Gop Catches Loot On Quiet Fat Cat Feet

Like Miss Piggy and her indignant “Moi?,” President Clinton still testifies to his innocence in the Democratic fund-raising mess, but documents recently and reluctantly released make it plain he was in the thick of it.

With his first two years in office repudiated by voters in the mid-term congressional elections and his political prospects seemingly moribund, the president pushed for pre-emptive fund raising that was fast and, if not exactly dirty, was, let us say, unfastidious.

It may still be technically true that Clinton didn’t outright sell Lincoln Bedroom pajama parties, invitations to state dinners and chairs at hot-ticket coffees to big donors.

But he was clearly dangling those perks as prizes, and fund raisers hustling in his name all but retailed them. If the practice wasn’t crooked, which would be bad, it was disgusting, which is worse.

All that said, if we’re to get anything more out of the situation than just one more occasion for fruitless public indignation, the focus needs to widen.

The president and the Democratic National Committee carried common political practice to extremes, but the differences from precedent were more in degree than in kind. Clinton and the DNC didn’t invent cash-and-carry politics.

And the differences between the two parties’ actions may be more of style than of substance.

Republicans tend to tap donors who have made it. Democrats look to donors who are on the make. Old money knows all the little social semaphores by which the privileges that will come from big contributions are understood. New money, not yet polished by membership in the better clubs, wants to know the payoff.

Unfortunately, the hearings that are shaping up in the House and Senate show little promise of amounting to anything more than an excuse to torture Democrats for Republicans’ pleasure.

The GOP raised far more money in the last election cycle than Democrats did. Maybe the Dole campaign and Republican National Committee did so with a purity that surpasseth all understanding, but if they didn’t, we won’t find out from the hearings. (Too, the media so far have been oddly incurious about the GOP side of the ledger.)

Hearings that don’t look at Republican funding as well as Democratic are politically biased, and hearings that don’t look at congressional election funding as well as presidential are institutionally biased.

What is more, the hearings are directed by a GOP leadership that, rejecting election financing reform, says the current feeble limits ought to be lifted. Millionaires and paupers then would have an equally unimpeded right to buy elections. What would be fairer?

In short, the GOP, which has a shot here at taking the moral high ground and defending it in the public’s genuine interest, shows every sign instead of settling for just another romp on the political low road.

Clinton and the Democrats jumped into this soup and deserve the heat they are getting. But voters ought to get a good bit more out of this than the serving of boiled Democrats that appears to be all the GOP means to serve them.

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