He has known this day would eventually come. He has not cared. At last, it has come, and he still does not care. He will stay clawed to his White House desk until his fingers are bloody stumps — and until the nation’s expectations for its leader are similarly reduced and wounded. He would sooner have his conduct exposed as criminal and degenerate than lose his hold on office. And to maintain that hold, to help America deceive itself that the conduct is so much harmless “old news,” Bill Clinton now encourages us to concentrate our minds on the state of his soul. Come along with him, please, he asks, as he travels “quite a journey”: a trip through the quasi-spiritual, easy-virtue psychobabble of repeated public “apologies.”
Clinton has “repented,” he says. He has a “broken spirit.” He has renounced “pride and anger.” He will no longer “excuse” or “compare” or “blame” or “complain.” By such sacrifice and self-abnegation, the president believes, or wants us to believe, some “good can come of this for our country.”
And what is the “good” he has in mind? Amnesia.
Monica Lewinsky, Clinton argued in Florida last Wednesday, is “not what America is about.” America, remember, is about HMOs and school reform and gun control. America, in other words, is “about” his administration’s commitment to “the public’s business,” which he now promises to pursue anew. If only we will relieve him, by “forgiveness,” of any real practical responsibility for an episode more disgusting — and cloaked in greater mendacity — than any other in our presidency’s history.
At Clinton’s private meeting with his cabinet this past Thursday, health and human services secretary Donna Shalala shocked the room by openly questioning his latest pleas for mercy. You seem to be suggesting, she incredulously told the president, that the beauty of your policy-wonkery is adequate compensation for the wretchedness of your personal behavior — that you should survive in office, that is, no matter what, simply because you are right on the issues. Yes, the president reportedly rebuked Shalala, that is exactly what I’m suggesting. John F. Kennedy won the 1960 election, he explained, only because the nation remained ignorant of his true character. It was a just result.
And so it will be a just result, in Clinton’s theology, if he evades impeachment by inducing the country to forget what it already knows about his character. His “repentance” is motivated exclusively by a determination to retain power. It is insincere. It is false.
As is the president’s solemn vow to get “to the rock-bottom truth of where I am and where we all are.” Truth is Bill Clinton’s last concern; he still defies it. Even before Kenneth Starr’s 445-page impeachment referral to Congress was made public last Friday, the president’s attorneys were releasing an extensive memorandum purporting to rebut what the independent counsel’s meticulously corroborated evidence proves beyond a shadow of a doubt: that the president obstructed justice and tampered with witnesses and committed multiple perjuries, all in an effort to conceal a lurid, adulterous sexual relationship.
Clinton is innocent of such charges, his attorneys essentially contend, because — so far as law and politics are concerned — there was no such relationship to conceal. “The term ‘sexual relationship,'” they write, “like sexual affair, has no definitive meaning.” The president, they insist, was testifying “accurately,” in public and under oath in court, when he refused to acknowledge a dalliance with the intern. Only intercourse, Clinton told the Lewinsky grand jury August 17, constitutes “sex” the way “most ordinary Americans” understand the word. Nothing else he did with the young lady — masturbation in a White House sink, “oral-anal contact,” all the other business detailed in the Starr referral — is “sex.” The question whether Clinton is or was having sex with Lewinsky “depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” he asserted at one point in his deposition. The question whether he was ever alone with her “depends on how you define ‘alone.'”
This remains the official position of the Clinton administration, attested to, on White House letterhead dated September 11, 1998, by presidential counsel Charles F. C. Ruff. Our executive branch, in short, continues to organize itself around a spectacular lie.
That it is all just a lie is news to almost no one in Washington. All but the last few die-hard Clinton believers in the capital fell off the turnip truck some weeks ago; the basic, factual record of the Lewinsky scandal was near-universally accepted here already. What Kenneth Starr has done — suffering relentless White House assaults on his reputation with a dogged loyalty to mission that looks positively heroic in retrospect — is add a devastating measure of finality and weight and obligation to the city’s judgment against the president. The charges are not just true. They are not just serious. They demand the action of an impeachment proceeding.
And yet, even as it accepts this move as inevitable and necessary, Washington tortures itself with doubt and gloom. L’affaire Lewinsky, Congress and the editorial pages tell themselves, has become a national crisis, a tragedy, even. Its effects will be uniformly baleful: The private lives of public officials will be subject to prying and poking forever. And the people still support Bill Clinton. Are we really to banish him from office — against their will? Should “elite opinion” be enough to “undo” a popular democracy’s presidential election?
Yes. If need be, yes. Impeachment is a sober matter. But it is neither a crisis nor a tragedy. The heavens will not fall if Bill Clinton’s vice president becomes president. The 1996 election will not be thus “undone”; that is what vice presidents are for. The nation will lose nothing much at all if a few adulterers are prevented from advancing in our politics in the future. And our democracy’s public-opinion polls do not determine our president’s fitness for office in the present. Democracy’s elected representatives do that — on a basis of careful consideration and conscience, and through orderly steps and means anticipated by our founders and written deliberately into our Constitution.
The decision is really quite simple. Bill Clinton is asking Congress to judge acceptable a president revealed to the world as a lout and liar and criminal. Congress must refuse the request and remove him.
David Tell, for the Editors
