The leering jokes of late-night comics. The armchair analyses of prime-time experts and pseudo-experts. The headlines and polls and spin and back-room calculation of everyday politics. Suddenly now, all this round-the-clock Lewinsky chatter seems so far short of the mark as to be beyond endurance. For suddenly, ill prepared and still barely conscious of the situation, the nation must tap its deepest reserves of sobriety and courage to confront a truly extraordinary obligation. The president of the United States must be removed from office.
It was not uncertainty about the scandal’s underlying facts that deterred us from saying this before. The truth has been obvious from the start, and subsequent developments have brought little more than corroborating detail. Bill Clinton and an office intern not half his age romped in the White House as if it were Joey Buttafuoco’s Long Island garage. To conceal the affair, Bill Clinton explored frontiers of legality so distant that only people directly in his pay could claim to see them. While the world watched, Bill Clinton brazenly lied about the sex and the law alike. And then Bill Clinton’s executive branch — with his approval — acted to sustain his lies before the twin bars of justice and public opinion.
We have never been impressed by the argument that this is just a small, private embarrassment without consequence to the country’s business. Monica Lewinsky was never just a small, private embarrassment to the president himself. Clinton always knew that were his sexual squalor revealed it would undermine his authority as the nation’s leader. Which is why he lied about it in the first place. Clinton always knew, as well, that were the lies exposed as criminal, the damage would be deeper still. Which is why even at this late hour he continues to insist, insulting common sense and logic both, that his every word and deed have been “legally accurate.”
No man, not least the president, is above the law. The president, who must be respected in order for the entire project of self-government to remain respectable, cannot be notorious for debauchery and dishonesty. And the administration the president directs cannot be allowed to serve as a king’s court; the government cannot systematically deceive its citizens about the president’s misdeeds. During the Lewinsky controversy, Bill Clinton has made war on each of these bedrock principles. The war has been outrageous, and THE WEEKLY STANDARD has objected all along.
But we have remained alert, at the same time, to a further principle, one less elevated but no less real. Republican government must be stable government. The president serves a uniquely weighty role in that stability. And so the presidency’s regular four-year rhythms — and the popular electoral decisions that animate them — are not to be casually undone.
This functional requirement of American politics exists in tension with the system’s ideals. The president is asked to embody the highest standards of individual conduct and public duty. But in practice, that the entire machine not slip its gears, he is actually allowed more latitude for error than other politicians. Congressmen and senators are engulfed by scandal from time to time; in most such instances, no great national price is paid. But it takes — and should take — more than commonplace wrongdoing prematurely to end a president’s career. Before they turn against the chief executive, Americans will play elaborate psychological tricks on themselves — they will ignore their intuition and trim their convictions, all the while lunging at any excuse to pretend that they are doing something else. It is predictable. It is pardonable.
And it is the story of 1998. Maybe, the nation has told itself, Monica Lewinsky really is Bill Clinton’s purely private peccadillo. Maybe his repellent behavior — the tightly wound ball of sex and lies and crime — really isn’t so rare at all. Maybe they all do it. And maybe, just maybe, Monica Lewinsky is a fiction. Maybe the president is telling the truth, Clinton has survived all year by cultivating such cynical delusions. Here, too, he has committed a sin. And here, too, this magazine has tried to call him to account for it.
But we have until now deferred a final judgment on the fate of the Clinton presidency because we have always been confident that the national delusion would ultimately be arrested; that the president would be trapped for good in his lies; that there would come a day of reckoning on which he was forced to end his eerie quiet and confront the mess he has made of our politics. On such a day, we held faint hope, Clinton might still bow before the American civil religion. He might freely acknowledge his past corruptions, in other words, and atone.
For weeks before his speech to the nation on August 17, just such a course was urged on the president by some of his friends, in and out of government. They wanted him to make a full breast of it, to apologize — for everything. Noble philosophy is scarce around Bill Clinton; these people no doubt conceived their advice in exclusively tactical terms, as the best means by which he might secure his grip on the White House. No matter. Had he taken this advice, he could have made the country a precious gift. Whatever the motive, he could have offered the necessary tribute to virtue. He could have reaffirmed the axiom that in American public life, at the center of which lies the presidency, law and truth and probity really do matter.
And then — perhaps — Clinton could safely have served out his term. Greatly diminished, to be sure. But no longer a threat to anyone but himself.
Alas, it did not work out this way. The day of reckoning has come and gone. The Clinton presidency is now irretrievable.
In his August 17 address, Bill Clinton all but confessed the basic Lewinsky lie, and thus rendered useless the fundamental pretext by which the country has tolerated him these many months. Clinton otherwise expanded on the lie, however, with the preposterous suggestion that his dishonesty in practice did not constitute dishonesty in law. And then the president did something truly appalling. He refused all further blame. He expressed anger that he had been caught in what is “nobody’s business” but his own; it is “past time,” he said, for Americans to relieve him of responsibility for his own disgraceful actions. He should be left alone and unchallenged, in other words: the president as unquestioned and unrepentant villain.
It cannot be. If Clinton is now permitted to serve out his scheduled days in the Oval Office, the problem will not be that some urgent piece of the people’s business may go undone. Three days after Clinton’s Lewinsky speech, he was able to announce an apparently necessary anti-terrorist action overseas — all to the good, and just as an “ordinary” president would. But Clinton is not an “ordinary” president, and he must not be allowed to become one. That will be the problem with his continuing in office. Every time Bill Clinton appears in public to perform the work that only a president can, he represents a walking, brutal rebuke to the spirit of our constitutional order. And every additional day that the country lets him keep on walking, it will be endorsing and embracing that rebuke. It will be establishing the Clinton presidency — not just Clinton’s tawdry character, but his contempt for the law and its habits and mores — as normative in our politics.
Impeachment, Alexander Hamilton wrote, is reserved not for punishment of technical violations of the law but as protection against broader “injuries done immediately to the society itself.” The Clinton presidency has become just such an injury. America must now be led to recognize this by honorable public figures in both parties. The country must become indignant. And if its indignation proves insufficient to force Bill Clinton’s resignation, then, yes, he must be impeached and convicted. Either way, Clinton must go.
David Tell, for the Editors
