Rounding Out and Moving On
Clinton was lucky, but so was the Republic.

by ROBERT L. BARTLEY
Monday, January 29, 2001 12:01 A.M. EST

William Jefferson Clinton is gone from the White House, last seen taking a spill playing with his dog on his lawn in Chappaqua. His plea bargain with Independent Counsel Robert Ray has been signed and delivered, and he proved to Susan McDougal that he did feel her pain after all, granting her a presidential pardon on his way out of the Oval Office. He pardoned some 140 others, most spectacularly fugitive arbitrageur Marc Rich, whose plea was taken directly to the Oval Office by one of Mr. Clinton's former White House counsels and whose still-supportive former wife was a big Clinton contributor.

For those of us who've prematurely counted Mr. Clinton out before, experience warns that we may not yet have seen the Comeback Kid's last comeback. Clearly a powerful political base remains with Hillary in the Senate and Terry McAuliffe about to become Democratic National Committee chairman. Still, during the presidential transition Mr. Clinton's star dimmed decidedly.

Any outgoing president will fade, indeed is expected to. But President Clinton's leave-taking seemed aptly to epitomize his eight years in office. It was self-centered, with three speeches on George W. Bush's inaugural day and several aspersions on the legitimacy of his victory. It tried to "spin away" criminal behavior, with spokesmen voicing caveats to cloud the written admissions to Mr. Ray and the Arkansas Bar. It was so Clintonian that hairs bristled on the necks of some who'd long given him the benefit of the doubt.

The self-serving pardons in particular stuck in the craw of some who'd opposed impeachment, for example Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle. As it happens, the original charges against Mr. Rich arose from the Carter administration's energy-policy conceit that it could make "old oil" sell for a much lower price than "new oil," and I've long held doubts about so sweeping a prosecution. Even so, the procedures for the pardon, or rather the lack of them, suggest that the moving force was money-grubbing. Too, a president pardoning his own brother must be some kind of a record. And the pardon of Mrs. McDougal is clearly a reward for her serving jail time for contempt of court in refusing to answer questions about the Clintons' role in the Whitewater partnership.

The angry reaction from many of Mr. Clinton's legal appointees and pundit supporters is, if I may indulge myself, of some satisfaction to me and my staff here at the Journal. We think we are the one media outlet that consistently stuck with the big story of the last eight years, to wit, presidential character. Precisely how this story would play out was impossible to foresee exactly, but as it unwound through eight years and into the final weeks we--and our regular readers--were anything but surprised.

This is a juncture for a few reflections. We've recently heard a lot of tactical second-guessing on how President Clinton might have avoided the blot of impeachment. But remember, before anyone knew Monica Lewinsky's name Kenneth Starr had won 14 convictions or pleas. After years of stonewall delays and facing the prospect of jury nullification, Mr. Starr's successor decided not to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for Whitewater, the Castle Grande land flips, disappearing billing records or the Travel Office firings. Robert Ray's carefully parsed statements of prosecutorial discretion were spun by the Clintons as vindication. Meanwhile, Attorney General Janet Reno repeatedly refused to charter an independent investigation of the campaign finance-Chinese espionage issues, despite the recommendations of the FBI chief and her own task-force head.

To ultimately succeed, this kind of behavior needs to fool all of the people all of the time. Somewhere along the way a slip was inevitable. It happened to be Monica, probably because sex was about the only thing the president could not delegate to a protective shield of aides and agents. So Mr. Clinton was the second president impeached, survived his trial and went on to further adventures.

While Mr. Clinton ran twice as a centrist Democrat, in his final years he had to reciprocate for support during impeachment by giving heady McGovernite liberalism a new breath of life. Over Mr. Clinton's two terms the Democratic Party declined. The 2000 elections were essentially a tie, but for the first time in two generations the Republicans control both the White House and the Congress. They will have the opportunity to address issues postponed in the Clinton years, in particular Social Security. They also will have a chance to restore the rule of law shredded by his stonewalling and cover-ups.

While Bill Clinton caused some pretty good hiccups, in the end the system digested the problems created by his personal and political peccadilloes. As Adam Smith once put it, responding to a friend who declared that the loss of the American colonies would be the ruination of Britain, "Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation."

Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com. This column is adapted from the introduction to "Whitewater, Vol VI."