Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (24 page)

The Republicans were no longer the party of Willkie, Dewey, and Rockefeller. Indeed, they were barely the party of Bob Dole, newly self-declared as one of the “liberals.” Conservative southerners were now the most dynamic force in the GOP.

The second Clinton term can be divided into triumph, disgrace, and survival. In the same period, Newt Gingrich’s approach went from statesmanship to overreach to defeat. And the conservative movement demonstrated its proclivity for brinksmanship, its refusal to accept that the decisive realignment to the right was not going to happen, and its desire to refight the battles of the 1960s over and over again.

Clinton’s 1996 victory, the Republicans’ near loss of the House, and a soaring economy created a very temporary Era of Good Feelings. When boom times pour money into federal coffers, win-win budget compromises are easy. It seemed that Washington had finally figured out how to make divided government work.

It was
a sign of how starved Washington was for achievement that the 1997 budget deal was touted as being so grand. House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich pronounced it “a dream come true” while Clinton proclaimed it “the achievement of a generation.” The deal itself was not particularly objectionable, but neither did it justify the high-fiving, chest-thumping, boy-are-we-great triumphalism of Democratic and Republican politicians alike.

The bargain was a political classic of the sort passed routinely in state legislatures at moments when the economy is hot and revenue pours in. Difference splitting is easy, because everything can be topped up—some money to new programs, some to tax cuts. Democrats are then allowed to point to the good things they are spending money on while Republicans can talk about the burdens they are removing from businesses and hardworking taxpayers.

At the time
the agreement was reached, the federal budget was moving toward balance all by itself. “The economy is the champion here,” observed the notoriously honest Ben Cardin, a Democratic House member from Maryland who would later go to the Senate. Clinton did have a right to claim credit for the return of fiscal sanity—but because of his 1993 budget, not the latest one. You could sense that Clinton felt a trifle guilty claiming the new bargain as a big deal, especially since so many Democrats had lost their seats in 1994 after walking the plank for Clinton on the earlier, painful fiscal plan. “The
budget agreement that we announce today,” Clinton acknowledged, “would not be possible had it not been for the tough vote taken in 1993 to set us on the right path.” He might have added that George H. W. Bush deserved some credit, too. The 1990 budget deal that caused him such grief had begun closing the big hole. By contrast to 1990 or 1993, the 1997 deal was easy because Clinton and the Republicans had money to spread around.

Some of it was even well spent. Clinton finally got a significant down payment on expanding health coverage. The $24 billion, five-year children’s health program (crafted by the famed bipartisan Senate deal makers Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch) extended health insurance to 3–5 million children. It was the largest expansion of health coverage since Medicaid and Medicare and was as close as anything in the grand bargain to being worthy of the label “historic.”

The bill also contained a few improvements to make the new welfare system a bit more generous, and its $500 per-child tax credit was good for middle-income families and resembled Clinton’s original promise of a “middle class tax cut.” But that progressive measure was stuffed in with a cut in capital gains taxes that conservatives always sought. Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal group, found that the bill’s tax cuts were, on net, heavily tilted toward the wealthy. What this meant is that pro-market conservatives got what they needed out of the deal.

But not all on the right were satisfied. As soon as the agreement was announced, the Heritage Foundation issued a scathing analysis that, not accidentally, bore a great deal of similarity to statements Heritage and other groups aligned with the Tea Party would make in the Obama years.

Under the headline “The Return of Big Government,” Heritage’s statement argued that the agreement masked “substantial growth in the size and scope of the federal government,” and it plainly accused Republicans of selling out. Heritage noted that “while the President’s agenda is revealed explicitly in the documents accompanying the agreement, the congressional agenda is left largely up to the imagination.”

“Taxpayers,” Heritage complained, “are being asked to accept bigger government in exchange for the promise of a ‘balanced budget’ and a small cut in their taxes.”

Making clear yet again that balancing the budget mattered far less to
conservatives than hacking away at government, Heritage concluded: “The real test of a balanced budget plan is whether it actually leads to smaller, less costly government and leaves more money in the pockets of working families. The available evidence shows that this budget deal fails on nearly every count and that, in most cases, the policies it reflects may be worse than doing nothing.”

Gingrich, however, was effusive in praising Clinton for responding to his reelection victory by choosing “to reach out a hand and say, ‘Let’s work together.’ ” And as reporters noticed at the time, he appeared chastened at his party’s near loss of the House. The deal, he said, showed that “the American constitutional system works, that slowly, over time, we listened to the will of the American people, that we reached beyond parties, we reached beyond institutions, and we find ways to get things done.”

As a young man, Gingrich first became active in politics as a Rockefeller Republican. For a time, it seemed, he was willing to work with the reluctantly self-described Eisenhower Republican in the White House.

When 1998 began, Clinton seemed poised to make the reach for greatness he had always envisioned. He was as popular as ever.
A Gallup poll in mid-January found that 60 percent of Americans approved of his performance, and only 30 percent disapproved. The era of deficit politics was over as surpluses started rolling in, which gave Clinton fiscal room to take the initiative. And Republicans, as Gingrich’s comments on the budget agreement showed, were still smarting from Clinton’s successful attacks on them, and from the failure of their more revolutionary phase. Clinton had plans, including an effort to continue to move the country toward universal health care coverage through gradual steps rather than in one large fight. Building on the children’s health bill, he now wanted to allow the near-elderly to buy into Medicare. He was also looking to pass a $21.7 billion child care program and sought new federal spending for school construction and to hire 100,000 more teachers, matching his initiative that financed local governments to hire 100,000 cops. “We lived and learned and took our environment as we had it,” Gene Sperling, the president’s senior economic adviser, told me at the time. “We’re now in clearer waters.”

And then, in a matter of days, came the tidal wave. The United States
Supreme Court had set it all in motion on May 27, 1997, when it ruled that the president could not avoid testifying in a civil suit brought by Paula Jones that accused Clinton of harassing her sexually six years earlier, before he was elected president.
The details of the encounter had been revealed in an article in the conservative
American Spectator
magazine in January 1994.
The reporting on Clinton’s personal life had been financed by Richard Mellon Scaife, a conservative multimillionaire who ultimately gave the magazine close to $2 million specifically for what became known as the “the Arkansas Project” designed, in the careful language of the
New York Times
, “to unearth damaging information about President Clinton.” Not for nothing did Hillary Clinton later speak of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Jones’s lawsuit was also financed by conservative groups, and Clinton hoped he would be able to avoid testifying in the case until after his term was over. But in ruling that Clinton could not use his office to avoid a deposition, the Supreme Court offered what turned out to be one of the worst predictions ever made by any judicial body, anywhere.
It rejected the idea that testifying in the case might “place unacceptable burdens on the President that will hamper the performance of his official duties.” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the unanimous Court that it “appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of petitioner’s [Clinton’s] time.”

It’s worth pausing briefly over the concatenation of events that led to Clinton’s impeachment. Doing so is a reminder of how thoroughly bizarre the episode was, how reckless the president was, and the lengths to which his enemies would go in their attempts to drive him from office.

The government shutdown had the utterly unintended consequence of setting up the circumstances for Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-three-year-old White House intern.
In a largely deserted White House being run by a skeleton staff, Clinton and Lewinsky found each other alone on November 15, 1995, and that’s when their sexual relationship began. It continued until April 1996, when Evelyn Lieberman, Clinton’s shrewd deputy chief of staff, arranged, initially without Clinton’s knowledge, to transfer Lewinsky to the Pentagon. There Lewinsky was to make a friend named Linda Tripp. Even after the transfer, Clinton and Lewinsky stayed in touch through racy phone calls.

The Jones case and the president’s affair collided on Saturday, January 17, 1998, the day Clinton gave his deposition in the Jones case.
Unbeknownst to the president, Ken Starr, the special prosecutor investigating the Whitewater land deal Clinton had been involved in when he was governor of Arkansas, got a tip. Starr sought and received Justice Department approval to expand his investigation into possible obstruction of justice in the Jones case. Lewinsky had confided her affair with Clinton to Tripp, and Tripp secretly recorded phone calls with Lewinsky about the relationship with Clinton. She later turned them over to Starr. The Jones lawyers were fully briefed on the Lewinsky affair by a literary agent named Lucianne Goldberg, with whom Tripp had discussed the whole matter in the hope of getting a book contract. On the day before Clinton gave his deposition—indeed, while he was preparing for it—agents for Starr’s office surrounded Lewinsky at the Pentagon City Mall, where she was meeting with Tripp. They detained her for several hours and questioned her.

Clinton then proceeded to deny the affair with Lewinsky during his deposition, which ultimately opened him up to the perjury and obstruction charges that became the centerpiece of the impeachment articles. Adding to the chance absurdities of the case, Lewinsky had intended to dry-clean a dress stained with the president’s semen, but Tripp talked her out of it, thereby preserving the evidence that would undercut his claim that his encounters with Lewinsky had not been sexual.

The story of Starr’s new investigative focus and Clinton’s new problem leaked quickly, again with help from Goldberg. She had arranged for Tripp to tell her story to
Newsweek
’s Michael Isikoff. When
Newsweek
editors chose not to run the story, Goldberg informed the fledgling
Drudge Report
of the magazine’s internal debate. Drudge, an increasingly influential voice on the right, played the story big, and by Tuesday night, January 20, the
Washington Post
and ABC News reported what Isikoff had been trying to get into
Newsweek
.

The response in Washington was electric—and among the president’s own supporters, the range was from dismay to rage. I described
the reaction of Clinton partisans in my own column that Friday, January 23: “Their fury is in some cases about morality but in all cases about the prospect of
such extraordinary irresponsibility on the part of the leader they had vouched for. Why, they ask, would he risk his whole presidency for such an affair? If this is true, how dare he bring aid and comfort to their Limbaugh-listening friends? If he knew this story was there, why didn’t he settle the Paula Jones case?” Even though Clinton’s friends and allies eventually rallied to oppose impeachment, these are questions Clinton supporters still ask themselves.

For a few days, Clinton attempted qualified rather than outright denials, but they weren’t working. Clinton had been on the phone with Dick Morris, who advised him that voters at that point would accept nothing less than a complete denial.
Clinton’s famous reply to Morris: “Well, we just have to win, then.” Winning meant lying—or, to put the most charitable spin on the matter, accepting Clinton’s rather narrow definition of “sexual relations” as meaning only intercourse.

And so on Monday, January 26, appearing with the first lady and Al Gore to talk about child care policy, he issued
the statement that would never be forgotten: “I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky. I never told anyone to lie, not a single time—never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people.”

As a political matter, Morris was probably right: Clinton had to issue a full denial because the Lewinsky revelations had so shocked official Washington that pressure would likely have built very quickly for Clinton’s resignation. Clinton needed to buy time, to rally his own supporters, and to hope that his enemies would overplay their hand.