At the end of last week, by general consensus here in the capital, the presidential campaign turned “negative” — and it was George W. Bush who did the deed. The awkward way Bush crossed this line and the reaction to his move are eloquent testimony to a central weakness of current American politics. No, we are not here referring to the “mean-spiritedness” of Washington’s “tone”; something worse than that lately plagues us. Indeed, the country’s fetishistic revulsion over meanspiritedness has actually helped incubate and disguise the real disease.
First came word, two weekends ago, that Bush had ordered the last-minute cancellation of a television ad about Vice President Gore. The kiboshed ad was built around a clip from an interview with Gore on NBC’s Meet the Press. During which clip, asked whether President Clinton had uttered even a single untruth “in the last two years,” Gore stammered out an embarrassed but nevertheless very stubborn denial. The vice president, the gist of this commercial was to have been, is a man who will say just about anything to protect his political interests.
No problem there, we’d say. No problem even with the fact that the Meet the Press interview in question took place in 1994, by which time Bill Clinton had already unrolled the first few hundred in his record string of presidential lies. Even then, in other words, Gore’s defense of Clinton’s honesty was craven and weird.
But the would-be ad nowhere identified the date of the NBC broadcast in question, and thus might have implied that Gore’s weirdness was recent. That is to say, unsuspecting viewers might have got the impression that even now the veep cannot bring himself to admit that Clinton spoke a falsehood or two during his Lewinsky troubles. That impression would be fair, of course, at least where the president’s really important, i.e. perjurious, falsehoods are concerned. But be that as it may: For using a six-year-old Gore quotation to make this point, Bush would surely have been whacked hard by a chorus of Democrats and media types, and it wasn’t worth such grief, so he wisely killed the ad.
All of which backing and forthing immediately set Washington tongues a-clucking about “disarray” in Austin, Texas. And just a few days later, the clucking reached its current, near-deafening pitch. Because last Wednesday, during an interview with CNN, Bush reiterated his pledge to avoid “personally attacking” his opponent. And then, barely 24 hours later, it was revealed that Bush had already approved another ad, now on the air in 17 states — this one challenging Al Gore’s credibility, most strikingly by reference to the vice president’s notorious “community out-reach” appearance at a Los Angeles Buddhist temple in 1996.
Tut, tut, tut. Bush has broken his word. He has unsheathed the terrible sword of “personal destruction,” which is, after all “what’s wrong with our politics.” For shame.
It is ridiculous, this complaint. It is ridiculous that the cry of foul comes loudest from the Gore campaign and the Democratic National Committee, whose most recent “theme of the week” is the canard that George W. Bush has knowingly withheld necessary medical treatment from desperately ill poor children in Texas — and whose own television ads have been similarly savaging Bush for months on end. It is ridiculous that Gore’s admirers pretend annoyance at the suggestion that such stuff might be beyond the pale. Their charge about the Texas health care system concerns Medicaid, a substantive and therefore legitimate “issue,” they huffily explain, whereas Bush’s mention of the Hsi Lai Temple is a “personal” and therefore off-limits assault on Al Gore’s character. It is further ridiculous that such a bogus distinction has already won widespread and automatic acceptance among Washington’s professional commentariat.
And finally, it is ridiculous — no, it is terribly depressing — that the general public, too, is likely to concede to Team Gore the cherished victim’s role in this controversy, and cast the bulk of blame on Bush for the campaign’s inevitable “descent” into the “mud.” The country is likely to react this way because it has become deeply confused about a principle that, just eight short years ago, was still universally considered indispensable to the very idea of American constitutionalism. To wit: that a public man’s willingness to bow before the law and answer for his actions, quickly, honestly, and always — thus, his readiness to accept custodial responsibility for orderly and transparent government — speaks as nothing else does to his character. And therefore, that a public man’s character is certainly an “issue” that begs for inspection. Properly conceived, you might even say, character is the paramount issue.
We have not grown confused about this by accident. We have been taught our confusion, on purpose, by the Clinton-Gore administration.
Do you doubt the lesson is real and explicit? Consider an unusually self-conscious but otherwise typical student. There is a chilling passage in Bob Woodward’s book Shadow which describes how Mark Fabiani, the White House’s top Lewinsky-era scandal spinner, came to take that job. Clinton capo Harold Ickes offered it to him. Fabiani did not want it. So Ickes threatened to destroy his career if he refused. Fabiani thought this coercion “despicable.” But, he later explained to Woodward, he chose to succumb anyway — because he was persuaded by Ickes’s argument that “the president needs to be reelected” so as to effect the policies Fabiani believed correct.
Fabiani’s conclusion in sharper relief: The boss and his henchmen may be fully “despicable,” but if their agenda is the right one, then it renders that purely “personal” ugliness trivial — and anyone who shares the agenda can, even should, deny the truth of his leader’s character. The better to forestall a victory by the opposing team, you see. The better to win.
Who was Mark Fabiani, in those days, but a perfect doppelganger for the American majority that sustained Bill Clinton in office during his impeachment trial — despite that majority’s clear understanding, consistently expressed in the polls, that the president was guilty of every felony charged against him? And who is Mark Fabiani these days? Why, naturally enough, he is a senior aide on the presidential campaign of Albert Gore Jr.
Since 1993, Al Gore has loyally served a president who felt positively entitled to break the established rules; entitled to lie about the matter whenever he was caught; and entitled, worst, to twist the entire executive branch into a private legal defense committee — all purely by dint of his politics. Among Clinton’s critics have been some Republicans. And that fact alone, the president has over and over again insisted, is enough to disprove the criticism.
Now comes time to recognize the servant as his master’s spawn: Gore is like this too. His ludicrously exaggerated support for Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal? There were Republicans involved, Gore has blithely explained. Impeachment was simply a “partisan effort in Congress.”
Or this, a few years back: “The public needed to be informed as to why this pending Republican agenda was not good for the country.” So the Democratic party had to finance an expensive national advertising effort during the 1996 campaign. And Gore had to make those fund-raising phone calls from his White House office. And his party had to vacuum up every available contribution it could find. Including some illegal ones — like those generated by Gore’s visit to the Hsi Lai Temple.
George W. Bush is justified in reminding the country about the temple and justified in doing so now rather than later. More justified, for that matter, than perhaps he realizes. Last week’s Bush ad cites Gore’s temple visit as an instance of hypocrisy, an event that puts paid to the vice president’s call for campaign finance reform. It is that, to be sure. And yet, hypocrisy is merely a garden-variety political sin. How much graver the sins at issue here: broken laws and lies and, underneath, an outright corruption of our government and politics. Al Gore is a man who sees nothing wrong — something, instead, to be almost admired — in his willingness to breach the limits of traditional honor so as to achieve his party’s legislative goals. And further his career.
This is Gore’s true “character.” What could be more serious a campaign “issue” than that?
David Tell, for the Editors
