While Republicans have been having a good time poking fun at President Bill Clinton for the disturbing enthusiasm he throws into raising huge wads of cash for fellow Democrats, they might keep two things in mind.
Led by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, the GOP killed campaign finance reform and the opportunity to stop politicians like the president, who can turn rubber chicken into hard cash better than just about anyone.
If the president can raise scads of money with so much ease, perhaps his reputation with the American people, post-Lewinsky affair, is not as tarnished as some members of Congress would like to believe.
The Republican National Committee sent out a mocking congratulatory press release Monday, celebrating the president’s 100th fund-raiser this year. There was no total for how much the president had raised, but he did manage in a single stop Monday to generate $1 million for Democratic Rep. Charles Schumer of New York. That one event produced more cash than both candidates in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District raised all year.
With majorities in both houses of Congress and Democrats eager for campaign reform, Republicans this year could have proposed all sorts of creative ways to reduce the incessant need for campaign dollars. Being in the majority, they instead opposed any measure that could improve the chances for the minority party. The “Fundraiser-in-Chief,” as the GOP calls him, is taking advantage of a rotten situation Republicans fought hard to preserve.
The president’s success, however, should give Republicans pause. In no sense should the proceedings created by the Starr report in the House Judiciary Committee be a popularity contest. But Americans with ready money are telling Congress exactly how serious they think the charges are against the president. Republicans, despite valiant effort, have failed to make the president’s extramarital affair into something more than an extramarital affair. The fact that he lied about cheating on his wife was obvious to most people, who do not seem shocked that spouses — even White House spouses — stray and then lie about it even to friends.
Republicans have made much out the president’s lies. But the lies seem so pathetic and so typical of a guy catting around that the puffed up significance House members have tried to impose on them come off more as farce. (They could have tried to rally behind a better tactic, a frightening What-if, expressed recently in the Wall Street Journal. What if Linda Tripp had sent her taped conversations with Monica Lewinsky to the Chinese, making it a question of national security? The president’s affair might have leveraged something far more serious than a job in New York for his paramour.)
They have yet to press that argument, however, and their assertions of high crimes and misdemeanors are unlikely to catch on. Meanwhile, the president hops from district to district raising more and more campaign money.
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