Campaign financing

Like another unpleasantness that threatened the Clinton-Gore administration, the investigation into the vice president’s visit to a Buddhist temple during the 1996 campaign came down to truthfulness under oath and then a definition. Attorney General Janet Reno may have spared the vice president this week the burden of a special prosecutor, but her department’s continued investigation into the ’96 fund-raising practices of the Clinton-Gore campaign continues to place doubt on the whole system of fund-raising.

Held up to question most recently was whether Mr. Gore knew his visit to the Hsi Lai Temple in California was a fund-raiser, an idea he disputed in his testimony in April to Robert J. Conrad Jr., the head of the Justice department’s campaign financing task force. Ms Reno’s doubt that the vice president perjured himself grows out of his comment that while these meetings were not fund-raisers, he freely admitted – “there’s no if, and or buts about it” – that they were held to “build a relationship so that later, you might go out and ask for a contribution.” Whether Mr. Gore, showing that he can parse definitions as well as anyone, considered these events fund-raisers or events that led to raising funds makes no practical difference; his testimony did not try to hide their purpose.

But the attorney general’s decision should not lead the public to conclude that the Clinton-Gore campaign had clean hands in the 1996 election. The many convictions, includng two from the temple event, brought on by the Justice Department campaign finance task force suggests that the campaign was an unusually corrupt enterprise in an area of politics notorious for corruption. Had the attorney general given more support to this task force it might not now still be considering the long-ago White House coffees or Mr. Gore’s fund-raising phone calls.

Congressional Republicans see the attorney general’s decision as a cover-up, but she has not done the vice president any favors on this issue. Ms. Reno may truly believe that she makes decisions without political influence, as she says, but the effects of her decisions are anything but apolitical. Special prosecutor or not, voters can find much to dislike about the way money dominated, and still dominates, presidential campaigns.