Reproduced with permission of The Progressive Review, 1739 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20009, 202-232-5544, Fax: 202-234-6222. Editor: Sam Smith, ssmith@igc.org.

Why Washington loves James Carville
December 19, 1996

James Carville's mad-dog act, railing against Kenneth Starr, is having an impact well beyond Whitewater. Using Carville as a peg, official Washington and its servile scribes are raising questions about the institution of independent counsel itself.

Independent counsels are loose cannon on the deck of Washington politics. Most everything else can be contained, restrained or explained away. The special counsels too often reveal just how seamy, corrupt and hypocritical this town is and there are plenty of people here who don't like it. Without even waiting to see what Starr's grand juries have come up with, the local establishment is buying into Carville's rant. As Carville himself put it recently, "There've been four 'Nightlines' on independent counsels. I've made my point."

Indeed he has. We have, for example, found Archibald Cox ruminating darkly in the New York Times, Vanity Fair running a long sob story about how tough it is to be a big shot under investigation, and the New Republic warning that "the need to reform the special prosecutor system has reached a critical point."

What is this critical point? Simply this: the presidential couple who have been the darlings of the city's elite are now in deep trouble because an independent counsel has been allowed to look into their affairs. While the city is busy feeling the Clintons' pain, the country can be deeply thankful that we still have a strong special prosecutor law on the books.