Starr in our eyes

We didn't need to know it. But now that we do, we can hardly ignore it.

by Dan Kennedy

IT WOULD BE legally accurate for me to tell you I was shocked and appalled when I realized that Ken Starr's 445-page report really was about nothing other than sex. But if I stopped there -- that is, if I chose not to volunteer information -- I could be accused of misleading people. So lest I be charged with leaving false impressions, let me stipulate for the record that I also found the Starr report to be immensely entertaining. Even better, I could call it work. To the best of my recollection at this point in time, it was the only occasion when I've ever asked my kids to leave the room so I could continue reading pornography. Without feeling guilty about it, anyway.

David Kendall was right. In its out-of-control, gratuitous "pornographic specificity," the Starr report reads not so much like a legal brief as like a soft-porn novel. This is good stuff -- almost as good as Art Levine's pre-release parody of it in Slate last week, in which he slobbered over Lewinsky's "voluptuous curves thrusting against the tight fabric of a low-cut white dress . . . a come-hither look in her flashing, dark eyes." Starr's $40 million blockbuster leaves so little to the imagination that you have to wonder what's going to happen to the $6 million book deal Lewinsky is rumored to have waiting for her. It's going to be mighty difficult for her to top the lurid descriptions contained in the Report of the Independent Counsel to Congress.

The Starr report has already accomplished many things. It has shown us that Bill Clinton is a certifiably bad person, even if he's not an impeachable president. It has demonstrated that Starr himself, the son of an evangelical Texas preacher, is a sexually repressed bluenose who in the absence of a congressional mandate would probably wind up getting caught peeking into his neighbors' bedroom windows. And it has probably killed off the misbegotten independent-counsel law once and for all. The law comes up for renewal next year, and it's hard to believe that any member of Congress would be irresponsible enough to want to unleash another Ken Starr on the White House. Not when most of the 535 senators and representatives see themselves as potential presidents.

Indeed, Starr's handiwork is so misbegotten and grossly off the point that only the most hard-core of the Clinton crazies seem ready to move ahead with impeachment -- such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which intoned on Monday that " `only sex,' as detailed in the Starr report as opposed to some truly private matter, is quite sufficient grounds for removing a president." Or House Judiciary Committee member Bill McCollum (R-Florida), an unctuous moralist who's been making the rounds of the talking-head shows, and who would not look a bit out of place in pantyhose and pumps. Compared to the prissy McCollum, Orrin Hatch sounds like Bluto Blutarsky.

The mainstream media, on the other hand, after eagerly passing along Starr's every leak for the past eight months, feel as used as Madeleine Albright or Erskine Bowles, sent out to front for a man who turned out to be a fraud. The New York Times, which has done so much to legitimize Starr's investigation, is already leading the counterattack. Op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd -- perhaps journalism's preeminent Clinton-basher, along with Michael Kelly of the National Journal and the Washington Post -- was beside herself Sunday at the Starr report's failure to deal with Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, and all the rest of the so-called Clinton scandals. "Kenneth Starr, all these years and all these millions later, has not delivered impeachable offenses. He has delivered a 445-page Harold Robbins novel," she fumed. "These are not grounds for impeachment. These are grounds for divorce." The Times' editorial pages, run by implacable Clinton foe Howell Raines, led with a whimper on Sunday, issuing a bland call for the House to handle Starr's report in a fair and bipartisan manner. (Granted, the matter that truly outrages Raines -- the campaign-finance scandal -- was not the subject of Starr's investigation, and still looms.) Times reporter Michael Winerip, in a lengthy profile of Starr in the Times Magazine on September 6 and in a shorter follow-up piece this past Sunday, made a solid, disturbing case that a more experienced, less zealously religious prosecutor than Starr would never have investigated the Lewinsky affair in the first place.

An unexpected consequence of the Starr report may be that the public changes its view of the media's role in all this. To listen to Clinton's toadies, you'd think the entire story was an invention of the sex-and-sensation-obsessed press. In fact, this story has been Starr-driven, not media-driven. Yes, there have been journalistic excesses, although the examples that were supposedly the most telling -- such as the semen-stained dress and the Secret Service agents who knew Clinton and Lewinsky were alone -- turned out to be true after all. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Boston Globe's Mark Jurkowitz argued against the media's reporting anything as salacious and bizarre as what might be called the cigar rumor. Yet even that turned out to be based on information coming out of Starr's office, as we all now know. And though Yasir Arafat somehow managed to disappear from this particular anecdote as it made its way from the Drudge Report to the Starr report, Starr compensated with something even better: the president's popping the stogy in his mouth and proclaiming, "It tastes good."

And if the public were as disgusted with the media's pushing this story as the conventional wisdom would have it, then why -- according to a piece in Monday's Wall Street Journal -- did the release of the Starr report do for the Internet what the Gulf War did for CNN, with hundreds of thousands of people downloading the report almost as soon as it became available? Clinton's defenders, as well as those who are just plain horrified by sex, were reduced to criticizing Congress for releasing the report before the president's lawyers could draft a response (never mind that the public paid $40 million for it) and, even more ludicrous, criticizing the Globe and other newspapers for publishing it in its full, unexpurgated glory. If reprinting such an important official document is now held up as evidence of "media excess," then the term has lost all meaning.

Indeed, it's pretty obvious that Starr fell well short of his goal of proving that Clinton had committed impeachable offenses. By Monday, a consensus was already emerging among the media and political elite -- supported by insta-polls conducted over the weekend -- that Clinton's sexual escapades, even though they were compounded by lying under oath and subornation of perjury, fell well short of the "high crimes and misdemeanors" required for impeachment. The buzz this week is of some alternative form of punishment, with Clinton's detractors pushing for resignation and his supporters (or at least those who remain neutral toward him) talking about a congressional censure. Even those who harshly criticized Clinton were unstinting in their condemnation of Starr's peephole-gazing. The Washington Post's William Raspberry put it this way on Monday: "We may feel strongly that the questions about sex between consenting adults should never have been asked. But when the sex is owned up to, and when it turns out (in Starr's allegation, at least) to be particularly gross, we can't pretend it's not there."

It's not entirely Starr's fault that the Lewinsky affair is no longer seen as grounds for impeachment. The earth keeps moving beneath him. Shortly after the story broke last January 21, the conventional wisdom was that presidential perjury and subornation of perjury would be more than adequate grounds for removal from office. The Starr report contains reams of evidence that Clinton lied under oath at his deposition in the Paula Jones case, and that he exerted heavy pressure on Lewinsky and others to do the same. Starr even anticipates the now-prevailing attitude that Clinton's false testimony in a suit that was later dismissed doesn't count for diddly: he points out that the suit was ordered to move forward by no less than the Supreme Court, and that the questions Clinton was asked about workplace womanizing are routine in sexual-harassment cases. But most observers are giving Clinton a pass.

Next, the pundits opined that if Clinton perjured himself at his grand-jury hearing on August 17, well, that would surely be grounds for impeachment. Starr argues that Clinton did perjure himself before the grand jury, although much of his argument revolves around Clinton's otherworldly definition of sex. But even granted the technical nature of Clinton's possible perjury, the degree to which elite opinion has shifted in just the past month is striking. In a particularly pungent passage, Starr notes the irony of Clinton's contending that he didn't have to admit to sex with Lewinsky because oral sex doesn't count -- even though the entire Jones case was based on Jones's contention that Clinton had propositioned her for precisely that. In other words, Clinton would have us believe that blowjobs weren't relevant in a case about blowjobs.

Starr's undoing was that he focused exclusively on Clinton and Lewinsky's sexual affair, forgetting about the more important issues that affair was supposed to illustrate. The salacious details contained in the Starr report are truly amazing. We learn that Clinton wasn't attracted to Kathleen Willey because she has small breasts. We learn that Lewinsky may have missed out on her big chance for presidential cunnilingus because she had her period on the one occasion when Clinton offered to go down on her. We learn that Clinton alternately threatened and cajoled Lewinsky like a 17-year-old football star who's been boinking a 14-year-old cheerleader and will do anything he can to shut her up so that his prom-queen girlfriend won't find out.

But the president would be in far deeper trouble if Starr had discovered parallels between Clinton pal Vernon Jordan's employment efforts on Lewinsky's behalf and the earlier financial help Jordan gave Whitewater felon Webster Hubbell. That coincided with Hubbell's decision to stop cooperating with Starr's office. The Lewinsky affair was supposed to be the key to understanding how Hubbell and other Clinton associates may have been paid off in return for their silence. Instead, the Hubbell matter is simply stuck into the report, in one paragraph, almost as an afterthought.

Likewise, the report barely mentions the highly legalistic "talking points" Lewinsky gave to Linda Tripp. That document purported to instruct Tripp on how to lie under oath if asked about an alleged presidential groping incident involving the underendowed Willey. Starr appears to accept Lewinsky's contention that she wrote them up herself, which seems nonsensical given footnoted evidence that Lewinsky can barely spell or write a syntactically correct sentence. Maybe if Starr had pressed her harder on that point rather than on how many times Clinton had "touched her bare breasts with his hands and his mouth," to quote from an oft-recurring passage, he would have learned something truly significant.

The problem now is that Starr, despite failing to prove impeachable offenses, has nevertheless destroyed Clinton's reputation. The cleanest solution -- resignation -- isn't in sight for a variety of reasons. In a commentary on National Public Radio last Thursday, Daniel Schorr noted that Clinton would probably be indicted by Starr's grand jury the moment he stepped down unless the new president, Al Gore, were to pardon him. And Gore, mindful of what happened to Gerald Ford after he pardoned Richard Nixon, wouldn't do that. Then, too, unlike a parliamentary democracy, the US system does not provide for an honorable resignation. If Clinton were to quit, he would be disgraced, his modestly progressive record all but forgotten.

The most likely outcome: censure, followed by two years of paralysis. It is something that should fill every liberal with dread. In calling for Clinton's resignation in the Globe on Sunday, American Prospect coeditor Robert Kuttner wrote: "The remainder of his presidency will be a slow bleed. His pathetic weakness will bring out all his worst tendencies to pander to his political enemies, to ingratiate himself with the Republican right."

Four years and $40 million for this? Ken Starr did his job -- thoroughly and badly. We didn't need to know this stuff. Now that we do, we can hardly ignore it. But this should never happen again.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.