The Obstacle Course

By NANCY GIBBS

Last Wednesday, the morning after President George W. Bush made his prime-time debut, more than a dozen House and Senate Democrats gathered for a postmortem in the L.B.J. Room of the Capitol. Pollster Geoff Garin ran through the results of his focus groups--what viewers had responded to, what they were still worried about. "The bottom line was Bush had a pretty good night," says a participant. "People liked him. They liked his presentation. They thought it was balanced." It was one more sign of how profoundly the world has changed since the last time the Democrats sat listening to a President lay out his vision for the future, and one more sign that they need to find a new map.

A year ago, when Bill Clinton gave his last State of the Union address, the Democrats controlled the debate, they paid for the mike, they owned the issues. Bush was busy campaigning on the promise of a huge tax cut that most voters said they didn't want; Clinton was insisting that it was more important to pay down the debt first and foremost, and taking credit for every merry thing that was happening to every leading economic indicator.

A year later, the economy has a charley horse, the tax cut they deplored is the centerpiece of the new President's budget, Alan Greenspan has blessed it, and every argument the Democrats make gets drowned out by that Other Story, the presidency that will not end, the scandal that will not die. Internal Republican polls last week showed Bush had little reason to fear that the Clinton pardon debacle would overshadow his big budget road show. Bush's message was getting through, pollsters found; the ones being drowned out were the Democrats. The power sharing they expected after a close election--their ideas won, they insisted, it was just their candidate who lost--has been exposed as so much wishful thinking.

While party leaders Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt might have liked a bigger spotlight last week, the better to expose Bush's mysterious budget magic, they could not control the images emanating from Washington. More than a month after Clinton left office, he remains the image of the party even when he is battered and silent. He was supposed to be leading the government in exile, chiding Bush for reckless driving. "The liberals would have liked for Clinton to weigh in," says one key Democratic Senate aide. "But he can't. The Republicans have neutered him."

He neutered himself. By last week Clinton's near silence on why he pardoned fugitive tax swindler Marc Rich and assorted other highflyers and lowlifes was getting a little spooky. It was time to tap on the lid of the trunk and see if Houdini was still alive in there. Now he got help from the Old Guard, the magician's assistants who had stuck by him through thick and thin and thick. Here came faithful fund raiser Beth Dozoretz, who we learn was cleared by the Secret Service to visit the White House 76 times in the past two years, declining to tell the congressional investigators whether her fund-raising efforts for the Clinton library had anything to do with her lobbying for the Rich pardon. Those arguing on Marc Rich's behalf knew well enough to work through Dozoretz rather than the Justice Department. As Rich attorney Jack Quinn said to the committee this week, "She was in much more frequent communication with the President than I was."

But like her pal Denise Rich before her, Dozoretz pleaded the Fifth Amendment, and with that, the pardon scandal was moving out of the familiar theatrics of the Congress to the deadly quiet, far more serious precincts of the Southern District of New York, where prosecutor Mary Jo White was reported to be in contact with Denise Rich about finding out what she knew.

Next on the griddle were Clinton's most dogged lieutenants, the bunker squad--chief of staff John Podesta, counsel Beth Nolan and endlessly faithful consigliere Bruce Lindsey. All of them had the same message: During those wild, sleepless final days, they had protested in force against the notion of pardoning Rich, a fugitive who had illegally bought more than $200 million worth of oil from Iran during the hostage crisis and dodged paying $48 million in one of the biggest tax frauds in history. They were so adamant in their opposition that after a Jan. 16 meeting, they assumed the matter was dead. "I thought he had accepted our judgment," Podesta said. "I didn't think this was an active matter."

That Clinton ignored their advice and proceeded so recklessly looked damaging on its face, but the faithful trio actually did Clinton some good. They noted that pardon requests were pouring in from every direction in the final days, not just from relatives and benefactors and potential blackmailers. "We had requests from members of Congress on both sides of the aisle and both houses, we had requests from movie stars, newscasters, former Presidents, former First Ladies," Nolan said. They agreed that Clinton had exercised dreadful judgment but that it was his right. "The President is the President," Nolan said.

Their very forthrightness may have helped squelch suggestions that a bribe was involved. Their portrayal of a White House in disarray--the Final Daze--sounded so plausible that some thought it explained why Clinton waived his Executive privilege and allowed his counselors to testify. This is what passes as the best defense--not that he was venal but that he was an idiot. "I think that people are finally tiring of it," Podesta told Time, "but as long as it's still selling cable-TV rating points, it will probably go on a little longer."

As for the ex-President, he was rattling around the house in Chappaqua, N.Y., wondering whether he should try a big blowsy tell-all TV interview to try to turn this around. A longtime Clinton adviser put it this way: "For the last 30 days, he hasn't had one positive story. It could go on like this for another 30 days. So he's thinking, If I don't stop it now, I never will. We are very close to locking in a public impression about the President that isn't good and isn't temporary." But any kind of question-and-answer session would be a disaster in the making. When it comes to those drug runners and con men his brother-in-law sponsored for pardons, "what is he gonna say? He can't get through that." For the moment, Clinton is holding off on a big confessional. "He's decided instead," says another adviser, "to just call every American, one person at a time."

--Reported by Michael Duffy, Karen Tumulty and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by Michael Duffy, Karen Tumulty and Douglas Waller/Washington