Columnist David Broder: Searcing for the right words? Why bother

David Broder

Thursday, Dec. 3, 1998 | 11:47 a.m.

Lawyers, it is said, use language differently from other people. Most of us try to find words that convey our thoughts and sentiments as clearly as possible. Lawyers use language to stay out of trouble -- to pin down the other party in a transaction and to avoid being pinned down themselves.

In this government, where lawyers play an uncommonly large role, thanks to the president and first lady's preference for those who share their profession, we are getting full exposure to the use of language as camouflage.

The president gave the first demonstration, in his classic nonresponse to a grand jury question: "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is." He continued to show himself the master of verbal sparring in his equally convoluted answers last week to the 81 questions submitted by the House Judiciary Committee.

Any thought that he might actually help the committee narrow and clarify the truly tough questions it faces in its impeachment hearings quickly went out the window. Not one of the 81 questions -- not even those dealing with uncontested facts -- received a direct "yes" or "no" answer.

Some of the evasions were awkward, as when he reinterpreted his sworn testimony that he could not recall giving gifts to Monica Lewinsky. "By that answer," he said, "I did not mean to suggest that I did not recall giving gifts; rather, I meant that I did not recall what the gifts were, and I asked for reminders."

Whatever the awkwardness, the president has good reason to split hairs over words and parse the sentences with dexterity, for he faces the possibility of impeachment and/or prosecution for perjury after he leaves office.

But the habit of literal-mindedness is not confined to the Oval Office. It infected Vice Al President Gore, in his famous press conference assertion that "no controlling legal authority" prevented his making fund-raising calls from his White House desk. And it is running strong in the Justice Department, where Attorney General Janet Reno keeps finding reasons not to name an independent counsel to investigate the financing of the Clinton-Gore 1996 re-election campaign.

Let me be clear: The independent counsel statute has proved to be a disaster and, with any luck, Congress will give it a decent burial when it comes up for renewal next year. But while it exists, it needs to be employed with some consistency. Reno has asked for independent counsels on Cabinet members for what seem to be minor alleged offenses -- acceptance of freebie tickets to sporting events, misstating the size of payments to a former mistress, conversations with a lobbyist on an Indian gaming case, etc.

Unlike my friend Bill Safire of the New York Times, I don't believe that the Democrats stole the 1996 election. But they perpetrated a scheme that allowed them to accept public financing of the re-election campaign, ostensibly adhering to the spending limits that go with that subsidy, but then raised millions more in private money to pay for ads pummeling the Republican opposition and touting the administration's record.

The early ad campaign charted by Dick Morris cut the legs from under Bob Dole and gave Clinton-Gore an almost insurmountable advantage. Because Reno has meticulously ruled, according to her understanding of the letter of the law, that none of this merits outside investigation, the contenders in the next election will undoubtedly conclude that anything goes.

And that is the damage from all this fine-tuned lawyering. Presidential conduct that once would have been condemned as utterly reprehensible is sanctioned. Campaign practices that violate the spirit of the law and feed public cynicism about politics are condoned.

What ever happened to plain talk?