How I'd Whip the Democrats

By Mary Matalin

After a solid year of scum--a soiled blue dress, a scheme to buy silence, witness intimidation, and lies, lies, lies--you might think Bill Clinton would be ready to get back to doing his job. But you would be wrong. According to the New York Times, our cigar-abusing, bongo-thumping President plans to celebrate the Senate's highly charitable verdict by launching "an all-out offensive to knock off his foes." It's not enough for this self-absorbed wretch to defile the nation's highest office. Now he's dragging his whole party into the muck. And amazingly, Democrats are buying into the Big Creep's definition of victory: three-quarters of the country believe he is untrustworthy and lacking ethical standards, and they're popping corks. Party leaders are united in defense of this man--their guiding principles of moral and legal relativity have been elevated to an art form (one standard for liberal Presidents, another for everyone else). The politics of personal destruction that they invented (with attacks on Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, et al.) has, on Clinton's behalf, been perfected by pornographers and private eyes.

In short, as the millennium elections approach, Democrats represent the party of degradation, double talk, double standards and political destruction. Buoyed by their odd conception of victory, they are launching Operation Perpetual Impeachment, targeting outspoken presidential critics for political extinction in 2000. For Republicans the temptation to do battle with them--for retribution, validation, vindication--will be enormous. But the G.O.P. needs to resist taking this bait and return to fighting over big issues, not small men.

Republicans can safely resume their rightful role as agenda setters and not worry about the latest cynical Clintonite "war," because the new offensive is doomed. These pathological partisans must have battle fatigue, because they have devised a strategy based on three grave political miscalculations:

No troops. The voters are reeling. In the immortal words of Richard Douglas Llamas, the Senate impeachment heckler, "Good God Almighty...get it over with."

No battlefields. The most outspoken Republican targets are from outspokenly Republican districts; they would be strung up had they not pushed for impeachment.

No general. In presidential races issues flow down from the top of the ticket. Is Al Gore really going to wave the bloody impeachment shirt, reminding voters of complicity in this most ethically challenged Administration?

The Republicans' problem is the lack of a coherent, unifying agenda. The G.O.P. was founded on a bedrock philosophy in 1854: maximum individual liberty supported by a protective but not paternalistic government. Policies that flowed from this philosophy--from abolition to antitotalitarianism to rational distribution of wealth--united the party and made America great. These were huge issues. But for the past half-decade we have unified around the smallest imaginable issue: Clinton. Yet it is Clinton who provides the G.O.P. with its best opportunity to regain its bearing. He has set up a classic confrontation by reopening the era of Big Government. His 1999 State of the Union address previewed 81 new tax increases. With breathtaking paternalism and condescension, he wagged his finger at a postspeech pep-rally audience and declared, "I guess we could return the surplus to you and hope you'll spend it right."

This is the stuff of great debate. Polls show that when it comes to taxes, the public now trusts Clinton more than it does the G.O.P.--a sign of how far we have fallen. But the Republican Party is on the right side of history. Let the debate begin.