The president’s future

Special investigator Kenneth Starr laid out his case to Congress and the American people last week: President Clinton lied extensively and in a variety of ways and sought help from friends to hide an extramarital affair. Congress, which has been notable all year for what it hasn’t accomplished, finally has a chance to do something with that news flash and is struggling to figure out just what that might be. The answer is narrow yet extremely important to the office of the presidency.

The only surprising part of Mr. Starr’s report is the level of detail he used to humiliate the president. The public has known since he ran in 1992 that President Clinton had sex outside his marriage. It knew in theory, anyway. Now it knows in an embarrassing play-by-play account. And it already knew that the president had a habit of trying to hide behind tortured legalisms (“I didn’t inhale.”) and ambiguous nondenials (“I have caused pain in my marriage.”) The nation elected him twice anyway.

The president by now must have played out countless times the three options available to him. Resign now and avoid the added shame of the impeachment process; endure the congressional hearings and resign only if impeachment appears inevitable; vow to fight to the bitter end to retain the presidency. His decision should rest this week on whether the public sees in the perjury charges something more than just a Bubba with his pants down or whether it begins to look more skeptically at Mr. Starr’s work — to ask, for instance, why a report on a four-year, $40 million investigation of the Whitewater land deal says nothing about the Whitewater land deal.

Whichever way public sentiment goes, the Clinton presidency is finished. If he manages to hang on to his office, the president will redefine the meaning of lame duck. If he leaves, President Al Gore will not be able to make a phone call without Congress helpfully reminding Attorney General Janet Reno that there are still some questions about the ’96 campaign that need answering. Either way, stay or go, Mr. Clinton’s presidency and the effectiveness of his administration are over and so is the pathetically small agenda he had announced for the final two years of his term.

That’s why the talk of his resignation or a congressional censure are so meaningless. They amount to the final act of a tragedy after the protaganist has been slain. Either would tie up a few loose ends and nothing more.

Amid the 11 charges in Mr. Starr’s report that he concludes may constitute grounds for impeachment, there is, however, one question that merits serious consideration from the House Judicial Committee.

The other 10, collectively, sound much like a common divorce proceeding: Guy lies about about his affair with a bubbly young person and about the details of the affair, from where he touched her to whether they exchanged gifts; he tries every legal maneuver he and his lawyers can devise to avoid admitting that he had the affair; wife gets the house, car, golf clubs, etc. Only, in this case, the wife loses, too. In any event, this is hardly a crime against the government.

It merely restates the obvious to point out how wrong and troubling the president’s behavior has been, but what can Congress do with a charge of an affair, no matter how nasty Mr. Starr tries to paint it? Already, Republican Reps. Dan Burton of Indiana and Helen Chenoweth of Idaho, who have been condemning in their opinions of the president, have come forward to admit their own dalliances. Can the country expect the rest of Congress to gather Phil Donahue-style and share their unpleasant, imperfect pasts? How much can the nation be asked to endure?

The one issue that rises to the level of further investigation is whether the president compelled government employees to lie knowingly for him. Did the president force Ms. Lewinsky to file a false affidavit in the Jones case? Did he pressure his personal secretary, Betty Currie, to change her testimony in the same case? These are appropriate questions for the House committee to consider and, if proved, they threaten the office of the presidency in a way that the affair itself merely demeans it.

The Starr report, cluttered as it is with the breathless recounting of the Clinton-Lewinsky couplings, makes it difficult for Congress to keep the somber tone it has tried to set in the past week. Members reviewing the report might profit from waiting for the initial uproar to fade, then narrowly focus their hearings on the possibility of subornation of perjury based on these instances. Sometime after that, it might ask Mr. Starr about Whitewater.