The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • Page 76

Opinion Commentary The Sun Thursday, February 11, 1999 Page 21a arbanes could be vulnerable Plotting primary The right's last stand By Froma Harrop Rep. Bob Ehrlich 's vote for in a state that provided Mr. victory margin in 1992. trategv 1 sues. The U.S.

Chamber of Commerce gave her a 90-percent rating in 1997, compared with 30 percent for Mr. Sarbanes. A Morella vote for the next Republican tax cut would provide a helpful follow through. Positioned as the candidate attuned to present economic realities, Ms. Morella may broaden her appeal.

The business community, from corpoiate suites to Main Street shops, may want to contribute. And upscale independent women voters who prefer Democrats may find in Ms. Morella a political solidarity that they have begrudged Ms. Sauerbrey and other conservative women. The effect may even spread to the news media, whose image of most Republicans tends to the cartoon-like from men in top hats and striped trousers to gun-toting rustics.

Ms. Morella may get a better ride in the press as a supposed successor to liberal GOP Sen. Charles Mathias, so wistfully recalled by those who otherwise view Republicans as reprehensible. Whether today's Republicans would find much to like in a Senator Morella is a contingency beyond the scope of this musing. What is more certain is that even "safe" Democratic Senate seats need not be conceded.

Besides, the prospect of Mr. Sarbanes having to limber up for a strenuous run, with the Democratic Party expending extra money and campaign appearances by the president, may be a spectacle worth pursuing. Jay G. Merwin a former Evening Sun reporter, is a lawyer in Baltimore and a Republican. Maryland, can be hazardous to a political career.

As was shown in Republican Ellen Sauerbrey's recent run for governor, a Democrat can scamper to victory on attack ads accusing a Republican of voting against such a "civil rights bill," however miscast. In recent years, Republican Dick Bennett ran strong races for attor- MoreUa ney general and lieutenant governor. But he was recently elected Republican Party chairman in Maryland. Abandoning that post now for a third run would rankle party regulars. Neither GOP Reps.

Wayne Gil-chrest nor Roscoe Bartlett seems inclined to seek higher office. It is Ms. Morella who has the incentive to run against Mr. Sarbanes. Challenges loom in her majority-Democratic district, from within her party and without.

In the past, it was conservative Republicans who grumbled loudest at her voting affinity with Democrats on everything from social issues to taxes. Her vote against the impeachment of Mr. Clinton, however, has brought more Republicans together in dismay and potentially in a willingness to vote for some- SAM iW Rule of law victim of impeachment trial By Linda R. Monk By Jay G. Merwin Jr.

ONCE AGAIN it appears as if Sen. Paul Sarbanes will not need his running shoes for his re-election run. The same scuffed loafers will do for this poli tician who has not faced a threat- eningppponent in years. Mr. Sarbanes' election to an un precedented fifth term as a U.S.

senator from Maryland seems inevitable but for one possibility that promises the thrill of forcing him to break a sweat in the next campaign. After the March 2000 primary, a well-financed Rep. Constance Morella, a Montgomery County Republican, could be standing next to him at the start ing line. To be sure, many Maryland Re publicans would prefer someone else, someone who votes more like a Republican. And some of their favorites do occasionally dance out from behind the curtain of denial to drop a few veils of encouragement to their cheering constituencies.

In the end, though, some of the obvious candidates have reason to hurry off stage when it's time to enter the Republican pri mary. Rep. Bob Ehrlich would be a forceful, articulate candidate. But will he risk his present office? Mr. Ehrlich's vote for impeachment won't help in a state that provided President Clinton's second-highest victory margin in 1992 and another strong one in 1996.

Another problem is that Mr. Ehrlich once served in the General Assembly, where even voting with Democrats on certain legislation, such as a bill with sexual harassment definitions so elastic as to pose a danger to doing business in HUD's new mission By Harold D. Young A HOMELESS man recently walked into our Department of Housing and Urban De velopment offices on Howard Street, where he was interviewed by a community-builder fellow. During their conversation, the HUD fellow learned that the young man would soon lose his job and needed a place to live. The fellow, who was trained as a nurse, suspected the man had a medical problem because he was sweating profusely and experiencing some lightheadedness.

He told her that he suffered from high blood pressure. The HUD fellow not only helped this man locate housing, but she also referred him to a Johns Hopkins Hospital program for hypertensive young black males. Weeks later, the HUD fellow continues to follow the young man's progress. This one woman's efforts shows HUD's community-building mission to find solutions to all kinds of problems, not just housing-related ones. With this in mind, a group of nine Baltimore HUD employees, known as community builders, is responsible for building partnerships within the community to improve outreach efforts.

Team goals The goals of the community-builder team are to help HUD reduce homelessness, transform public housing, increase home-ownership, fight for fair housing and empower people through economic development. Here are some examples of our work: Community builders are developing a resource directory for churches that are interested in starting nonprofit groups to help poor people. A team of community builders is consulting with Annapolis city administrators on the redevelopment of Clay Street. HUD fellows are looking for ways to increase efficiency in delivering services to the homeless in Baltimore. A HUD fellow is helping residents in West Baltimore become involved in redevelopment efforts.

Residents of HUD-insured multifamily properties may receive computer training to help prepare them for jobs. HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo has promised that community builders nationwide will "bring an outsider's perspective and a wealth of experience" to the problems facing urban America. In Maryland, we are realizing this goal by working with communities needing help to become cleaner, safer and more stable places to live, work and play. Harold D. Young is the senior Maryland HUD official and the senior community builder.

impeachment won 't help Clinton 's second-highest one else in a GOP primary in the district. Also, Democrats may decide it's time to trade in a Republican liberal for a real liberal, such as Montgomery County Del. Mark Shnver, of the Kennedy clan, who can attract the money needed to run. The escape route for Ms. Morella is higher up.

Unless a well-funded Republican materializes from the mist, no one will match her in money or name recognition in the Senate primary. If she wins the nomination, voters may well ask, so what? Why vote for a liberal Republican over a liberal Democrat? From there, it will be up to Ms. Morella to distinguish herself. Economic issues are her main chance. Mr.

Sarbanes draws national attention for his scoldings of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan for not lowering interest rates even further, for not pumping more money into the economy, the inflation risk be damned. Mr. Sarbanes' economic policies, rooted in the Depression era, are an anomaly even among Democrats. Surely any Republican can best him on this topic. Ms.

Morella already does on some business is cries More's daughter, Meg. "There's no law against that," says More. When informed that being bad violates God's law, More replies: "Well, then, let God arrest him." The devil's due Accused by his son-in-law, Will Roper, of giving the devil the benefit of law, More retorts: "What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the devil?" Roper, also a lawyer, is quick with his answer: "Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that." "Oh?" says More, "And when the last law was down and the devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, man's laws not God's, and if you cut them down and you're just the man to do it do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the devil the benefit of law for my own safety's sake." This is one of the most eloquent statements of what the rule of law really means. So it's disingenuous for Republicans and Democrats to criticize the president for "legal hairsplitting" when making defenses he is entitled to under the law. It was no more Mr.

Clinton's job to help Paula Jones' attorneys prove their case than it was More's to help the king convict him of treason. Crafty and even misleading use of language is not perjury, and the Supreme Court has said so. Perjury is difficult to prove, not to let scoundrels go free, but rather to limit the power of government. That is the purpose of written laws, and that's why Americans have been insisting on them since we broke away from England. It is what makes us unique as a nation.

Sarbanes si By George F. Will PORTSMOUTH, N.H. The loneliness of the long-distance runner abates a bit for Lamar Alexander at Yoken's restaurant. Here, Rotarians gather for good works and rhetoric of varying quality. This day a bell is rung and someone delivers a terse invocation.

Next, the group recites the Rotarian credo, which is radically incompatible with the state's great industry of the next 12 months, the presidential primary. (The credo: "The four-way test of things we think, say or do: 1. Is it the truth? 2. Is it fair to all concerned? 3. Will it build goodwill and better friendships? 4.

Will it be beneficial to all Then Mr. Alexander tells them why, next February, this state ought to treat him better than it did three Februarys ago. The presidency, he says, "can't be inherited and shouldn't be bought." It is hard work and should be held by someone who works hard to win it, not by anyone who relies on a famous name (the names George W. Bush and Elizabeth Dole come to mind) or inherited wealth (Steve Forbes). No one running in 2000 will have worked as hard as Mr.

Alexander has since 1995. Since the 1996 primary, he has been spurred by a sense of a near miss. That year his third-place finish in Iowa gave him a surge in New Hampshire, where the Thursday before the election he passed Bob Dole, who was chasing Pat Buchanan. Then Mr. Dole did unto Mr.

Alexander what George Bush had done unto Mr. Dole in 1988 he aired a barrage of negative ads that went unanswered. Mr. Dole secured second place, and the ability to fight on. Mr.

Alexander was on the way out. However, Mr. Alexander's two third-place finishes immediately bumped him up to 16 percent in California's Field Poll. That is the "slingshot effect" of early achievements in small contests. It explains why Mr.

Alexander, when he is asked here, as all candidates are, if he thinks New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary is the finest flower of U.S. democracy, he not only says, yes, but he also says it with unfeigned fervor. His expectation is that Iowa's caucuses will effectively winnow the Republican field to three, and New Hampshire will send just two on to March 7, when California, New York and eight other states (so far) vote. He has fine organizations in place here and in Iowa. Mr.

Alexander, 58, was Tennessee's governor and Mr. Bush's secretary of education, and his agenda is solid conservative stuff tax simplification featuring restoration of the "Reagan rates" (28 per-' cent maximum); raising the child exemption to doubling the charitable deduction for those who give more than 5 percent of income; missile defense. The Rotarians murmur approvingly at what he calls his new beatitude: 'Tis better to repeal than enact." By which he means Congress should pass two-year budgets and devote every second year largely to revising or repealing laws and regulations. However, his soft upper-South accent seems to accentuate the measured nature of the man and the lack of edge to his politics. Well, say some aides, a nation overdosed on Clintonian excitements might crave a low-voltage candidate.

The trouble is, it rarely does. Howard Baker, on whose Senate staff Mr. Alexander worked, was such a candidate in 1980, as was former Sen. Paul Tsongas in 1992 and Sen. Richard Lugarinl996.

Mr. Alexander's retail politics make sense here, and especially in Iowa, where the chore is to turn out people for caucuses on a February week night. However, he may be more methodical than New Hampshire voters are: Last time, about a quarter of them made up their minds the weekend before the voting. He has painful history on his side: He has run before and lost. Mr.

Reagan sought the nomination prematurely in 1968 and strenuously in 1976. Mr. Bush lost in 1980 and Mr. Dole did in 1988. Time was, Tennessee rivaled Virginia and Ohio as a nursery of presidents, producing three (Andrew Jackson, James Polk and Andrew Johnson) in 36 years.

A Gore-Alexander race would be the first since 1944 (FDR against Tom Dewey) with two nominees from the same state. That is not likely. But, then, perhaps not more unlikely than that both Gov. George W. Bush and Mrs.

Dole, the leaders in today's New Hampshire polls, will be as formidable next February as they seem today. George F. Will is a syndicated columnist. IN THE vast ocean of debate over the president's future, few waves have been made by warriors of the left. The colleges remain downright tranquil, undisturbed by any noises coming from pro-Clinton demonstrations.

Indeed, the only campus posters on the subject take another side: They cry out to impeach the president and are signed by local socialists. The great apathy on the left for defending the president only underscores an underlying truth about the impeachment and trial of President Clinton. It is not about conservatism vs. liberalism. It is about the right-wing vs.

the political middle. The far left and far right would both love to dump Mr. Clinton overboard, if for different reasons. The attempt by journalist Christopher Hitchens to weaken Mr. Clinton's case is remarkable only in reminding us that the radical left has been largely on the sidelines during all this back-and-forth.

A British leftist, Mr. Hitch-ens made a tiny splash by claiming that presidential aide Sidney Blu-menthal did indeed tell him that Monica Lewinsky had been a stalker. The Republicans immediately ordered an investigation into possible perjury by Mr. Blumen-thal, and Mr. Hitchens got his 10 minutes of face time on NBC's "Meet the Press." It is now obvious, however, that these revelations will in no way alter the course of the Good Ship Impeachment.

The Senate has put the vessel on a determined course to the junkyard. Nevertheless, this demonstration of strong hatred from the old-fashioned left reminds us that the president's politics have not been kind to knee-jerk liberalism. The far left has been scandalized by Mr. Clinton's dallying with such traditionally conservative causes as welfare reform, free trade, tax cuts and increased defense spending. The great masses inhabiting the political middle, on the other hand, are quite happy with these policies.

The socially corrosive impact of welfare on poor families, for example, had long troubled the broad swath of moderate Americans. Mr. Clinton succeeded in getting welfare reform past the left wing of his own party, which would have none of it, while softening some of the more Draconian rules advocated by the right. In appropriating popular Republican issues as his own, Mr. Clinton left conservatives with the unpopular ones: banning abortion, weakening environmental regulation, opposing gun control.

It may have been naive to believe that conservatives would be delighted at having a majority in Congress and a Democratic president they could work with. But that's not the name of the game. The name of the game is winning the rumble, that is, getting elected and controlling the river of government money. Once Mr. Clinton won the political contest, his opponents on the right saw no alternative but to find another excuse for a fight.

In his book "The Choice," journalist Bob Woodward offers a prophetic remark by former Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry. The Republicans, Mr. McCurry said long before anyone had heard the name Monica, "can only win by doing the single most dangerous thing for Mr. Clinton which is to totally destroy him as a human being. They will do everything they can to turn him into a liar or turn mm into a cheat or turn him into a philanderer.

That basically is the danger here if you don't have substantive grounds for debate." This quote is featured in a recent New York Review of Books tide written by Lars-Erik Nelson, Washington correspondent for the New York Daily News. (Mr. Nelson has towered over his journalistic peers in getting to the heart of the matter.) "For six years," Mr. Nelson writes, "the Republican party's right wing and its allied radio talk-show hosts have de nounced Clinton as a lying, draft-dodging, pot-smoking womanizer, notwithstanding the fact that many of their own heroes Gin-j grich, for example are at least as 1 vulnerable to some of the same I cruel accusations." He concludes ithat "what they Republicans 'need, and will have difficulty finding, is a program that is both conservative and politically safe." If the Republicans were looking Tor an example of appalling personal behavior, Mr. Clinton sure provided one.

Mr. Clinton's surviv til is a tribute to luck and to his considerable political skills. He had crafted a popular centrist po sition that could withstand the ftiost determined onslaught. Mr, Clinton may outlast this ordeal, tut the victory clearly belongs to the politics of moderation. I Froma Harrop is a Providence THE ONE sure outcome of the impeachment trial is that the rule of law has been diminished as much by Republicans as by Democrats.

And, to the chagrin of many of his constituents, House Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde has become its chief detractor. According to a recent Chicago Tribune poll of Mr. Hyde's conservative Illinois district, 35 percent of the respondents said their opinion of the congressman had dropped because of his handling of the impeachment proceedings. In his opening statement to the Senate, Mr. Hyde cited the case of Sir Thomas More, a former lord chancellor who was executed in 1535 for refusing to swear an oath that the king of England was supreme over the pope.

Quoting from "A Man for All Seasons," a play and Academy Award-winning movie, Mr. Hyde argued that More epitomized the rule of law when he went to his death rather than take an oath in vain. Yet while Mr. Hyde extolled More and the rule of law, his House managers excoriated President Clinton for "legal hairsplitting." Even Democrats have joined in the refrain at times. But legal hairsplitting is at the heart of the rule of law, and More is the perfect example of that.

Indeed, one could argue that More was the Bill Clinton of his day. Lawyeriywit As portrayed in the movie "A Man for All Seasons," More uses all his lawyerly wit to avoid directly answering the king's inquiries about his fealty. When informed that he must swear an oath about the king's marriage to Anne Bol-eyn, More plies his daughter Meg about the oath's wording. "What do the words matter?" asks Meg. "We know what it will mean." "It will mean what the words say," replies her father.

"An oath is made of words. It may be possible to take it." God created man, said More, "to serve him wittily, in the tangle of his mind." Only when God allows no must humans "clamor like champions." Instead, More said, "our natural business lies in escaping. If I can take this oath, I will." To More, the rule of law was a very pragmatic thing, beyond philosophy and morality, and therein lies its protection. It is not designed to punish bad people or reward good people, but to apply the same rules to all people, good or bad. The rule of law is therefore not conditioned on a human being's subjective determination of right and wrong which, of course, can vary as often as the king's taste in women.

At one point in the movie, More is urged to arrest a man who could prove treacherous (and indeed will). "Father, that man's bad," RANDY MACK BISHOP Defending the rule of law means defending the power of language to limit the power of government. It is the heart of the lawyer's enterprise, as evidenced by Mr. Clinton's famous formulation of "what the meaning of 'is' is." We deny him that argument at our own peril, as More would be the first to say. Personally, I think Mr.

Clinton is a liar and unfit to serve as president. That's why I didn't vote for him in 1996. But the question before the Senate is whether he is guilty of perjury, and on that question I think he has a valid claim to innocence. For my own safety's sake, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the law. Linda R.

Monk is the author of 'The Bill of Rights: A User's Guide," which won the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award. Bergerisms Nakedly political advice to senators: Cast each vote as if it were your last. Senators took a big risk debating in secret. The public might demand this be continued in perpetuity. Should the Senate vote wrong, Starr might investigate it.

Funny business goes on in the cloakroom, so they say. If you cannot even believe in the Olympics, what is there left? By Dan Berger Journal columnist..