Gingrich Tears Into Clinton for ‘Enormous Scandal’

WASHINGTON —  House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), ending a months-long cease-fire over President Clinton’s legal and ethical troubles, has mounted a stormy new offensive against the president with a major strategic goal: to change the subject of debate from Clinton’s private weaknesses to his public probity.

In an escalating series of attacks on the president over campaign finance irregularities and other issues, Gingrich has provoked a bitter response from Democrats--and abruptly transformed the environment on Capitol Hill from tentative attempts at bipartisanship to open warfare.

“We are in the middle of an enormous scandal,” Gingrich said Thursday in a speech to Republican women. “Its ramifications are historic and cover many, many things. There’s been a deliberate, desperate effort to trivialize it into a soap opera so we can dismiss it.”

Gingrich said that he is less concerned about the president’s sex life than the White House refusal to cooperate with congressional investigations. “The American people have the right to know when the law has been broken,” he said.

Clinton, seeking to remain above the fray, replied at a Thursday news conference: “I can be responsible for a lot of things, but I’m not responsible for the speaker’s behavior.”

But House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said that Gingrich’s comments “demeaned the office which he is privileged to hold.” The Democratic National Committee issued a statement accusing Gingrich of a “descent into the gutter of American politics.” And White House spokesman Mike McCurry called on the speaker to “come to his senses.”

The bare-knuckle rhetoric marked a significant escalation in election-year bickering that may sour the political atmosphere and doom major legislative accomplishments for this year.

It gives powerful new impetus to a sharp swing toward partisanship that is buffeting a variety of issues on Capitol Hill. Efforts to draft an anti-smoking bill, once considered likely to become this Congress’ most important achievement, have deteriorated into partisan name-calling. Republicans and Democrats are squabbling over competing spending plans, arguments that belie the cooperation which led to last year’s bipartisan budget-balancing agreement. Legislation to provide urgently needed money for the United Nations is headed toward a veto because of a Clinton-GOP fight over abortion funding.

Gingrich’s offensive also represents an important new tack for Republicans, who have spent months frustrated because they have been unable to turn charges of sexual misconduct by Clinton to their political advantage.

Gingrich said that he and his wife had “wrestled” with the issue for more than a week, and confidants said that the attacks on Clinton reflected the speaker’s deepest convictions--not political strategy.

“You cannot show me a poll that shows the pragmatic political logic of [Gingrich’s] maneuver,” argued Tony Blankley, a former aide to the speaker. “After a year and a half of trying to reach accommodation with the president, their convictions have gotten the better of them.”

But other Republicans said that Gingrich’s offensive also is aimed at reframing the debate over Clinton’s troubles to the GOP’s advantage--with the side effect of giving energy to the base of strong Republican voters that they hope to bring to the polls this fall.

“He is trying to change the terrain here and get beyond the sexual allegations to tell the American people that nobody is above the law,” said Republican pollster Linda DiVall, a Gingrich advisor.

“People have been coming up to him asking why the Republicans were sitting passively by,” she said. “It was sheer and absolute frustration. . . . The press was saying we as a people don’t care about character. Well, we do care about character.”

GOP pollster Bill McInturff said that Republicans had failed spectacularly in their few halting attempts previously to extract political advantage from the charges of sexual misconduct against Clinton. Instead, they have watched in dismay and confusion as the president’s approval rating has soared.

“Sex . . . [is] not our terrain,” he said.

In his attacks on Clinton this week, Gingrich moved to a different battleground: questions about whether the president and his Democratic allies have been systematically trying to obstruct justice.

Gingrich, who has encouraged other Republican leaders to follow suit, said that he was provoked into speaking out by Democrats’ refusal to vote to grant immunity to four witnesses for a House committee’s investigation of Democratic campaign fund-raising irregularities in the 1996 campaign.

On Wednesday, the speaker warned that he might block the proposed $18-billion funding of the International Monetary Fund--a major international priority for the administration--if the Democrats do not cooperate with the fund-raising investigation.

And, asked whether he endorsed the recent characterization by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) of President Clinton as a “scumbag,” Gingrich said: “Some thought it was too strong and others thought it was too weak. . . . I would rather stand next to an honest man who uses a clumsy word than an illegal man with five sharp spinners any day of my life.”

At his news conference Thursday, Clinton pledged to continue seeking bipartisan cooperation with Gingrich. “Nothing he says about me personally, nothing, will keep me from working with him and with other Republicans in the Congress to do everything I possibly can on every issue before us.”

But House Democratic leaders wasted little time in launching their counterattack against Gingrich, demanding that he remove himself from any congressional investigations of the president.

In a letter, Gephardt told Gingrich that he appeared to have decided Clinton’s guilt already and is incapable of “a fair and impartial investigation.”

“We don’t need to turn this government into the ‘Jerry Springer’ show,” he told reporters, referring to the talk show that has often begun with talk about sex and ended in fisticuffs.

Times staff writer Edwin Chen contributed to this report.