The Breach

by Peter Baker

  As this new reality sank in for Gingrich, a few West Coast races were being called. Republican Linda Smith lost her challenge to Democratic senator Patty Murray in Washington State, and the seat of retiring California congressman Frank Riggs slipped out of GOP hands. But they picked up Vic Fazios old seat, and two of their most vulnerable California Republican incumbents, Brian Bilbray and Jim Rogan, managed to pull out tight races. Rogan, closely watched because he sat on the Judiciary Committee, wound up with 50.8 percent of the vote. Gingrich, reassured that the Republicans would at least keep the majority, went to bed at 2 A.M.

  At the White House, the plan had been to watch election results in the family theater in the East Wing. But Clinton stopped by his chief of staff s office to check out the early returns. Craig Smith, the White House political director, had fired up a computer and was racing around the Internet in search of vote totals. Clinton, for all of his mastery of the rhetoric of the information age, was a virtual Luddite when it came to computers, but as Craig showed him how to zip through district-by-district results on the Web, Clinton became entranced with the technology. A kid with a new toy, he even gave instant analysis to the aides gathered around, offering assessments on why each candidate won or lost and thoughts on what that might mean for the larger picture.

  Eventually, Clintons fund-raiser and friend Terry McAuliffe called up from the White House theater, where the sausage pizzas, beers, and sodas had been set up for the viewing party.

  Weve got everybody here, McAuliffe told Craig Smith.

  But the president did not want to leave. Hes on the computer, Smith reported back, and wants everybody to come up here.

  So the entire party moved over to the West Wing, including aides such as John Podesta, Doug Sosnik, and communications director Ann Lewis, as well as outside allies such as pollster Mark Penn; union leaders John Sweeney and Gerald McEntee; former Texas governor Ann Richards; Hillary Clintons former chief of staff Margaret A. Williams; former deputy White House chief of staff Harold Ickes; and Ellen Malcolm and Mary Beth Cahill from Emilys List, the Democratic fund-raising organization for women supporting abortion rights. The first lady, who was scheduled to attend the party, opted out, in keeping with her chilly relations with the president since his August admission. Instead, she stayed in the theater with a few friends and watched a new Oprah Winfrey movie, Beloved.

  But if Hillary had yet to fully forgive him, it seemed to Clinton that the country had. Accurately or not, the election had been cast as a referendum on impeachment, and the numbers flying across the computer screen were a clear repudiation of Gingrich and the House Republican effort to oust the president. Voters saw it the way he did, Clinton believed, as a partisan vendetta.

  Around midnight, when it looked as if the Democrats might even take back the House, McAuliffe called his friend Dick Gephardt in St. Louis and handed the phone to Clinton. The pair talked briefly about the prospect of Speaker Gephardt. Two old rivals, they momentarily forgot their past differences and shared in the joy of the moment. For Gephardt, it was like a dreamworld. Like Gingrich, he had started the morning expecting Republican gains; in fact, his pollster, Mark Mellman, had just that day predicted a net GOP increase of five to ten seats. Win by losing, indeed.

  Clinton did not want to go to sleep. He stayed up until past 2 A.M. watching results, until finally McAuliffe and Smith were the last to leave. In the end, Democrats picked up five seats, not enough to win the House, but a smashing upset nonetheless, and one that Clinton hoped could mean only one thingthe end of impeachment.

  The president hugged McAuliffe as he walked out. Terry, I cant thank you enough. We made it through.

  For weeks leading up to the election, Clinton and some of the people around him had given counterintuitive advice to Democratic candidates: run on impeachment. For all of the hand-wringing among so many party strategists, the president and his operatives had concluded early on that impeachment would be a boon at the ballot box, not the other way around. Exhausted by the scandal, voters would punish Republicans for launching the inquiry, they argued, not Democrats for defending a morally suspect president.

  Stan Greenberg, Clintons 1992 campaign pollster who had addressed the House Democrats the morning of the impeachment inquiry vote, summed up the strategy aptly in an October 19 preelection memo later sent to candidates entitled Gaining the Edge. Contrary to their instincts, Greenberg wrote, Democratic candidates should want their election campaigns to engage the impeachment issue. Do not run from it. The impeachment inquiry is an opportunity. Based on polling conducted October 14 and 15, just a week after the House vote, Greenberg argued that Democrats had positioned themselves skillfully for the fall election. Voters, he found, would flock to Democrats who wanted to end any inquiry by the end of the year or proposed censuring the president rather than impeaching him. To make his point, Greenberg outlined four scenarios where the Democrat could use impeachment on the campaign trail to a Republicans disadvantage. Between them, they showed Democrats winning by 18 to 33 percentage points.

  What these scenarios suggest is that Democrats should want the impeachment issue to feature in this election, whether or not the Republicans want to talk about this issue, Greenberg instructed candidates. Indeed, their silence ought to be a signal that they understand their disadvantage. Above all, Democratic candidates should welcome a full-blown debate or exchange with their Republican opponent. The Democratic position would appeal not only to party regulars, he added. Democrats are in a position to energize the base and win over independents at the same time.

  Other Democratic consultants were pushing the same message, particularly Clintons current pollster, Mark Penn. The White House wanted to show that impeachment was a winning issue, and senior Democratic officials were eager for a demonstration project that would test the theory. Jay Inslee, a former congressman who was running against Rick White, a Republican incumbent in Washington State, provided it. Within eight hours of the House vote to open an inquiry, Inslee cut an ad tackling the dicey subject head-on, asserting that Clinton should be censured, not impeached and complaining that Rick Whites vote on impeachment will drag us through months and months of more mud and politics. Enough is enough. Its time to get on with the nations business. Inslee soon jumped out to take the lead, and Clinton tried to persuade other candidates to adopt the same strategy, though most remained reluctant. The president and first lady also quietly worked to energize core Democrats angry at impeachment, taping 250 radio spots and telephone messages aimed at African-American and Latino communities.

  Most Republican candidates were trying to run from the issue. Their base was already depressed by the conservative talk-show bashing of the budget deal. Strategists advising Republican candidates urged them to avoid a campaign premised simply on taking advantage of Clintons weakness. Consultant Ralph Reed, the pragmatic former executive director of the Christian Coalition, warned in a September 23 memo that if we rely entirely on the scandal, we will come up short on Election Day.

  Gingrich had never been entirely certain how to handle the issue. Most of the time he stayed away from it, believing that Clinton would fall of his own weight and fearing that inserting himself into the controversy would only make it easier for the White House to change the subject to him. Gingrich had advised other Republicans to keep quiet about the scandal and let Clintons fellow Democrats beat him up, as they were wont to do anyway. And yet Gingrich believed Clinton was a liar who ought to be exposed. For Bill Clinton, the truth is transactional, he had told advisers as far back as the government shutdown in 1995. As the Lewinsky scandal deepened, Gingrich simply could not resist commenting at times. In the spring, he declared that the president had presided over the most systematic, deliberate obstruction-of-justice cover-up and effort to avoid the truth we have ever seen in American history and vowed that I will never again, as long as I am Speaker, make a speech without commenting on this topic. It was an impetuous promise. Within a few weeks, he had dropped the issue from his stu
mp speech.

  As the election came down to the wire, Gingrich changed his mind again. His polls showed morality at the top of voters concerns and indicated that Republicans were viewed as better able to deal with the issue. On his campaign plane jetting across the country, his consultant Joe Gaylord read him the scripts for three thirty-second television advertisements raising the Lewinsky issue. Thats great, Gingrich said, signing off on the strategy. The ads were produced by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and tested in focus groups in Charlotte and Cincinnati. One featured the infamous video footage of Clintons finger-wagging denial that he had had sex with that woman, while another featured a woman asking rhetorically what viewers had told their children about the whole affair. In every election, there is a big question to think about, said one of the ads. This year, the question is: Should we reward . . . Bill Clinton? And should we reward not telling the truth?

  NRCCs Operation Breakout tried to fly under the radar screen of the national political press, with ads placed in only selected key races across the country where they might do the most good in turning out base Republican voters. But once reporters found out about them, they became the image of choice on network television, played over and over to the point where most voters across the country had seen them on the news. By virtue of the intense media focus, the anti-Clinton theme supplanted any other campaign messages and became the voice for the entire Republican election effort. And contrary to expectations, the voters energized by the ads were not Republicans but core Democrats outraged at the attack on their president.

  Republican candidates around the country began to panic. Many of them called congressional leaders such as Tom DeLay, begging them not to run the ads in their districts. Even DeLay, the leader of the drive to impeach Clinton, thought the project was badly handled. They should have been running on Clinton and his misconduct, DeLay told advisers, but should have been doing so for weeks, not at the last minute in some desperate stab at finding an issue that would sell. Even Gingrichs former adviser Frank Luntz, architect of the Contract with America and the 1994 Republican takeover, argued that impeachment was a losing campaign strategy. It could have been our night, he wrote in a postelection report circulated to GOP leaders. We squandered this opportunity in a haze of anti-Clinton, pro-scandal rhetoric that reminded voters of all the things they hated about Washington. Luntz, who had been effectively exiled from Gingrichs inner circle, complained that Republicans came across as self-righteous and offered an anemic message designed to appeal only to first wives.

  The result was a loss that went far beyond the few seats that actually changed hands. In the end, Democrats picked up five seats, narrowing the margin in the House to 223 to 211, plus an independent who usually sided with the Democrats. That meant the Republican leadership could afford to lose no more than five votes on any given issue, a governing majority so fragile as to seem almost unworkable. The Democratic victory defied historical trends; going all the way back to the early nineteenth century, the presidents party had always lost seats in the sixth year of his administration, usually several dozen. The last time a presidents party grabbed more seats in such a six-year itch election was 1822, when popular James Monroe was in the White House presiding over the Era of Good Feelings.

  This is just horseshit! Bob Livingston was shouting into the phone. This is not a good day!

  The morning after the election, Wednesday, November 4, Gingrich had decided to try to quiet discontent within his caucus by convening a series of telephone conference calls. In his first one of the day with fellow House Republican leaders, the Speaker presented a sunny picture of what had happened. They were still in control, he emphasized. Every committee would still be in the hands of Republicans. They had defied history in keeping a GOP majority for the third consecutive election.

  But Livingston was not buying the spin. The generally amiable chairman of the Appropriations Committee had a quick temper that was now erupting. He had spent months raising money and campaigning for colleagues, but they had no message; they ran a campaign devoid of any real issues. They should have been talking about all they had accomplished, about their reform of the Internal Revenue Service, their tax-cutting plan, their telecom munications industry overhaul. Instead, all they did was talk about Clinton. Livingston was fed up and so were others.

  Fairly or not, Gingrich was being held responsible for the debacle. The blunder with the ads, his election-day boast of a twenty-seat pickup, and his initial we-really-won assertions all infuriated Republican congressmen. It did not help matters when he went on television the morning after the election and blamed the media for focusing too much on impeachment and the scandalnever mind the ads and his own vow the previous April never to make a speech again without mentioning misconduct in the White House. By his second conference call the day after the election, this one with the general membership of the House Republican caucus, Gingrich was bridling at the criticism and trying to shift blame. The real reasons they had suffered losses, he told his colleagues, were racist radio ads aired by Democrats intended to drive up black turnout and the failure of Senate Republicans to pass House-authored tax cuts. He was not the one who had focused so obsessively on Clintons scandals, Gingrich insisted. He had tried to promote a real message of Republican progress on issues, but it just could not penetrate the wall-to-wall all-Monica-all-the-time fixation of the television networks.

  While many Republicans were jumping ship, Gingrich found that day that he could count on support from one GOP leader. Im not going to let them run you out of town, DeLay told him privately.

  Henry Hyde spent the morning after the election in Chicago, where he had watched morosely as the results came in the night before. He had hoped the public would speak out in outrage at what Clinton had done. The public had spoken out, Hyde realized, but he just did not like what they had to say. By the time he arrived at the Hilton Hotel at OHare Airport around 10 A.M. to meet with senior aides and investigators who had flown in from Washington, Hyde was determined to put the election out of his mind. There was no point in recapitulating what had happened. Republicans still had the majority, he told himself, so he tried to proceed as if nothing had changed.

  Okay, he said, lighting up one of his staple cigars as he sat down in the hotel meeting room with aides Tom Mooney, David Schippers, Mitch Glazier, and Sam Stratman. I promised you wed go over the requests for admission. Where are they?

  The aides looked around at one another. They had drafted a list of 103 questions to put to Clinton in the form of requests for admissionan interrogatory of sorts intended to narrow the issues and pinpoint where the factual disputes were concentrated. Copies had been brought to discuss with Hyde, but his staff hardly figured that would be the first order of business the morning after such a cataclysmic political event. They had been wondering what the election would mean for impeachment. They half expected Hyde to come in and say, Forget it, its over.

  When no one said anything, Glazier went ahead and handed out copies of the 103 questions. Someone finally raised the issue of the election, however, and Hyde tried to brush it off. Why should an election make a difference? Hyde asked. We have a duty.

  For all of his outward unflappability, though, Hyde knew how disastrous the election setback was and recognized that he had to get impeachment off the table one way or the other as quickly as he could. He had already pledged to try to finish by the end of the year, and now he committed to himself to carry through on that no matter what. After all, his mandate would expire with the old Congress at the beginning of January anyway, and the inquiry would have to be reauthorized by the next House, a daunting prospect now with five fewer Republican seats in the new year. The only way to get through this, then, was to conduct an abbreviated inquiryno long fishing expeditions, no extensive hearings, no endless parades of witnesses. And so he and his advisers decided at the airport hotel that they would call just one major witness: Ken Starr himself.

  Hyde started reading thr
ough the list of 103 questions prepared by Glazier and the rest of the staff. With his red pen, he started crossing through one after the other. They were all about sexemphasizing all the wrong things, trying to be inflammatory, rather than seeking information.

  What are all of these questions about sex? Hyde demanded.

  Mr. Chairman, this is a sexual harassment case, answered Glazier. If youre talking about perjury and what he lied about, then you really have to ask these exact same questions you would ask him if he were a defendant in a sexual harassment case.

  Look, Hyde replied, this case is not about sex. Its about obstruction. If we want to get that across, we have to ask the questions we need but we cant emphasize that. Hyde did not want to be known as the sex investigator. Everyones going to be talking about how the Judiciary Committee is obsessed with sex.

  Glazier had been sensitive to that concern and had tried to get around it by asking questions in a somewhat obtuse way, such as Did you engage in the kind of activity described on page so-and-so, line such-and-such, of the Starr report? He was essentially asking Clinton if he had touched Lewinskys breasts or genitalia, as she had testified, but without using graphic words. Hyde was not persuaded: Isnt this just a cheap shot? The chairman wanted the questions to be staid, to read as if they came from a blue-chip, downtown law firm, not a partisan legislative committee. Hyde came up with an alternative formulation for asking some of the perjury questions without dwelling on the sexual nature of the issuesthey would ask Clinton, Did you lie in your deposition when you testified this way or that, and then quote his own words.

  By the time Hyde put down his red pen, just eighty-one questions were left, most of them fairly straightforward and sedate. In standard legalese, they asked the president to admit or deny a variety of events in the time line put together by Starr, including phone calls to Vernon Jordan, conversations with Betty Currie, and various meetings with Lewinsky. After Hyde scratched out twenty-two of the most salacious questions, the word sex or sexual appeared just five times and always in quotations attributed to Clinton. Nowhere in the final version of the questions did Hyde directly ask about Clintons sexual activities with Lewinsky. But it included some zingers, such as the very first question: Do you admit or deny that you are the chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America? In case that had not driven home the point hard enough, another question asked, Do you admit or deny that pursuant to Article II, section 2 of the Constitution you have a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed? (The committee staff actually got it wrongthe faithfully executed clause appeared in section 3, not section 2.)