For years, Lanny Davis wagged his friendly tail from the petshop window of local politics in suburban Washington and dreamed of life downtown, where the lucky dogs do their business not on last week’s Potomac Value-Shopper — but right there, live, on CNN. But no one would buy him. Then, one day, scratching at the New York Times, Davis chanced upon a William Safire column about Hillary Clinton and Whitewater, and he got to thinking. What if he were to become a more aggressive pooch? What if he were to phone up his better-connected Democratic acquaintances and beg that they recommend him to the cable-TV squawk shows as a down-the-line defender of the scandal-plagued First Couple?
Puppy heaven! Within days of this brainstorm, Davis was all over the nation’s airwaves, playing tireless, yappy fetch with the imaginary tennis ball of Bill and Hillary’s perfect virtue. And before the year was out, the Clinton West Wing, where it takes a village of useful idiots, had marked him for greatness.
Our hero was hired up as “special councel to the president” for work on the administration’s principal domestic policy initiative. Which is to say: Lanny Davis started doing “damage control,” urging White House reporters to accept as plausible — and circulate throughout the country — an account of Clintonism sufficiently “full” and “contextualized” as to smother all the hideous details. Put another way: For thirteen months until January 1998, Lanny Davis got paid federal money to lie a lot.
Davis’s new chronicle of these labors, Truth to Tell, is not nearly so infuriating as its title would imply. It is pathetic instead. The book is an inside baseball memoir as might be written by some wide-eyed, farm-boy rookie after just a single spring-tranning session in the big leagues. Gosh! I’ve met . . . Mark McGwire.
Or, as Kid Lanny all but burbles with equivalent awe-struck enthusiasm: Gosh! I’ve met . . . Michael Weisskopf of Time magazine, “one of the best in the business — a middle-of-the-road journalist, without an ideological or personal ax to grind, with a level of integrity and a concern for accuracy and fairness that were as high as those of any journalist I had encountered over the years.”
So it goes, page after cringe-making page, Davis incontinent with pride just to have breathed the same air as such titans. Once, he recalls, unable to wait till morning, he stayed by his office computer past midnight for the opportunity to read a minor, late-breaking wire by his favorite reporter, John Solomon of the Associated Press. And, oh joy, the trade lingo he learned! Which he now waves around the way a prep-school boy handles his pipe: This or that news story did or didn’t “have legs,” he lets drop with a knowing wink.
Imagine you are one of the many White House reporters effusively praised in Truth to Tell for having been willing to engage Lanny Davis in “an ongoing back-and-forth dialogue to sort out the facts and legal issues accurately.” Innumerable times, with the deadline clock ticking, he has made you run a frantic find-the-buried-body race through some multi-thousand-page release of subpoenaed documents — nattering in your ear the whole while. And now he pats you on the head for having field your dispatches “comprehensively, accurately, and with our viewpoint expressed.” How must this feel? What must it be like to read that you embraced a “culture of trust” with this next-to-useless Jimmy Olsen chipmunk?
Embarrassing, one suspects. But that is a private matter. The rest of us should point no accusing finger at the reporters who listened to Davis’s endless spiels and dutifully recorded his “viewpoint.” He was speaking for the president of the United States, after all; what he said was therefore news, and they were professionally obliged to write it down. With this in mind, the only real dupe to emerge from the dreary scandal catalogue of Truth to Tell is the author himself.
On Kathleen Willey: “I just couldn’t take this story seriously.” On the noshow jobs that Clinton staffers arranged for Webb Hubbell after he was forced to resign from the Justice Department: “I gave so little credence to the seriousness of the story.” John Huang’s visits to the Oval Office struck Davis as “a nonstory from the beginning.” His “first reaction” to Monica Lewinsky “was that there couldn’t be a basis for this rumor.” And when questions arose about the curious wordplay of the president’s Lewinsky denials, “I couldn’t believe the press had reached this level of cynicism.” Say what else we might about him, Lanny Davis is transparently sincere. In a White House packed with soul-dead shysters, Davis appears actually to have believed the lies he told.
So the question becomes: How to explain such invincible credulity? And the answer is found in the conception of political truth-telling embodied by Davis’s rulebook of “spin.” Bad spin, he advises, is “hiding or obscuring bad facts, by releasing information selectively and misleadingly, and sometimes by being less than completely forthright in answering media questions.”
Good spin, by contrast, is “surrounding bad facts with context, with good facts (if there are any), and, if possible, with a credible, favorable (or less damaging) interpretation of these facts.” That way, Davis says, the worst that’s likely to happen is that people will shrug off the facts and figure: “How bad could it be?”
Notice: There are good and bad “facts,” but they are always something less than Truth. You have not really told the Truth — that is, issued good spin — until you have manipulated these facts into a story that will not seriously harm you. And so, by necessary inversion, a story that does threaten serious harm simply cannot be “true.” It is theoretically impossible, for example, that your president has perjured himself, obstructed justice, and deputized his aides to conceal the crimes.
Provided, of course, that you are Lanny Davis. And that you remember what your “mother and father” taught you “about the importance of having a Democrat in the White House.” Yes, there will be people who carp at you over mere facts. But the larger, goodspin truth will always protect you, and if there is but a single Republican among the carpers, it will be fair for you to “label any criticism as pure politics.”
Thus the Clinton White House fashions its cult metaphysics: That which does not flatter our leader is a threat to the cosmos and so must be false.
All this would seem an unusually creepy philosophy, if it were in fact unusual. But it isn’t, as the events of the past year make clear. Drained of its party-hack aspect, and in only slightly less extreme a form, the Lanny Davis standard of political integrity — the ethos of a high-school pep rally — is the one America now accepts. The habit of measuring a politician’s public character by his humility before the law and other such niceties appears largely lost. If a politician is “on our side,” if he claims to endorse most of what most of us consider righteous policy — even though he is a lying bastard, and a felon in the bargain — well, we now think that is fine enough. And we are prepared to root for him.
Yet there do remain a few vocal dissenters on the continent. One of them is Christopher Hitchens, the transplanted Englishman who contributes brilliant, snarly prose to many of our better magazines and also to the Nation. His new book is a withering treatment of the contemporary culture of Clintonism, the considerable subtlety of which analysis defies fair summary.
Just the same, if summary there must be, suffice it to say that Hitchens understands our scandalous president with rare and unsparing precision. And that he even better understands our president’s various left and liberal defenders — with whom Hitchens otherwise, more times than not, sees eye to eye. No One Left to Lie To is a veritable bible of anti-anti-anti-Clintonism.
But even that lovely doctrine can be pushed too hard — one would not have thought it possible — and at various points, Hitchens reaches beyond the limit of his own best argument. For his general endorsement of the Starr investigation and the House impeachment articles it inspired, he has lately been accused, by the Nation’s Katha Pollitt, to treason against progressivism: of having given aid and comfort to the likes of Hyde and Barr and Lott. In No One Left to Lie To, Hitchens cannot resist the temptation to retort in kind.
Whom is Katha Pollitt aiding and comforting, Hitchens wonders? So here, at great length, he reminds his erstwhile lefty friends that in political combat Clinton has routinely shot their wounded. That he has relied for advice on Dick Morris, a “conservative Republican.” That he has bilked Indian tribes and said kind things about Richard Nixon. That he has authorized the execution of a hopelessly brain-damaged black man. That he has signed the anti-homosexual Defense of Marriage Act. That he has sold out health-care policy to the big insurance companies. This is a progressive politics, Hitchens asks?
No, it is not. It is the anti-politics of “traingulation,” and a good bit of it is repulsive no matter where you sit. But under the circumstances, it is also rather beside the point, or should be. For to engage in a sectarian dispute over whether the president is either a “lesser evil” or a “crypto-right-winger” — and thus does or doesn’t deserve support against Ken Starr — is itself to concede the Lanny Davis premise: that Clinton’s honor can ultimately be tested only in the realm of supra-factual, agenda-contingent “truth,” quite apart from what he’s actually done.
Christopher Hitchens does not believe this, of course. The rest of his book is an eloquent claim that the president is bad not because he is an imperfect socialist, but just because he is bad. Which should be plenty bad enough. Hitchens has no doubt been provoked beyond endurance by his critics on the left. But the sarcastic “team spirit” taunt he hurls in reply ill suits his cause.
Bill Clinton has breached the barrier. In the future, there will likely be another such president: lawless, appalling, and popular all at once. He will be surrounded by another collection of Lanny Davis toadies. And it will once again be a lonely, thankless task to call attention to his crimes. There in the opposition bunker, one expects to find a man of Christopher Hitchen’s notable nerve and talent — willing to reject the president for the simple and sufficient reason that he is corrupt, irrespective of his position on the death penalty, welfare reform, or anything else.
David Tell is opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
