CLINTON V. AMERICA?

Wisely, Bennett begins at the heart of the matter. It’s not what the Lewinsky affair tells us about Bill Clinton, he postulates in the opening pages of The Death of Outrage, but what our handling of the affair tells us about ourselves: “Once in a great while a single national event provides insight into where we are and who we are and what we esteem. The Clinton presidency has provided us with a window into our times, our moral order, our understanding of citizenship.”

Such stakes here are higher than the presidency of a thus-far successful politician. Clinton can leave at the end of his term in two years, or he can go much sooner, depending on the quantity of evidence against him and the quality of the prosecution. But much more important is what remains once he is gone. Much more important is who wins the argument: those who say Clinton’s conduct with a twenty-two-year-old office intern and his cover-up matters, and those who say it doesn’t. Will this spectacle teach us to seek and elect leaders of personal rectitude for our country, or will 1998 be remembered as a year-long course in how to be French?

“On Bill Clinton’s behalf, in his defense,” Bennett argues, many bad ideas are being put into widespread circulation. It is said that private character has virtually no impact on governing character; that what matters above all is a healthy economy; that moral authority is defined solely by how well a president deals with public policy matters; that America needs to become more European in its attitude toward sex. If these arguments take root in American soil — if they become the coin of the public realm — we will have validated them, and we will come to rue the day we did. These arguments define us down; they assume a lower common denominator of behavior and leadership than we Americans ought to accept.

The worst thing you can say about President Clinton’s behavior is that it has produced the argument that his private behavior doesn’t count. It does. In claiming a zone of privacy, Clinton made an arguable point. But, as Bennett notes, that zone does not in fact apply to Clinton’s case:

It would matter whether a president had a discreet, isolated, long-ago affair, or whether he were a serial (and still-practicing) adulterer. It would matter if a president had been put on notice — if he knew his personal life would be under intense scrutiny — and still decided to run the risk and indulge in an affair in the Oval Office, with young staffers. It would matter if the president used his public office to assist in, and cover up, his private flings. It would matter . . . if there was genuine contrition, a change of heart, a change of ways.

Sadly for Bill Clinton, none of these mitigating factors is present. What we now confront is a president of the United States conducting an eighteen-month “lapse of judgment” with a starstruck intern at the bottom of the White House food chain, a liaison so reckless that “Monica Lewinsky” is now better known to the world than “Jacqueline Kennedy.”

Sadly for the country, the traits Clinton has been caught exhibiting in the Lewinsky mess are equally evident in the conduct even he would count as public. They are as vividly on display in the good that he’s done as president as they are in the bad.

It begins, for Bennett, with desecration. Clinton has “defiled the office of the presidency of the United States.” All those months he was Monica-izing, he was renting out the Lincoln Bedroom and greeting generous foreign gun-runners in the East Room. He was working the White House like a cash cow to find those saturation TV ads he and his pal Dick Morris were whipping out. Is there any citizen who could imagine behaving that way in that place? Isn’t there a secular reverence that moves all of us when we enter the White House? If Americans do not care about the manner in which presidents live their lives, why did we build that glorious mansion to honor it?

After the desecration, however, Bennett notes the deception that inevitably follows. “A person innocent of what the president is accused of doing would be shouting his innocence from the rooftop,” The Death of Outrage argues. “He would not wait for a subpoena.”

Bennett points to a “seamless web of deceit” that connects Bill Clinton’s private and public life, his private failings and public failings. Watch the president and you see the same system of behavior, the same predictable chain of steps, in every situation that requires cover-up: stonewalling denial, followed by a chorus of denials by Clinton’s surrogates, followed by a carefully couched confession, followed by even more denials.

Recall the Gennifer Flowers affair. After denying it during the 1992 campaign, Clinton admitted to a one-night stand with the Arkansas singer during his January deposition with the Paula Jones attorneys. Soon thereafter the Clinton clean-up brigade was out in the streets. “I mean, I think I know the definition as well as anybody,” James Carville gamely allowed. “If I groped with somebody in a bar in 1977, I don’t call that having sex.”

The use of flacks is a big part of the Clinton pattern. It allows him to lie frugally while forcing his loyal staff to exhaust their political currency like sailors on weekend leave.

“I never asked anyone to lie,” he told the country. Tell that to George Stephanopoulos whose recent article in Newsweek begins with his painful recollection of what he calls the “worst morning” of the 1992 Clinton election campaign. It was the day John King of the Associated Press showed him a copy of a document his candidate had assured him for months did not exist: Bill Clinton’s April 1969 draft notice.

Stephanopoulos has witnessed the same sad spectacle being replayed again and again the past seven months, as Clinton made use of his current staffers and surrogates to disseminate his current lies: “He sat back silently and watched his official spokespeople, employees of the U.S. government, mislead the country again and again and again.”

And then, after the Clintonian desecration and the Clintonian deception, comes the Clintonian exploitation. In 1991, I covered a Cleveland meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council. Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was the star speaker, attacking the evils of racial quotas, saying all the right things for his moderate-to-conservative audience.

But by year’s end, Clinton could be seen scooting across the ideological tundra. With Mario Cuomo holding back from the 1992 presidential race and Paul Tsongas talking the centrist line on hard issues like entitlement reform, the Arkansas governor saw green grass growing off to the left. No more talk of sacrifice from the man Tsongas would baptize the “Pander Bear.” Not only had Clinton used and discarded the Democratic center on which he’d launched his presidential bid, he began to destroy it. Working the senior citizens down in Florida, he blasted Tsongas for daring even to talk about limiting Social Security.

Once in office, Clinton showed the same ability to use and discard, serving up Lani Guinier as his civil-rights enforcement chief, then dumping her without a word. He asked Barbara Jordan to develop a sound immigration policy, then had some middle-level non-entity dismiss her report.

Monica was not the first Clintonite to get the “that woman” treatment, nor is Betty Currie the first party Clinton has used to take the heat for him. “She and Betty are friends,” he said in the January 17 deposition to explain the Lewinsky visits. “That’s my recollection.” On the eve of the 1996 election, he performed a similar buck-passing on the issue of campaign contributions from foreigners. That, he said, was an affair which concerned the poor slobs over at the Democratic National Committee.

It’s especially timely to recall Clinton’s use and dismissal of Democrats who adhere to traditional values. The man who basks today in the bicoastal love of Santa Monica and Martha’s Vineyard got elected by winning the hearts of regular folk in the fly-over country between. Recall his words of allegiance. He would champion those who “work hard and play by the rules.” He would make abortion not just legal and safe but “rare.” When is the last time anyone heard such words spoken from the Oval Office?

Bill Clinton reminds one of that character in the 1981 movie Body Heat — not the horny lawyer, played by William Hurt, who gets lured into trouble by Kathleen Turner, but the creepy mobster-husband played by Richard Crenna. This is the character who taunts his sexual rival by saying the world is divided between those who are “willing to do what is necessary” and the weaklings who are not.

The man in the White House passes the test. So did the Rhodes Scholar who wrote in 1969 — to an ROTC commandant, the man who’d saved him from the draft, the man he’d just double-crossed — that his motive was, in its own unabashed way, pure: in his words, his “political viability,” his electoral ambition was at stake.

Such breathtaking expedience has been the theme of the Clinton rise. He went to Georgetown University because he wanted to get to Washington. He got out of the draft by promising to join an ROTC outfit but instead headed back to England. He went to law school because he needed the usual license to run for office. He went back to Arkansas after school because that was his political base. He covered up his embarrassing draft record, his modest drug use, and his 1960s-style campus sex life all in the same cause: “political viability.”

Seven months into 1998, the same ambition and cover-up are joined in do-or-die alliance. To remain president, he has calculated, he must continue to keep the real Bill Clinton from public view. “I want you to listen to me,” he told the entire country in January, his finger pointed at the nation like a perverted Uncle Sam recruiting poster. “I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” As George Stephanopoulos wrote, “This was no impulsive act of passion; it was a coldly calculated political decision.”

Americans are a practical people, and Bill Clinton enjoys a high job-approval rating for practical reasons. Whatever his personal demons and delusions, he placed grown-ups like Lloyd Bentsen, Leon Panetta, Alice Rivlin, Robert Rubin, Frank Raines, and Jack Lew in charge of the economy. He has risked the anger of organized labor to forge a foreign policy that placed the biggest bets on free trade. He is, with all his faults and all his narcissistic lust for “political viability,” a recognized world leader.

Unfortunately, as William Bennett’s critique in The Death of Outrage demonstrates, there seems to be in fact no way to expel the bad from Bill Clinton’s nature while retaining the good. The good is of a piece with the bad. Any verdict against Clinton, even a reprimand, would not just address his bad qualities but weaken the moral authority of his good qualities — and diminish the power of our presidency for as long as he holds it.

That makes the next months of American history particularly tricky. We have an uninterrupted democracy stretching back to the eighteenth century. Unlike the French, we haven’t had a Second Republic or Third, Fourth, or Fifth. We have only the one we started with. In deciding about his last two years in office, the good citizen might attempt the maturity Clinton has shown at his best, not the passion he pursued at his worst. Otherwise, this year of the French

Christopher Matthews, the San Francisco Examiner’s Washington bureau chief, is author of Kennedy & Nixon and host of CNBC’s Hardball.