers, Bill Cohens and Warren Rudmans in this investigation, the kind of Republicans who thought integrity mattered more than power. The final vile effect of the Clinton years may well be not that he made Democrats into Republicans on the political issues but that he made Republicans into Democrats where ethical issues are concerned.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 3, 2002 10:50 PM