As if the impeachment mess weren't enough, President Clinton is facing additional heartache from an obscure-and ordinarily harmless-proclamation mandated by Congress.
On Oct. 16, while on a campaign fundraising swing through Chicago, Clinton issued a statement announcing National Character Counts Week. Given the President's recent ethical problems, it was only a matter of time before his critics seized on the irony of the situation.
The day after the proclamation, an anonymous, two-page message rolled off fax machines, containing a printout of the White House Web site's version of the proclamation text. White House specialty press spokesman Dag Vega-the official responsible for sending out news of such proclamations-said the White House had nothing to do with the fax.
From there, the trail led naturally to the Republican National Committee. RNC spokesman Mark Pfeifle fessed up to the party's having sent the "unusual" anonymous fax message on Oct. 17. Pfeifle contended that the proclamation's release in Chicago on a Friday afternoon shows the Clinton administration was trying to go "underneath the radar screen" in order to sidestep an embarrassing juxtaposition of the proclamation's rhetoric with Clinton's acknowledged lying about his affair with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Pfeifle also pointed out that many phrases that were staples of "character counts" proclamations from 1994 to 1997 are absent this year, including "honesty," "trustworthiness," "high ethical standards," "personal accountability," "responsibility," "respect," "values," "moral and ethical standards," and "the difference between right and wrong."
By contrast, this year's proclamation mainly focuses on the administration's public-service initiatives, including AmeriCorps, America Reads, Learn and Save America and the National Senior Service Corps.
Many of the phrases that went AWOL this year stem from principles espoused by Character Counts!, a group based in Marina del Rey, Calif., that has convinced Congress to pass resolutions calling for the Character Counts Week proclamations every year since 1994. (House Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., who is chairing the Clinton impeachment inquiry, was one of the bill's original cosponsors.) Ever since Congress earlier this year-in a virtually pro forma manner-set aside October 18-24 as National Character Counts Week, the President has been obligated to make the proclamation official.
The flap over this year's announcement may get bigger before it quiets down. On Monday, the RNC issued a news release (this time not anonymously) and sought to interest talk radio hosts in the proclamation, Pfeifle said. "We wanted to make sure the American people and the news media got the information immediately," he said.
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