JUST RAPE

Thus, Juanita Broaddrick’s credible charge of a rape accompanied by physical battery by a man who was then attorney general of Arkansas and is now our president is too meaningless to merit a word of reproach from, among others, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Susan Faludi, Eleanor Smeal, former congresswoman and vocal feminist Patricia Schroeder, former governor and vocal feminist Ann Richards, or Geraldine Ferraro, vocal feminist and former candidate for the vice presidency of the United States. On cable chat show, the ever-flexible Elizabeth Holtzman, her grin stretched as tight as a death’s-head, expresses great concern for the imperiled rights of Bill Clinton. How do you defend yourself against such a charge? she wonders. On Crossfire, Clinton friend Susan Estrich claims that in the absence of proof, the benefit of the doubt goes to the accused, who is then declared innocent. But if so, innocence must also be granted to Clarence Thomas, whose denial of a far lesser charge was so much more forceful than Clinton’s, and against whom no scintilla of corroborating evidence has ever been brought. So, are the apologies to Justice Thomas in the mail? Thought not.

Feminists have also made much of the power equation, according to which social arrangements are themselves weapons of intimidation, used against women by men. Indeed, Mrs. Broaddrick’s charges involve not only rape, but rape by a government official, a man of vast institutional power, charged with upholding the law. “All rape is an exercise in power, but some rapists have an edge that is more than physical,” writes Susan Brown miller. “They operate within an institutionalized setting that works to their advantage, and in which a victim has little chance to redress her grievance.”

One such instance is what Brownmiller calls “police rape,” in which the violation is done by an authority figure, charged with keeping these things from happening. Bill Clinton in 1978, at the time Mrs. Broaddrick says he raped her, was the top cop in his state, soon to be governor, then president, making the assault the charges him with the ultimate perversion of power. As Brown miller writes, “The horror of police rape is special, for it is an abuse of power by one whose job it is to control such abuses of power. . . . Police rape . . . represents the ultimate Kafkaesque nightmare, for when society’s chosen figure of lawful authority commits a criminal act upon one of those persons he has been sanctioned to protect, where can a woman turn for justice?” Not, it appears, to the women in Congress, who used to call themselves members-at-large on behalf of all women, whose special beleaguered constituency was their imperiled and endangered sex.

Phone calls to the offices of senators Barbara Boxer, Barbara Mikulski, Dianne Feinstein, and Patty Murray (all of them strong backers of Clarence Thomas’s accuser, Anita Hill) and representatives Nita Lowey, Rosa DeLauro, Zoe Lofgren, Carolyn Maloney, and Nancy Pelosi brought refusals to comment, unreturned messages, statements that the reported incident happened too long ago for comment, and assurances that the members were working on more pressing issues. After a few days, Patricia Ireland of NOW did issue a statement finding credible both Mrs. Broaddrick’s charges and the long years of silence that followed them. The statement put no pressure at all on the president. Still, it had its uses, as it warned the president’s friends off the “nuts and sluts” attacks they had used against his earlier accusers with such gusto.

The NOW statement also made the stunned silence of Congress’s feminists seem more than ever peculiar. The most vocal defenders of women are perfectly content to let a proven liar who has been credibly charged with rape and battery stay on in the White House unquestioned. But this is only the latest of a whole train of judgments going down the same slope. First, the feminists said it was unimportant if a governor dropped his pants in front of a total stranger (who worked for the government). Then they called an office affair between an unpaid college-age intern and the most powerful man in the world both okay and private. Then they said that it was fine with them if the same man as president physically assaulted a volunteer in the Oval Office when she came to him seeking paid employment, in obvious emotional distress.

In that last instance, Gloria Steinem formulated what came to be known as her” one free grope” theory, maintaining that Clinton knew how to “take ‘no’ for an answer.” Now, when it appears that he sometimes takes “no” to mean “yes, please,” Steinem is silent, though she might want to upgrade her theory to “one free rape,” so long as the accused is in favor of late-term abortion. Perhaps Hendrik Hertzberg will call this a rape trap. Perhaps William Styron will apologize once again to the French for our monstrous prudery, and Arthur Miller will write something else about witch hunts. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. May tell us in the New York Times that gentlemen always lie about rape, to protect their views and their victims. Perhaps Erica Jong and her set, so turned on by the Paula and Monica stories, will be more aroused by this sequel. And perhaps Toni Morrison will rethink her idea that this makes Bill all the more her black brother. But then, perhaps not.

Still, beyond making the Left look stranger than ever, there is the question of where this all is leading. In a concrete sense, perhaps nowhere. This is not a legal proceeding with a definitive outcome. This is a matter of tone and of context. It is a long-burning fuse, an underground fire, a drop of dye spilled into a great vat of water that progressively discolors all the rest. “This is subversive,” says Chris Matthews. It is. And those who wonder where it can go, or what it can influence, should realize it has already gone everywhere and influences everything. Quietly, the terrain has been subtly altered. And the things that have been changed are these:

(1) Bill Clinton’s plan to win the verdict of history is now all but finished. He will not succeed in painting impeachment as a partisan witch hunt, punishing him for his personal shortcomings. His legacy now has been set in concrete: He is the first elected president ever impeached and acquitted; and the first president to be credibly charged with a rape. These two different elements reinforce each other. Singly, impeachment and the Broaddrick charges may be open to question. Together, they have a cumulative impact that makes each more valid and plausible.

Has anyone noticed that, since the Broaddrick interview, the once pervasive talk about the mean, nasty, intolerant, out-of-step Republican party has more or less disappeared? Maybe Bill Clinton was not quite such a victim. Maybe the stories of Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey appear more disturbing, more like predation than sex. The dread House managers now seem somewhat less sinister, in view of what their quarry is thought to have done. The subject has been changed again, from Clinton’s accusers to Clinton himself, always a dangerous thing for this president. His supporters have warned him to lay off Mrs. Broaddrick. So how will he now change the subject back?

(2) Has anyone also noticed that, since the airing of the Broaddrick charges, the heavy breathing about Senator Rodham has somewhat died down? Hillary Clinton’s chances of being elected to anything, any time, any place, may have been compromised. A first lady, or a private citizen, can refuse to answer questions. A political candidate can refuse questions about his or her private life. But one thing a candidate for high public office cannot do is refuse to answer serious questions on crime. The day after the Broaddrick interview aired on Dateline, Rush Limbaugh introduced almost every segment of his three-hour radio program with cuts from Mrs. Clinton’s ringing 1992 endorsement of Anita Hill, which called Hill a heroine and urged women victims of abuse to step forward. As a candidate, Hillary would be fair game.

It would be legitimate for rivals and journalists to bring up matters like these: Anita Hill and Juanita Broaddrick both made charges against controversial male public figures many years after the alleged offenses were said to have happened, and neither offered tangible evidence. Mrs. Broaddrick waited 21 years to go public; Professor Hill waited ten. Mrs. Broaddrick at the time of the incident told five other people; Professor Hill says that she told one. Mrs. Broaddrick had limited subsequent contacts with Clinton; Professor Hill continued to socialize with her employer and even followed him from job to job. Clarence Thomas had no record of lying or lechery. Bill Clinton does. Does Mrs. Clinton, like NOW, find Mrs. Broaddrick’s charges believable? If not, what makes her story weaker than Hill’s?

It is one thing to defend a weak, wandering husband; and another to shelter a possible predator. In this sense, the first lady looks much less appealing than before. Oddly enough, no pundit has linked these, but since the Broaddrick charges were first published, on February 19, Mrs. Clinton’s putative lead in New York against New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani has vaporized. So may the Senate career.

(3) A Hillary retreat would take some heat off the hustings, but the story wouldn’t quite end there. Her stand-in, Rep. Nita Lowey, an early and ardent Anita Hill backer, would herself draw Broaddrick questions. As would all feminist Democrats facing tight races in the 2000 elections. Did they fight Packwood? Did they hate Tailhook? Did they back Hill? What is the difference between Hill’s case, and Broaddrick’s, except that Broaddrick’s charges are so much more serious?

And then there is Al Gore, joined at the hip to Bill Clinton, who stood at the president’s side on the day of impeachment and praised his greatness. Gore in 1991 voted against Clarence Thomas, while calling for a full airing of Anita Hill’s charges. “We cannot dismiss Professor Hill so cavalierly,” he said to the Senate. “Doing so would be to dismiss every woman we represent. Every woman who has ever struggled to be heard over a society that too often ignores even their most painful calls for justice — we simply cannot take for granted that . . . the victim, or the woman, is always wrong.” So does Gore think that the many women who have accused Bill Clinton of things ranging from gross misbehavior to violence have been “always wrong” or misguided? What does ignoring them do to all the women “we represent?” Has Mrs. Broaddrick’s case — or Kathleen’s or Paula’s — ever come up in Gore’s chats with Clinton? Did Gore ever ask him about them? Did Clinton ever try to tell Gore he was innocent? Would Gore believe him if he did, and, given the record, why should he? And, again and always, to all the Democrats, Why is Juanita Broaddrick’s case weaker than Anita Hill’s?

Every feminist Democrat, male or female; everyone who ever backed the Violence Against Women Act and then either defended Bill Clinton or has said nothing about him, is now fair game for repeated questions and protests and pickets from women themselves. Clinton survived 1998 at least partly because his friends were able to portray his critics as querulous white men, poking their noses into “private behavior.” They will have less success against their new critics, who are rape counselors, rape victims, and angry exfeminists. These people were not amused by Tom Daschle’s plea that we simply “move on” as if nothing had happened. Clinton may skate, in the legal sense, but his friends may pay for him. They are in for a rocky two years.

(4) Broaddrick’s charges bring up another quality of Bill Clinton’s that is even more disturbing than anything broached so far: his strained relationship with what most people regard as real life. To many, O. J. Simpson’s odd lack of outrage when he was charged with the murders of his wife and Ronald Goldman was the tip-off that all was not kosher. Likewise, Clinton’s reaction to Mrs. Broaddrick’s story seems . . . strange. Accused of a crime that is vile and violent, he seemed not merely unmoved, but elated. The day after the Dateline interview aired, said a cheerful story in the New York Times, he was all smiles as he glad-handed supporters, “so sunny in his own remarks that he converted even his bad news to good.”

What kind of man is turned on by rape charges? Perhaps the same man who in 1991 embraced the cause of Anita Hill five months after his encounter with the then-Paula Corbin in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock. The same man who, in September 1994, signed the Violence Against Women Act, including the harassment clause that would later help impeach him, 10 months after his encounter in the Oval Office with Kathleen Willey. And the same man who would send his voice president out to announce “$ 223 million in grants to help detect and stop violence against women” (and to insist that abusers be held accountable) two days after he was accused on national television of having raped an Arkansas woman. Guilty or innocent, this is peculiar behavior. It suggests Clinton has, at the very least, a form of reality deficit disorder, a syndrome not desirable in a president. Yet this is the man the Democrats battled to keep in high office. There seems at this time a fairly good chance that the president of the United States may be a delusional predator. And the Democrats think this is fine.

By now, the Broaddrick story does not have to “go” anywhere to have its own impact. It just has to stay as it is. It just has to sit there, unresolved and unending, in everyone’s mind, if not on the newscasts. It just has to sit there, coloring everything; in the mind of every reporter who asks a question; in the mind of every congressman dealing with Clinton; of every viewer who sees him on the evening news. It just has to sit there, upping the squirm factor, going on into the 2000 elections.

Do the Democrats ever think of how sweet life would be if they had forced Clinton out at the beginning of the scandal? They would now have a President Gore, entrenched in office, running to hold power, not to win it, taking full credit for the booming economy — not an embattled prospective nominee thrust into an awkward position by his boss and polling well behind George W. Bush and Elizabeth Dole. And the feminists would have a pro-choice, pro-quota president, who did not embarrass them daily, and who was a good bet to get elected, and then reelected. They would have had their policies and their principles; and their credibility, somewhat tarnished by their dismissal of Paula Jones’s charges, would have been fully restored. But it is too late for what-ifs, and the “winners” are stuck with the spoils of victory. Good.

Noemie Emery, a frequent contributor, lives in Alexandria, Va.