Lynn Walsh: The Politics of Zippergate

[Socialism Today, No. 6, March 1996, p. 16-19]

The Chief Executive of the world’s most powerful state is embroiled in a new sleaze crisis – Zippergate. Incredibly, this revolves around the allegation that president Clinton had sex with a 21-year-old former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and that he and his advisors conspired to get Lewinsky and others to lie about it. Focusing on this, the special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, has stepped up his legal and political campaign against the presidency. Impeachment of Clinton or resignation has been placed on the political agenda, recalling the Watergate scandal which forced Nixon from office in 1974.

Lynn Walsh asks: How did Clinton get into such a mess? Where will it lead?

A Pandora’s box of legal and political evils was opened by the Supreme Court when it ruled that Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, could proceed with her civil action against Clinton, formerly Arkansas governor, for sexual harassment and infringement of her civil rights. Fatefully, Clinton rejected a settlement with Jones, rather than give even a limited apology. So Jones’s lawyers, backed by shadowy right-wing foundations, trawled for other witnesses who would testify that they had been sexually harassed by Clinton or had furtive sex with him. They netted Monica Lewinsky, who was subpoenaed to give evidence. Lewinsky, however, signed an affidavit denying any sexual relations with Clinton. Acting on information from mysterious informants, Jones’s lawyers immediately alleged a cover-up by Clinton and his advisors.

Re-enter Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor appointed by the Republican-dominated Congress to investigate the president’s involvement in ‚Whitewater‘. This was a scandal involving property deals and the illegal use of federal-guaranteed loans from a Little Rock Thrift (building society), one of scores ripped-off by speculators in the 1980s. The Whitewater deals allegedly involved Clinton, then state governor, Hillary Clinton, partner in a prominent Little Rock law firm, and a circle of Democratic Party cronies. After convicting two or three of the Whitewater players, however, Starr could not produce any more indictments. Most frustrating of all, he could not pin anything serious on Clinton and Hillary – and he almost resigned.

Lewinsky was just what Starr needed to reinvigorate his investigation. This Bible-punching Republican says he is not interested in sexual conduct, only perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. With a massive staff and unlimited resources (he has already spent over $30m). Starr widened his investigation and started firing subpoenas at Lewinsky and Clinton’s circle of advisors and staff. Despite strict laws against the disclosure of grand jury testimony. Starr’s team has undoubtedly leaked evidence to the media in a sustained campaign to discredit Clinton.

Later, the Paula Jones case judge ruled that Lewinsky’s evidence could not be used in the Jones case. Clinton’s lawyers argue that if Lewinsky’s testimony is not used in court, then there can be no question of perjury. It is in any case unprecedented for a prosecutor to pursue a perjury inquiry in a civil case even before it is completed. Starr, however, appears determined to build a case of criminal conspiracy.

* * *

The Lewinsky allegations plunged Clinton into the worst crisis of his presidency. Public opinion reeled under the welter of allegations. The White House was in disarray. After days of hesitation, Clinton eventually boldly denied that he had ever had ’sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anyone to lie, not a single time, never‘. Next day, Hillary went onto the offensive, attacking Starr as ‚a politically motivated prosecutor who is allied with the right-wing opponents of my husband‘. She hit out at a ‚vast right-wing conspiracy‘ dedicated to destroying Clinton’s presidency.

Media commentators dismissed this as the paranoid ravings of a desperate woman, with some even accusing her of McCarthyism. Yet even Newsweek (9 February) had to admit that „the links between the Lewinsky players do form a tangled web“. There is clearly a nexus of publishing outfits, lawyers‘ coteries and business interests, all ultra-right Republicans, bitterly opposed to a Democratic presidency. Diagrams of their interconnections look like a tangled spider’s web, and take pages to explain.

Paula Jones’s case against Clinton was launched by the Landmark Legal Foundation and is currently financed by the Rutherford Institute. Linda Tripp, who set up Lewinsky, was previously searching for more anti-Clinton witnesses in the Jones case. She arrived in Washington with the tobacco lobby, and was guided by Lucianne Goldberg, a former member of president Nixon’s dirty-tricks team and now a ‚literary agent‘ who acts as a kind of impresario for anti-Clinton witnesses.

A lot of the muck now feeding the scandal machine originates with right-wing publishing groups like Alfred Regnery’s, who pours out books implicating Clinton in conspiracies and murders. The most powerful muckraker, however, appears to be Richard Scaife, heir to the Mellon banking fortune, who funds a battery of think-tanks and publications.

Nearly all the lawyers involved in the offensive against Clinton are involved in the Federalist Society, and many of them are linked to Big Tobacco. This includes Kenneth Starr himself, a prominent Federalist who continues to represent big tobacco companies in his lucrative private practice. An admirer of Nixon in the 1970s, Starr worked for both the Reagan and Bush administrations. He was pushed as special prosecutor by senator Jesse Helms, the dinosaur from North Carolina and a staunch friend of Big Tobacco. Even the Washington Post, which still defends Starr’s role, admits he „has been casual in the past about flashing his own conservative politics… it is a huge mistake“.

* * *

Why has there been such a long-running dirty-war against Clinton? The presidency is hardly out of control, from the standpoint of the ruling class, in the way Nixon was over the Vietnam war. Nixon secretly extended the war with the bombing of Laos and Cambodia, contrary to Congressional decisions, and attempted to free his administration from being checked by Congress and the judiciary. Clinton has inevitably clashed politically with Congress, which has been dominated by a huge Republican majority since 1994. Clinton, however, quickly abandoned most of the social reforms he promised in 1992. There has been no significant reversal of the pro-big business, pro-Wall Street policies pioneered by Reagan and Bush. Sections of big business like telecoms and the media corporations, who funded Clinton in 1996, have done very well.

But it is precisely Clinton’s ‚bi-partisan‘ approach which has aroused the right-wing crusade. Clinton’s New Democrats have hijacked most of the Republican agenda: a balanced federal budget, a war on welfare scroungers. As it became harder to attack Clinton on policy, the Republicans increasingly focused on his pay-offs to dubious cronies and especially on his priapic exploits. The Republican crusade is backed by big business interests who have a special grievance against Clinton, especially the Big Tobacco corporations.

Republicans also face the problem that Clinton and the New Democrat strategists concentrated on winning and keeping the presidency, tacitly accepting that the Republicans would hold on to their majority in Congress. Clinton has tried to develop a policy of ‚co-habitation‘ with the Republican majority. His strength is that the president controls the massive mandatory entitlement programmes, especially social security, which in the US means retirement pensions. Their defence by Clinton was crucial to his re-election in 1996. In reality, Republicans and their big-business backers would like to see the privatisation of social security – allowing further cuts in corporate taxation and opening up pensions as a gold mine for finance companies. Spelling this out on the hustings, however, would be political death. Even Newt Gingrich was forced to stand up and applaud Clinton’s State of the Union pledge to use the budget surplus to strengthen social security.

The witty US writer, Gore Vidal, once quipped that the US has one capitalist party with two right-wings. Commenting recently on Clinton’s current troubles, Vidal summed up the situation very well: „In any elective republic, politics is who collects what money from whom to be spent for whom on what. When a ruling establishment will not let daylight in on their workings because they own the media as well as the permanent rental of most of Congress, judiciary and executive, that doesn’t leave much to talk about at election time, except sex, the flag, the foetus and, in the good old days, communism. So the fact that Clinton’s sex life is now central to our political discourse is par for the current course“. (Observer, 28 January)

The Clintons‘ problem, says Vidal, is that they „never understood our class system (into which Bush was born at the top) and what the owners expect of such employees as the president and his wife“. Clinton abandoned the traditional New Deal reformism of the Democrats. But he enraged the insurance companies by proposing ’socialised‘ health; he has incensed the Big Tobacco companies by pressing for compensation; and he has alarmed Wall Street with the threat of curbing their tax loop-holes. The problem for the Republicans is that these policies are very popular.

The struggle between the Democratic presidency and its right-wing Republican opponents in Congress is not a conflict over fundamental interests. It is a tussle between rival representatives of the capitalist class, a struggle for political power and the spoils of office. The struggle is intensified by the sharing of power between the three separate branches of the US state: the executive presidency, the judiciary, and the Congressional legislature. It is complicated by the fractionation of the massive US capitalist class, which tends to work against the formation of a cohesive ruling elite. When the working class has no independent political voice, the two capitalist parties can freely indulge in the luxury of fighting one another for power, prestige, and big-business booty.

How different things would be if there were a mass party of the working class, which could seize on this domestic crisis to expose the organic rottenness of both the Republicans and the Democrats, the corruption of the whole system – and offer a real alternative to working people.

* * *

Despite the deluge of sleaze allegations swirling around Clinton, his approval rating rose to between 60% and 70% after his State of the Union speech (2nd January). Don’t people care about the moral mayhem in the White House? In reality, the overwhelming ‚approval‘ for Clinton reflects several strands of feeling in the popular mood: cynicism about all politicians; a recoil against the methods of Starr and the media; and, above all, a feeling that the economy has strengthened under Clinton and that prospects for living standards are better than they would be under the Republicans.

No one believed in 1992, that they were voting for a paragon of virtue.

After the Gennifer Flowers affair, everybody knew they were voting for an adulterer, probably a serial philanderer. The majority of those who voted (less than half the electorate) simply preferred Clinton’s policies to Dole’s. When it first broke, the Lewinsky scandal undoubtedly caused shock and revulsion. But anger soon dissolved into cynicism. Only 36% of voters think that Clinton should resign even if it is proved that he had oral sex with Lewinsky. Nearly half (49%) are against Clinton being impeached, even if he told her to deny any sexual relationship in legal proceedings.

Liberal feminists, especially, are in a quandary. They welcome Clinton’s call for an increase in the minimum wage, especially important for women workers, and for a new $21bn childcare initiative. He continues to defend affirmative action and increased business opportunities for women, and has also appointed a woman to the Supreme Court. But, says the head of a national feminist organisation, „I hate the stories that are coming out about Bill Clinton and I believe at least some of them must be true. Is he in the habit of treating women as sex objects? It would seem so. But I look around and I say, ‚What are our alternatives?‘.“ (International Herald Tribune, 30 January). The alternative would appear to be a descent into the Dark Ages with the likes of Newt Gingrich.

Most people prefer the hound dog they know to the jackals they fear. The Christian right has not succeeded in building a puritanical ‚moral majority‘ which they can deploy at will to destroy more liberalistic opponents. In the Reaganite eighties, sections of big business poured millions of dollars into a moral crusade on emotive social issues (like abortion) as a cloak for their drive to turn the clock back on decades of social reform. But Clinton has gained support (including among Republican women) for his defence of abortion rights, one of the few progressive issues he has stuck to.

Disgust at the president’s conduct has been overtaken by revulsion at the special prosecutor’s tactics. Starr claims he is concerned only with the perversion of justice, but his investigation has undeniably shifted from fraudulent land deals to oral sex. Linda Tripp was wired up to entrap her friend and confidante, Monica Lewinsky, while Lewinsky herself was pressed by Starr to entrap Clinton with a wire. Polls show that 60% are against Starr poking around in Clinton’s sex life, and condemn his methods, which are widely seen as ’sexual McCarthyism‘. Half those polled believe that there is a right-wing conspiracy against Clinton, while 60% are critical of the media’s role. (Newsweek, 9 February)

Clinton was re-elected in 1996 on the strength of the economic recovery, and continued growth is allowing him, for the moment, to ride out Starr’s assault. The long-term decline in living standards has not been reversed. Inequality is still growing. But most people are a bit better off than they were during the 1990-92 recession. And while, in reality, there is a downturn just around the corner, Clinton was able in his State of the Union speech to paint a luminous picture of coming prosperity.

He boasted that the federal budget will be balanced ahead of schedule, promising that the prospective surplus (over $200bn by 2003) would be used for the long-term strengthening of the social security system. Even better, he promised a whole array of new social spending programmes, on health, education, child care and the environment. To pay for this (about $150bn over five years) he says he will raise $24bn from big business by closing loop holes and withdrawing tax breaks, mainly hitting finance companies and property dealers. But this has yet to be agreed by the Republican-dominated Congress.

Most of the new revenue, however, will come from the big tobacco companies: $65bn, the first instalment of the proposed $368.5bn settlement, compensation for the horrendous medical problems caused by smoking. But this too has yet to be agreed by Congress. The deal will be bitterly opposed by Big Tobacco’s political pawns. No wonder tobacco money plays such a big part in the anti-Clinton guerrilla bands.

In reality, there is no way Clinton will be able to deliver on these promises. Apart from Congressional obstruction, a downturn in the economy will wreck his five-year budget plans. But today, Clinton appears to be offering the middle class and blue-collar workers a lot more than his Republican enemies.

Will Clinton be forced out? Although possible, it is not likely. Starr himself accepts that, constitutionally, the president cannot be indicted – only impeached. However damning the special prosecutor’s report, it will be up to Congress to take a decision – which ultimately requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate.

A few maverick Republicans are already calling for impeachment. But Gingrich’s tactic is ‚be patient‘, sit back while Starr batters away. The strategy (as the New York Times comments) is to ‚make sure Mr Clinton stays put – but keep him wounded‘. A beleaguered Clinton, they hope, will be a vulnerable target for Republicans in November’s mid-term elections and beyond.

The Democrats followed a similar strategy in 1986, when the Iran-Contra affair erupted. Despite the mass of evidence that Reagan’s national security advisor, Poindexter, and his defence secretary (Weinberger) had organised illegal arms sales to Iran and secretly continued support to the Contras in Nicaragua contrary to Congressional resolutions, the Democrats decided early on not to impeach Reagan. They preferred the prospect of fighting a lame-duck president in 1988. Despite the scale of Reagan’s counter-revolutionary crimes, constitutional principles, as always, were outweighed by political calculation.