Easter Prayers Should Include Clinton, Starr

At church this morning, many twice-a-year worshipers will find themselves with an opportunity to pray.

Here is a suggestion.

Along with silent offerings to family and friends, please include Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr.

They need your prayers.

We all need them.

Astounding public details of alleged indiscretions suggest President Clinton would do well to examine his personal life and code of conduct.

Disturbing accounts of the tactics used in digging out details of the president’s lapses suggest independent counsel Starr would benefit from reflection on his purpose and motivation.

This is not what we bargained for in electing a president or appointing an independent counsel.

The whole, sorry mess seems to have ended up in a place where the average citizen really doesn’t want to be.

Clinton clearly has let us down.

He is an intelligent man. Twice he has been entrusted with the highest office in the land.

What was he thinking?

“You grow up thinking the president of the United States is a special person,” said Liz Brandt, a law professor at the University of Idaho and member of the Idaho American Civil Liberties Union board.

She thought about what damage may have been done to the presidency by Clinton. “My kids are 7 years old. They don’t know the difference between Republicans and Democrats, but they do know Clinton is the president. He is a national symbol. We want to rally around the president. We want the president to be a leader, to provide coherence to our national identity. The president is representing us to the world. We all want to protect ourselves from thinking that he is letting us down.”

Most Americans form their opinions about government through their views of the president.

Now, with the help of Starr, we would view the presidency in most unflattering light. In that way Starr has let us down, too.

An independent counsel’s charge is to examine, without partisanship, whether serious crimes have been committed by people in the White House.

He is not charged with destroying a president or his reputation on behalf of enemies and rivals.

What else can be read into what Starr has done?

He has spent nearly four years, $38 million and used the power of 21 lawyers, the FBI, the IRS and two secret grand juries to find flaws in the president of the United States.

Is that what we ask of prosecutors?

“Nobody likes to think of the president having sexual relations with a White House intern, but the idea of the government spending $38 million and four years trying to find something that can be held against the president is just as distasteful to most Americans,” said Cornell Clayton, a political science professor at Washington State University and a national expert on how politics has crept into the federal justice system. “It lacks all sense of proportionality.”

Most of us think of the relationship between crimes and prosecutions this way: If a crime has been committed, a prosecutor tries to determine who committed the crime and then brings charges that match the seriousness of the crime.

In this case, that relationship has been turned on its head. Starr has targeted Clinton to see if he can find evidence of a crime. And when Starr couldn’t find a crime big enough to justify his effort, he didn’t drop the case, but went looking into the president’s personal life for something bigger.

“If any of us were targeted in the same way, if the federal government came at us and said we’ll investigate your life until we find something that is wrong, we would say it was a violation of our constitutional rights,” professor Clayton predicted.

This is a big reason, in addition to the strength of the national economy, that Clinton’s approval ratings are so high. People sympathize with him.

So, this is where we are. We do not like the idea of the federal government prying into lives. At the same time, we do not like the idea of a president giving someone a reason to pry.

The coming weeks will not be pretty. The partisan politics and personal flaws of our elected and appointed leaders will become painfully evident. Men of great power and great ambition will struggle to gain an upper hand. Some of what comes out won’t be suitable for family discussion.

On Easter, perhaps Bill Clinton and Ken Starr would do well to consider the aspirations ordinary men and women will contemplate this day.

From the pews will come pleas for wisdom, understanding, forgiveness.

Congregations will ask for the ability to acknowledge mistakes.

Pastors will invoke the heavens for the discipline needed to keep hatreds and jealousies in check.

These are the right things to do.

They rely on a power greater than the presidency or the office of the independent counsel.