BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
Amid an orgy of media attention, Kenneth Starr delivered to
Congress on September 10 a voluminous report with his conclusions
on an investigation of U.S. president William Clinton. The report
centered on an affair Clinton had with former White House
employee Monica Lewinsky and the attempts by the president to
cover it up.
Starr - who was appointed as a special counsel four years ago to investigate the so-called Whitewater charges against the president - claimed that his report includes substantial evidence that Clinton "committed acts that may constitute grounds for an impeachment."
The scandal has thrown the Clinton administration into crisis. Many capitalists politicians, with rightists leading the charge, are calling for impeachment proceedings, resignation, or at least congressional censure of the president.
The report and all the hubbub around it are but another eruption - in a way that directly affects the competing interests among the U.S. rulers - of a phenomenon best described as the pornographication of bourgeois politics (see also article on page 17).
Starr's 453-page report is filled with lewd details of Clinton's sexual encounters in the Oval Office. The day after it was handed to Congress, it was posted on the Internet and published in its entirety in special supplements by the Washington Post, New York Times, and other U.S. dailies. Its contents filled television screens and radio shows. And the salacious saga has continued since.
Soon after he was first elected president in 1992, Clinton faced similar scandals that have persisted through his administration.
Starr was appointed to investigate the "Whitewater" affair that exploded in 1994. That was centered on accusations that the president and his wife, Hillary Clinton, had used the Arkansas governorship to enrich themselves and promote big-business interests - and then used their powers in the White House to conceal those earlier abuses. About the same time Clinton faced a suit by Paula Jones, who accused him of sexual harassment while he was governor of Arkansas. A federal judge threw out the suit earlier this year, but Jones has appealed and the case remains alive.
Primary Colors, a novel published a couple of years ago, came very close to giving an accurate, if fictional, portrayal of the character, offensive behavior, and abuse of power endemic among officials of this administration - though not unique to Clinton's White House. What's at the heart of this scandal, however, is not the president's personal weaknesses.
Instability of world capitalist order
The growing vulnerability of Clinton to scandals is a
reflection of the instability of the world capitalist
system - which has become increasingly apparent since he was
first elected - and the concurrent decline of confidence in its
leading personnel among those who profit from the imperialist
order and among millions of working people.
In a commentary published in the August 29 New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman said that "the basic pillars that have stabilized the post-cold-war world are all either shaking or crumbling." These included the notions that Russia "had made the irreversible leap from Communism to free-market capitalism," that Washington defeated the Iraqi regime in the Arab-Persian Gulf war, and that the "American economic model" would sweep the world.
"Which brings us to the fourth shaky pillar, the leaders who made this post-cold-war world. They are vanishing: Yitzhak Rabin was shot. Bill Clinton shot himself," Friedman stated, referring to the president's conduct in the recent scandal. "Helmut Kohl lost his mandate. Japan is home alone."
The crumbling of the liberal columnist's illusions in these so-called pillars of capitalist stability was accompanied with a degree of panic. "That's scary," Friedman said.
This dread is expressed today by a growing layer of bourgeois pundits and is especially characteristic among middle-class layers. Bourgeois politicians, mostly rightists, are taking advantage of this kind of panic to intensify scandalmongering and drag working people into the trap of thinking that their main problem is corrupt and immoral individuals among the ruling "elite."
Ultraright, the main beneficiary
The ultraright is the main pusher and beneficiary of these
exposés.
In a syndicated column published August 22, ultrarightist politician Patrick Buchanan praised Clinton for ordering a cruise missile attack on Sudan and Afghanistan.
"But as the president returns to Martha's Vineyard," Buchanan continued, "the darkening cloud that hangs over his presidency has not lifted - and indeed the sad end to this presidency is coming into view." Buchanan was referring to the island off the Massachusetts coast where Clinton was vacationing after an August 17 speech in which the president admitted he had a relationship with Lewinsky, but claimed his earlier denials under oath were not lies, legally.
Referring to another scandal that led to the resignation of Clinton's former campaign manager, Richard Morris, two years earlier, Buchanan wrote: "Which is worse, a weak man paying a professional prostitute for cheap love and confessing his weakness - or the president using the Oval Office to seduce and exploit for his gratification a 21-year-old girl, and then looking the American people in the eye and lying about it?" In a September 13 column Buchanan predicted the Democrats will suffer "a crushing defeat" in the November elections because of the scandal.
Most of the small street protests demanding Clinton's resignation that have taken place across the country so far are clearly dominated by right-wingers. At one such demonstration of several dozen during Clinton's visit to Cincinnati, Ohio, September 17 many of the signs read: "Repentance needs no lawyers," "Resign, have mercy on us; and God will have mercy on you" painted on a white cross, and "Bill Clinton: the abortion president."
The attempts by liberal politicians to either defend Clinton or take their distance from him, and even condemn his conduct and character, have also put wind in the sails of the rightist "culture war" demagogy.
In a highly publicized speech on September 3, Democratic senator Joseph Lieberman said the president's behavior was "immoral" and claimed Clinton's actions "not only contradicted the values he has publicly embraced over the last six years, it has, I fear, compromised his moral authority." Since then, and especially since the release of Starr's report, it has become fashionable for Democratic Party politicians to attack Clinton. Liberal critics have included the presidents' former labor secretary, Robert Reich, who wrote a column in the September 14 Wall Street Journal titled "Mr. Clinton has no presidency to defend," and Leon Panetta, Clinton's chief of staff from July 1994 to January 1997, who called for censuring the president in a September 17 Washington Post column.
Many of the liberals who continue to defend Clinton, including Hillary Clinton, push the theory that behind the scandal is a right-wing conspiracy to railroad, politically destroy, and unseat the Democratic president.
This notion is echoed by many groups on the left. A front- page article in the August 22 People's Weekly World, the newspaper of the Communist Party USA, is one such example. Pointing to opinion polls indicating a majority of respondents approved Clinton's performance in the White House and a minority thought he should be impeached or resign, the article said: "The poll results suggested that the people recognize that Starr's probe of Clinton is a politically inspired witch hunt. Unable, after four years of digging, to unearth grounds for a criminal indictment of Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater real estate transaction, Starr seized first on a series of lurid accounts of Clinton's sexual peccadilloes to `get' Clinton."
No parallel with Nixon resignation
Other bourgeois commentators have tried to draw groundless
parallels to the events that led to the Watergate scandal in
1973-74, impeachment proceedings against then-president Richard
Nixon, and Nixon's subsequent resignation. Pointing to the first
worldwide economic recession since World War II and rising
inflation at that time, Floyd Norris wrote in an editorial
opinion article in the August 31 New York Times, "To return to
1998, the American economy and the President's poll ratings have
been doing very well. But economists have been surprised by the
depth and the duration of the Asian problems, and financial
markets are worried that they will spread to Europe and the
United States. The collapse in Russia has unnerved investors, as
soaring oil prices did a generation ago."
What this and similar articles miss entirely is that it was the defeat of U.S. imperialism by the Vietnamese people a quarter century ago, and the rise of the Black struggle in the United States which preceded it, that led to the Watergate crisis and Nixon's resignation. There is no similar basis for the current scandal.