No Cover-Up In Third-Rate Scandal

Things were simpler back in the days of Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Nixon. A crook was a crook, and he denied it like a man.

Now we have a president who really believes he’s not a crook, or not even wrong, because everybody does it.

Tell that to anybody’s mom.

We have a vice president who actually has done something in office, but shouldn’t have. He should have run to a phone booth across the street instead. Al Gore was the chief telephone solicitor for the 1996 re-election campaign and made his calls from federal offices.

At a press conference Monday he said his counsel had told him it wasn’t illegal and that the phone bills had gone to the Democratic National Committee. Then he said, “I have adopted a policy of not making such calls again.”

I wasn’t a crook, but I won’t do it again.

Gore said it showed the need for campaign finance reform. I am not crooked, the system is.

By 2000, when Gore runs for president, maybe he’ll be as straight as he looks.

Gore’s aggressive telephone soliciting was first reported by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, who once got a crook thrown out of the White House for shredding the Constitution.

He went from nailing a president who bugged phones to nailing a vice president who bugged people on the phone.

Scandals aren’t what they used to be. This doesn’t even involve the real Republican Party, but Bill Clinton’s imitation one.

Part of the appeal of this scandal is seeing self-righteous boomer pols splattered with mud, even if it doesn’t stick.

I am pure of heart, says Bill Clinton, the nation’s concierge-in-chief, who bedded 938 people at the White House, just counting the paying guests.

He says the fuss about renting the White House to contributors distracts him from domestic and foreign policy issues on the table - that is, when the table isn’t being used to feed $50,000 dinners to his checkbook chums.

Clinton’s great strength is that he seems sincere. He seemed sincere when he denied he had ordered the White House sublet for fund raising.

Then came an inconvenient detail: He was lying. He had written a note containing the figures $50,000 and $100,000, and the words: “Ready to start overnights right away.”

Clinton isn’t as bad as Nixon. He may not be a crook, but he’s a slumlord who charged exorbitant rents for a property he doesn’t even own, our White House.

Standards are so low that when a president or vice president says he hasn’t done anything illegal, it sounds like a ringing moral statement.

This may be a third-rate scandal, but part of the fun is that Clinton has surrounded himself with a gang incapable of a good cover-up.

That could save everybody.

In the Nixon administration, the co-conspirators hung tough - with the notable exception of Nixon’s yuppie lawyer John Dean, who looked and dressed like a Clinton guy.

In the Clinton administration we have a total Me Generation failure of a cover-up. A feel-my-pain free-for-all broke out.

Harold Ickes, who was ousted as deputy chief of staff, was probably a little resentful and wary of being indicted. He handed over documents showing that Clinton had done everything but hold a yard sale of the White House furniture and china to raise money to beat Bob Dole. As if Bob Dole wasn’t enough to beat Bob Dole.

Another former Clinton aide, George Stephanopoulos, now on workfare as a pundit, went on TV Sunday and became George Steppedinawfulstuff.

He said, sure, Gore spent a lot of time raising money and, yes, he was doing it from government buildings. Everybody does it.

Even if everybody does it - and they probably do - Stephanopoulos wasn’t supposed to shoot his mouth off and say so.

Stephanopoulos’ book (they all have books) had better be a best seller. If he loses his job in the pundit biz and goes back to political work, he’ll be George Stuffingenvelopes.

As for Gore, he won’t be able to pull his cute doofus act on Letterman again. We’ll imagine him working the phone like a maniac broker, making cold calls to big-money guys.

Who do the American people hate more than crooks? Telephone solicitors, that’s who.

Lucky for Gore he wasn’t calling all of us at dinnertime.