STEP RIGHT UP

By Richard Lacayo

Among the latest glimpses of the Clinton White House, it's hard to pick the weirdest. You can't do better than the image of the President himself clamoring to stuff the White House bedrooms with big contributors. Then again there is the episode in which a deputy chief of staff gingerly points out that Clinton's many fund-raising coffees may make it necessary to temporarily cut short those troublesome government duties like his daily briefings by advisers. All the same, for sheer madcap ingenuity, nothing beats the unsigned memo suggesting ways to reach "our very aggressive goal of $40 million." The ways? Offer donors seats on Air Force One and Two. Put them at the table at presidential dinners. Get them into that maximum lunchroom, the White House mess. Never let it be said that only Republicans want to privatize government.

The White House mess, indeed. There comes a moment in every political scandal when the fog starts to clear. In the intricate matter that is Democratic fund raising, the moment is now. For much of that we can thank Harold Ickes. In response to a request from congressional investigators, Ickes has been turning over thousands of pages of documents from his three years as Clinton's deputy chief of staff, the job he left in January, thus forcing the White House to release them before they leak. While most appear to be harmless to the White House, a few priceless pages explode the President's claim that he was aloof from the fund-raising shenanigans of Campaign '96.

For weeks Clinton has insisted that any excesses were the fault of misguided staff members at the Democratic National Committee. But the Ickes papers show the President deeply in synch with the whole fevered enterprise. The best proof is his jottings on a proposal put before him by Terry McAuliffe, his chief fund raiser, in January 1995, just as the G.O.P. congressional majority was settling in. McAuliffe, who wanted to reward old party supporters and "energize" prospective ones, suggested that the White House offer jogging, golf or coffee with the President. He also named 10 big Democratic Party supporters who might be the first to jog, golf or coffee. Clinton, who leaped on the idea as if it were the last cupcake on the dessert cart, scribbled in further instructions: "Get other names at 100,000 or more, 50,000 or more...Ready to start overnights right away."

Clinton didn't invent the White House sleepover. Among the 273 visitors who brought their pajamas during the Bush Administration, a few were G.O.P. donors. Others were supporters such as Rush Limbaugh, a man so crucial that when he arrived in June 1992, Bush even carried his bags. But like Henry Ford, Clinton took an existing idea and perfected its mass production. In the Clinton White House, 938 guests trooped through. They included the famous, like Barbra Streisand, Steven Spielberg and Billy Graham, and the relatively obscure, including numerous personal friends of the Clintons and Chelsea. But at least a third of them were moved to make donations to the party before or after their stayovers, totaling $10 million in all, according to the New York Times.

In January 1996 there was another memo to Ickes and chief of staff Leon Panetta. This one, from Evelyn Lieberman, another deputy chief of staff, urged more coffees. In 1995 and '96 there would be a total of 103, several in a good week-- enough to produce mild caffeine overload and $27 million. But the really notable part of that memo was the warning by Lieberman that during two weeks of intense activity, "staff who routinely brief the President will be asked to be flexible during this period and accept that their briefings may be considerably truncated or eliminated."

Bill Clinton has never been averse to the unsightly money business of politics. Even in college he had a card file of friends that he later used to solicit funds for his first congressional campaign. Now he insists that "the White House was not for sale." He says that D.N.C. guidelines "made clear that there was to be no price tag on the events." But a different story keeps popping up all around him. In the Los Angeles Times, an anonymous Democratic fund raiser insisted that D.N.C. finance chairman Marvin Rosen simply told fund raisers to tell donors that $50,000 would get them into a White House coffee. Another memo in the Ickes documents, this one signed by Peter Knight, the President's campaign manager, calculates that $500,000 could be expected from a forthcoming White House coffee for 10 Texas donors, which he calls a "fund raiser." All 10 were hit in the weeks that followed but gave only $132,800.

The intense money game was played by Clinton in a way that gave hospitality a bad name. The speedy turnover in the Lincoln Bedroom, the java huddles with big donors, the shared stretches on Clinton's jogging route reduced the message of the presidency to "Attention, K Mart shoppers." But they also put serious pressure on federal campaign-finance laws. Now it only remains to be determined whether the pressure reached the breaking point. Though nothing made public so far is evidence that Clinton or Vice President Al Gore asked for money in the White House, which could have been illegal, TIME has learned that congressional investigators are looking into that possibility.

There are also episodes outside the White House that look suspiciously as though fund raisers tried to lure special interests with the prospect of spending time with officials who could affect their businesses. One was a $10,000-a-plate dinner attended by Clinton last year at the mansion of Democratic pitchman William Brandt, outside Chicago. It raked in more than $1 million for the D.N.C. The guests included bankruptcy lawyers and bankers. Also present was Brady Williamson, whom Clinton had just appointed chairman of a commission that will file a report later this year recommending changes to bankruptcy law.

Federal law forbids most government appointees from using their titles in connection with their appearance at political fund-raising events. Williamson says he was there as a private citizen. But several banking-industry invitees complained that Brandt told them that Williamson would be there and that it would be a good opportunity to voice their views on the new bankruptcy law. In a statement last week to Senator Charles Grassley, David Thompson of First Chicago said Brandt told him the dinner would honor Williamson. "If [Brandt] was doing it, it was against my wishes and the directions of the White House counsel," says Williamson. Brandt summed up the influence-selling charges as "all garbage."

Among most Americans, the reaction to all of this is not exactly outrage. A TIME/CNN poll conducted last week by Yankelovich Partners shows that Clinton's approval rating is still a healthy 60%. Some 59% said it was inappropriate for Clinton to invite donors to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom. But only 23% think there is a "crisis" in campaign finance.

Even so, there is now the suspicion that the government of China used Asian-American front groups to try to funnel influence money into U.S. politics. That possibility was strong enough that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright expressed her concern to China's leaders in Beijing. And it was the Asian connection that was at the heart of the D.N.C. announcement last week that it was returning another $1.5 million in campaign contributions from 77 donors, bringing to almost $3 million the amount it has given back. Three-fourths of the suspect money was brought in by three Chinese-American moneymen: D.N.C. fund raiser John Huang, former Arkansas restaurant owner Charlie Yah Lin Trie and Johnny Chung, who brought six mainland Chinese businessmen to one of Clinton's radio addresses.

Colorado Governor Roy Romer, the new D.N.C. chairman, announced new check-screening procedures and reiterated the fund-raising guidelines that forbid soliciting contributions in return for White House invitations and bar most party-related activities from government buildings. But with the flood of new evidence being released, there are more calls for a special prosecutor. Attorney General Janet Reno continues to resist, claiming she still hasn't seen sufficient evidence of lawbreaking by high government officials, the threshold requirement. Reno promises to reconsider after a Justice Department task force concludes its ongoing investigation, which could take several months.

But some of the growing number of people insisting on a special counsel are Democrats. In the Senate those include Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a sponsor of the dying McCain-Feingold campaign- finance reform bill, as well as Daniel Moynihan of New York and Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. In the House it's California Representative Henry Waxman, lead Democrat in its fund-raising probe. This makes for the kind of situation that requires Washington memoirs of the '90s to have a separate index heading on "Clinton, temper of." Last week he was making late-night phone calls to ask Democrats what gives, sometimes at the top of his voice. To New Jersey's Robert Torricelli, he complained that Democrats who were looking to the independent counsel as a quick way out of a political problem were only creating a more serious one.

Republicans want to keep the heat on Democrats without having the investigation spread to their own fund-raising practices. To their immense discomfort, the FBI has been investigating whether the Chinese government funneled money to both parties in last year's congressional races. Senator Fred Thompson, the Tennessee Republican who will be chairman of the hearings, promises he will also look into congressional fund raising. But Republicans, who let lobbyists draft part of environmental legislation in the last Congress, want his questions to stop at the White House.

For them, therefore, an independent counsel is doubly attractive--not only to chase the President but also to cut off any other inquiries. Some Republicans are even thinking of invoking an obscure clause of the independent-counsel statute that would require Janet Reno to start a separate investigation into whether a counsel is needed if a majority of either party on the Senate Judiciary Committee provides its own list of possible criminal charges. If she cannot refute the charges within 30 days, she has 60 days to investigate the case for appointing one. During all that time, Reno would be required to shut down the grand-jury probe now under way.

Democrats are playing their own game. Senate minority leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota says Democrats will not agree to fund Thompson's committee until Republicans set a date for voting on McCain-Feingold. But they are also insisting that the Thompson probe focus on congressional fund raising, knowing that is the very thing Republicans want to avoid.

Without campaign-finance reform, all this will only get worse. Midway through Behind the Oval Office, the abject recollections of Dick Morris, there comes a moment when the President, sick of struggling to pay for the TV advertising that Morris had started more than a year before Election Day, unburdens himself: "I can't think. I can't act. I can't do anything but go to fund raisers and shake hands."

From there it was a short trip to the Lincoln Bedroom. The funny thing, of course, is that Lincoln never slept there. That room served as his study. And because of a renovation ordered by Harry Truman that demolished the interior of the White House, even the walls are 20th century. The mattress is no treat; the furniture is lugubrious Victorian; and for good measure the place is supposed to be haunted. Winston Churchill is said to have sighted Lincoln's ghost. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands reported an ectoplasm in a stovepipe hat. Bill Clinton thought he saw some easy dollars. He must have been mistaken. They weren't that easy after all.

--Reported by Michael Duffy, Tamala M. Edwards, J.F.O. McAllister and Viveca Novak/Washington

For more information, see the TIME/CNN Website at AllPolitics.com

With reporting by MICHAEL DUFFY, TAMALA M. EDWARDS, J.F.O. MCALLISTER AND VIVECA NOVAK/WASHINGTON