The Twin Scandals in Nation’s Political Horizon

WASHINGTON — President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) are the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the wretched crisis that has these two exemplars of the American political class in its grip. Each endowed with extraordinary political gifts, each also comes with the scandal-prone parts already assembled and connected.

It was Clinton who said, when he first erupted on the national political scene in the New Hampshire primary of 1992, that he would offer two for the price of one.

“Buy one, get one free,” he jested, presenting the equally able and ambitious Hillary Rodham Clinton to the voters. What we didn’t know was that the political twin to whom he truly was joined at the hip would turn out to be Gingrich.

Clinton last week played to perfection the role of the politically correct commander in chief, finally granting the racial justice of congressional Medals of Honor to seven black war heroes. But he seemed only to be seeking to distract attention from his lawyers’ simultaneous struggle to dissuade the U.S. Supreme Court from letting Paula Corbin Jones proceed with her humiliating lawsuit against him for sexual harassment.

And as Gingrich, just reelected speaker, delivered his uplifting speech about healing America’s racial wounds, he, too, seemed desperate to distract attention from the demeaning fact that nine congressmen of his own party voted against reappointing him as their leader.

If Clinton has displayed prodigies of resilience to win reelection, so Gingrich has shown equal skill, and equal chutzpah, in keeping his nostrils just above the surface of the ethical swamp that constantly threatens to close over his head.

No need to belabor the scurrilous detail of Clinton’s rapscallion ways with women, or Gingrich’s unpleasant way of talking divorce while his first wife lay in her hospital bed. It is the parallel and barefaced cheek of their methods to keep hold of political office that really takes the breath away.

Clinton, who once noted “the first primary is money,” has fought campaigns rich and has fought them poor--and knows which he prefers. In this latest fund-raising season, he used money first to intimidate any prospective Democratic challenger out of a primary tussle, then to buy TV time in the year before the election to drive up his own poll ratings and depress those of the GOP.

He has become the master of the art of turning cash into votes, a genuine innovator in the American system, whose example will doubtless be followed by all successors.

It Clinton has introduced the principle of the permanent begging bowl into the White House, Gingrich has taken it into his own area of innovation--the building of the personal political machine, with the recruiting device and political training structure of his GOPAC. Each has been a pioneer in the use and abuse of fund-raising, trampling the spirit of the laws and taking little regard of its letter.

The two outstanding politicians of their generation are now hamstrung by the fruits of their genius. Clinton’s Democrats face a new round of congressional subpoenas into his imaginative ways to encourage the gratitude of Asian donors. Meanwhile, Gingrich is undergoing congressional hearings and faces new inquiries by the Justice Department and the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service for his imaginative ways of building the GOP. Just before Christmas, Gingrich admitted to the House Ethics Committee that he had misled them (he blamed his lawyer) about his college course, financed through a tax-exempt foundation.

Being tax-exempt, it should have been apolitical. It was not. He also claimed that his political organization GOPAC was not involved with the course. It was. Indeed, Gingrich once boasted that, through wider distribution on cable TV, his course should produce “200,000 committed activists nationwide before we are through.”

Being innovators, each man has devised a rational answer to the basic political problem of his generation--the decline of the traditional party structure. To remedy this, Clinton knew his reelection required doing whatever it took to raise unprecedented amounts of money, available for deployment earlier than ever before, to secure reelection. Gingrich, unwilling to let the foot soldiers of the religious right take over his party’s machinery, resolved to do whatever it took to build his own battalions of political conservatives.

The result is that Americans, who voted and have paid for and now expect the undivided public services of their two leaders in White House and Congress, are now stuck with half men. Each is weakened and distracted--as well as discredited--by the ethical woes they trail in their wake. Each man, having helped develop the grisly new art of the total political campaign, is now crippled by the skill of each party in deploying the ethical weapon against the other.

But as we look glumly forward to a year of the trials of Clinton and Gingrich, recall that the parallels between them have always been uncanny. Clinton’s father died before he was born. Gingrich’s walked out on his wife and newborn baby. Each mother subsequently married a bullying alcoholic. Each boy was a precocious and not too popular--except for admiring teachers who spotted the innate intelligence and encouraged each overweight young baby-boomer.

Each benefited from scholarships to win the education that family could not afford. Each managed to avoid the Vietnam draft and, along with the bulk of their contemporaries, experimented with marijuana. Neither has ever held a proper job--except for a brief interlude of university teaching--until making a lifelong political career through elective office. Each “caused pain in my marriage,” but mobilized unusually devoted bands of political followers.

The tension inherent in the balance of powers between White House and Congress has rarely been so heightened, because it is seldom that the two arms of government find in their respective leaders two foes so worthy of one another’s steel. The last time Capitol Hill could field such a champion was when Lyndon B. Johnson used his mastery of the Senate to run rings around President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s White House.

The Newt and Bill show could have been a political epic, an American equivalent of the great parliamentary duels between William E. Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, or the political civil war between Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin. Instead, these two emblematic figures of the baby-boom generation now limp into their new season of confrontation as two siblings bruised by the logic of their common raising. But half the men they were, they still make for a curious symbiotic whole, as they represent and try to lead a political system they have brought wretchedly close to disrepute.*