It is fashionable, among President Clinton’s suddenly swelling ranks of critics (as well as among his last-ditch defenders), to bewail how awful this all is for the country, how degrading to us, to have such tawdry stuff cluttering the national agenda, such dirty laundry aired, such private matters exposed.
I respectfully dissent. On balance, the Monica Lewinsky scandal is good fo r America, in my view–good for Democrats, in the long run, as well as Republicans–regardless of whether Clinton is forced from office.
Traumatic as the process has been and will be, our body politic is sick enough to need strong medicine. And our political and civic culture will benefit in as-yet-unappreciated ways from having our noses rubbed so deeply in the dishonesty and decadence personified by Bill Clinton and his apologists.
Clintonism–a politics of image over reality, of say anything that sells, of governing by poll and focus group, of deception as standard operating procedure–has been a stunning success (at least in tactical terms). Nothing exceeds like success, and so Clintonism has become the great, bipartisan addiction of the governing class.
An effective remedy for any addiction will necessarily be painful. Painful, but cleansing. The denouement of this drama is likely to be not merely the disgrace of President Clinton, and of his cadre of co-dependent liars and spinners, but also a much- needed purging of the culture of lying that they have so perniciously perfected.
Perhaps this experience will do for us what even the trauma of Watergate failed to do in any deep or lasting way: push us toward a civic culture in which the first question one asks about a politician, or a journalist, or a professor, or a lawyer is not whether that person is liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, one of us or one of them. It is whether he or she can be trusted to tell the truth.
(Yes, truthfulness is not everything. Jimmy Carter made that virtue seem almost a vice by the self-righteous way in which he handled himself after winning election on the post-Watergate promise: ”I’ll never lie to you.” But we really should be able to elect a president who is neither a flagrant liar nor a sanctimonious prig.)
The Lewinsky purge should also occasion a new appreciation of the right to privacy, and of the fallibility of most mortals in matters sexual, and of the legitimate needs of presidents for confidential advice, and of the heavy costs of criminalizing politics. This appreciation will be more genuine than the concern exhibited by the selective and self-serving complaints of the president and his apologists.
Those complaints ring hollow because what Clinton seeks on all these fronts is a de facto exemption for himself from the same rules of law, and the same standards of moral judgment, that he and his supporters have helped create and apply to others.
In doing so, they would turn on its head James Madison’s declaration (in Federalist 57) that one of our Constitution’s bulwarks against oppression is that our rulers ”can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.”
Take the complaint that neither Clinton nor anybody else should be forced to answer intrusive questions under oath about whether he or she has had a consensual sexual affair. That, presumably, is the sentiment underlying the widespread view that Clinton should not be condemned for lying in response to such questions regarding Monica Lewinsky (and others) in his Jan. 17 deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit.
But Clinton, and his wife (who joined in the canonization of Anita Hill), have been leading champions of the sweeping sexual harassment rules–as augmented by the Clinton-sponsored Violence Against Women Act of 1994–that are forcing more and more men (and women), all over the country, to answer questions about consensual affairs. Those are the very rules that led the judge in the Paula Jones case to require Clinton to answer such questions, based on Jones’ claim that he had engaged in sex discrimination by rewarding female subordinates who gave him sexual favors (like Lewinsky) while punishing those who refused (like Jones).
The principled response to the perception that sexual harassment defendants should not be forced to answer such questions would be not to give the president a pass but to amend the law to protect all similarly situated defendants. We might call it Monica’s Law.
We already owe Monica for her role as a catalyst in bringing to the fore legitimate concerns about the increasing criminalization of politics, and the resulting damage to the presidency. For that harm, many have blamed Kenneth Starr. A more practical and principled response would be to reconsider the independent counsel statute, which clearly mandated that some independent counsel (albeit not necessarily Starr) pursue the evidence of possible felonies that Linda Tripp dumped in Starr’s lap on Jan. 12.
That post-Watergate statute was re-enacted in 1994, with the support of most Democrats–who had long used it to bedevil Republican presidents–over the objections of leading Republicans. It was signed into law by President Clinton.
It has proven to be a bad law. The problem is not (as Clintonites now argue, regarding Starr) that it has been administered by bad people. It is that–in a system in which the line between aggressive political or business tactics and white- collar crime is often debatable, and in which candidates finance their campaigns by peddling access to special interests, and in which honesty has not always been the most successful policy–a statute that provides so large an incentive for prosecutorial relentlessness is practically a mandate for criminalizing the customs of the political world.
The evident irony in all of this is that the prime engines of President Clinton’s destruction are laws of which he has been a particular champion. And one badge of Clinton’s hypocrisy is his pattern of buying off key constituencies by championing laws so singularly unforgiving that they are constantly at war with the culture of lying that is the essence of Clintonism.
”For the majority of us, white lies or discretion about sex are occasional digressions from general, everyday honesty,” Andrew Sullivan recently wrote in The New Republic. ”But, with Clinton, the lies about sex . . . are of a seamless piece with his lies about virtually everything else. . . . From the beginning, Clinton lied with indiscriminate abandon. He has lied about genocide and he has lied about his golf scores. . . . He claims to be a feminist, and yet treats the women around him as fools, tokens, or sexual objects. . . . He claimed to be a social liberal, and yet signed the Defense of Marriage Act and boasted about it on Christian talk radio.” The list could go on and on.
Why do I go on so about lying? Part of the reason is that I don’t see how democracy can work if politicians can lie with impunity, winning elections by pretending to be people they are not, and making promises they don’t plan to keep, and telling people only what they want to hear.
And part of the reason is that in a world with no consensus about religious or moral absolutes, the best deterrent to destructive and antisocial conduct may be to stigmatize the systematic lying and covering up that inevitably accompany such conduct.
It would be naive, of course, to expect total truthfulness from anyone. It would be even more naive to expect any survivor of the gantlet run by presidential candidates to be either a choirboy or Diogenes’ paragon. And one can imagine situations in which a president should lie–for example, if asked by a reporter to reveal a secret hostage rescue operation.
But none of this means we need to settle for chronic liars like Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon, or even for presidents as ready to resort to occasional deception as were Ronald Reagan (who lied when he denied trading arms for hostages) and George Bush (who lied when he said that ”the fact that (Clarence Thomas) is black and a minority has nothing to do with this in the sense that he is the best qualified at this time”). If journalists and voters decide that they want to separate the liars in politics from the truth tellers, it would not be that hard to do.
I, for one, would settle for a president of whom could be said what Huckleberry Finn said of his creator Mark Twain: ”There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.” Perhaps, thanks to the intern Lewinsky, that is the sort of president we will one day get.