Behind the sordid details of Kenneth Starr's report lurk two critical questions. Are the accusations shocking enough to justify the removal of an elected head of state and the political paralysis that would be inherent in the attempt to do so? Or is the evidence embarrassing enough that Bill Clinton will resign, go away and save his country the bother of a long, sleazy political show trial? The answers that emerge from a first reading of the report are, respectively, "no" and "perhaps".
The first thing to remember is that no one really knows what an "impeachable offence" actually is. The US constitution is utterly vague, saying merely that the President "shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanours". What is a high crime and misdemeanour? The accepted answer seems to be that given by former President Gerald Ford: "whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history." In other words, however much it is dressed up in the language of crime and punishment, the decision whether to impeach Clinton is a political, not a legal one.
For all the meticulous detail in the report, it does not make a convincing case that the President has done more than have oral sex with Monica Lewinsky on nine occasions and then lie about it. This may be immoral and outrageous, but is it a high crime? That depends, not on the sex (which is after all not illegal), but on the lies. And the most critical thing in this regard is what is not in the report. The reason Starr was allowed to look into Clinton's sex life in the first place was that the President was believed to have "suborned perjury" - that is, asked Monica Lewinsky to lie in her deposition in the Paula Jones case. There is no clear evidence in the report that he did, and Starr does not actually make that allegation directly. He relies instead on an allegation that Clinton obstructed justice by encouraging Lewinsky to get rid of the gifts he had given her. But it is not at all obvious that the detailed evidence he presents supports that conclusion. According to Starr's narrative, Lewinsky raised the subject with Clinton and said "Maybe I should put the gifts away . . ." Clinton replied, "I don't know" or "Let me think about that." He then, moreover, went on to give her more gifts (all of this was happening just before Christmas). These words and actions hardly suggest a coherent conspiracy on Clinton's part.
The other piece of evidence that Starr cites for this charge is that the gifts were subsequently retrieved. But here there is simply a flat conflict of evidence. Lewinsky is cited as saying that Clinton's secretary Betty Currie called her and arranged to call for the gifts. Currie, generally regarded as a decent and honest person, says it was the other way around: that Lewinsky called her, told her she was "uncomfortable retaining the gifts" and asked her to collect them.
As for "witness-tampering", another potentially damning allegation, the evidence again appears equivocal. The most serious part of it relates to Betty Currie herself. Clinton seems to have given Currie, who not in fact a witness in the Jones case, a broad account of his own evidence, making a series of statements and saying "right?" at the end of each of them. Starr says, in effect, that this was an attempt to get Currie to give the same testimony. Clinton's lawyers say it was, on the contrary, an attempt to check his own recollections against hers. The first explanation may seem more likely, but only on the balance of probabilities, not as a matter of unquestionable fact. And if you're going to unseat a president, you need firm facts.
Nor is it easy to see firm grounds for Starr's charge of "abuse of power". Some of this relates simply to the fact that Clinton used the courts to defend himself against Starr's investigation, a charge that looks merely like evidence of petulance on Starr's part. Some relates to the fact that Clinton lied to his own aides about whether he had sex with Lewinsky. "Abuse of power" seems like a rather extravagant term for simple, old-fashioned mendacity. The other charge on which Clinton might reasonably be impeached is that of lying in his evidence to Starr's grand jury. It is not in fact at all clear that Clinton's answers, even assuming they were lies, constitute a crime, never mind a high crime. Arguably, perjury itself is an impeachable offence, though many would argue that the perjury would have to be a matter of state rather than a private sin. In any case, however, perjury requires an intent to lie. The question is not did Clinton lie but did he know he was lying? It is, from what is known about Clinton, entirely possible that he deluded himself so thoroughly that he genuinely did not believe that oral sex is "sexual relations". Again, this may make him an object of scorn or contempt, but is it really grounds for overturning the result of the 1996 presidential election?
Two other things need to be borne in mind. One is that without Monica Lewinsky Ken Starr would now be a laughing stock. If he had not been presented with Linda Tripp's tapes from out of the blue, he would now be in the position that, having spent tens of millions of dollars, he has not come up with a single indictable offence in the Whitewater investigation which was, after all, his main focus. The other is that as Starr's report comes under closer scrutiny the ethics of publishing irrelevant, hearsay allegations will seem ever more questionable. Starr, for example, includes an allegation that Clinton suggested to Lewinsky that he would seek a divorce from his wife. This is based, however, merely on what a friend of Lewinsky's said that Lewinsky said to her. Why put it into the public domain unless the object is to humiliate Clinton as much as possible?
And humiliating the President is, in the end, the strongest achievement of Starr's report. The overall feeling of the document is that it is aimed, not so much at impeaching Clinton as at driving him out by sheer force of shame. What, for instance, is the legal point of telling the American people that "on one occasion the President inserted a cigar into her vagina"? Why include all the lurid detail on who touched whom where? How can a great democracy have come to a point where a government report, when placed on the Internet, triggers some of the filtering systems designed to keep children away from pornographic websites?
Whatever the reason and whatever the substance of the legal charges, there is no doubt that Starr has succeeded brilliantly in debasing, degrading and embarrassing Bill Clinton. He has made sure that Clinton has no hope of recovering, not just the dignity of his office, but the basic human dignity that he needs in order to be able to stand up in public and be taken seriously as a leader. He has, in a sense, made the ostensible purpose of his own report - the possible impeachment of the President - irrelevant. Compared to the sheer abasement that Clinton must be suffering, the solemn, epic process of impeachment might seem like a big step up.