The Last Campaign

Like a weasel, Bill Clinton emerges from the drainpipe shinier than when he went in. He has spent a year in the dark, ever since that night last January when he called his slippery guru Dick Morris and asked him to take the country's moral temperature. When Morris' polling suggested that people could stomach an affair but not a cover-up, Clinton's response was his mantra. "Well, we'll just have to win then." Now, on the anniversary of that vow, the President seems to have made good on it.

DIANA WALKER FOR TIME

After a year spent denouncing Clinton's character--the lies he told, the friends he betrayed, the garbage he collected in the campaign to save his skin--even his enemies last week were left wondering at the political skill that goes with it. The most hardened pros could scarcely imagine the assignment Clinton took on. He stood Tuesday night before an audience that included the Senators who are in the process of deciding whether all the ways he dishonored his office warrant stripping him of it--and then he flaunted its power and magic, bet the farm, promised the moon, massaged his approval ratings, and went out the very next day, even as his own lawyers were in the Senate defending him as a louse who still deserved a break, and thanked the roaring crowds of Buffalo, N.Y., for "one of the great days of my presidency."

Bill Clinton is now waging the last campaign--a multifront war to keep his job by appearing to do his job, a war in which he has enlisted lawyers, pollsters, policy advisers, Democratic lawmakers and celebrities. It doesn't matter that he will be long retired before the promises he lofted hit the ground; his poll numbers are his legacy. Even inside the White House, some heard an elegy Tuesday night. "It's like the speech you give when you know you're not getting anything passed, when you have no agenda," says an adviser. "So why not keep talking about the things you care about?"

The head-splitting spectacle--trial by day, triumph by night--inspired another round of commentary about the compartmentalized President. And so it was easy to miss the secret of his success. Maybe Bill Clinton is, in the end, the only person in this whole divisive drama who has remained intact, with a kind of wicked integrity all his own. One reason he can conduct Middle East peace talks in the morning and legal-strategy sessions at night, spray proposals on everything from digital mug shots to national parks, is that all the wild gestures and every last ploy work to the same goal--his survival, his popularity, his eternally orbiting polls.

Clinton's performance enthralled Senate Democrats to the point that Republican lawmakers conceded there was no longer a chance of finding the 67 votes needed to convict and threw open the question of whether this might all end sooner rather than later. "Clinton's won," said Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson on his 700 Club show, to the fury of many conservative allies. "They might as well dismiss the impeachment hearing and get on with something else, because it's over as far as I'm concerned." All that's left to argue is whether history will remember Clinton's gifts as reason to excuse the pain he's caused or as a reminder of how much promise he wasted.

The White House spin all year, repeated five times daily like a call to prayer, is that the President is going about the people's business, not obsessing about his legal defense. But he doesn't need to pull every lever and push every button in order to control the campaign machine. After two elections and a full year of fire by trial, says a top aide, "we know what he wants, when he wants it, and how he wants it."

The sharpest change in the President's defense last week was that after months of arguing the merits, the White House lawyers finally argued the facts--and that decision was pure Clinton. In the House proceedings, his team buried the evidence deep in their legal briefs, arguing in their rare public comments that the offenses, even if true, did not warrant impeachment. But once the prospect of a trial became real--and the President's lawyers got the time to make a variety of arguments--the direction of the defense came from Clinton himself. Lawyers Charles Ruff and David Kendall kept in touch with the President by telephone; meetings were avoided. Even upon their return from the Hill last week, Clinton simply called to thank them for their work. He was confident that his team knew how to make the most of the overall strategy. Plus, says a White House adviser of the case against the President, "he really doesn't believe he did it."

While Clinton stays focused on business during the day, he grows more expansive as the hours pass. Mornings are consumed by press events and policy briefings, the annual winter wonkathon that produces both the State of the Union speech and the budget; he can use the afternoon to think and read. White House aides are very careful to insist that he does not watch the trial as it's happening, but as one aide put it, "it's not that he's oblivious either." And at the end of the working day, the walls come down completely. Clinton carries upstairs to the residence the fat folder of policy questions and decision memos that accumulate in his In box every day, but the rest of his life is up there waiting for him. He channel surfs among news, sports and nonstop talk shows, thinks through the twisted case again and again, calls friends and supporters to gauge reaction to the day's events and, most important, checks in with his friends in the Senate.