Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Feb 13, 1999 | The sense of letdown that threatened to set in before President Clinton's inevitable acquittal Friday was already starting to lessen before the vote was even taken. Janet Reno's long-overdue announcement that the Justice Department was investigating Kenneth Starr for ethics violations had something to do with it. And, though the White House has denied it, so did the press reports that Clinton is targeting the Republican House managers for defeat in the 2000 congressional elections. We know that neither case is going to provide a wholly satisfactory result. Starr won't wind up in the orange jumpsuit he so richly deserves, and a number of the Republicans of the House Judiciary Committee will still be polluting the country's political life after the next election. But the danger that was always lurking in the country's wish to put this whole thing behind it, the danger that the real villains would simply walk away without being named as such, doesn't seem quite so strong.
The phoniest notes of the last few weeks have been the Capra-esque groaners about how this whole process reaffirms the strength of our system, the functioning of which, we're told, triumphs over even the most bitter partisanship. In Friday's New York Times, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe paints a picture of the impeachment trial as "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Most of the people I know have felt like they've been watching "The Wrong Man," Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film (a true story) in which Henry Fonda plays a nightclub musician accused and nearly convicted of a string of hold-ups he didn't commit. Tribe ends his piece by saying of Clinton's acquittal, "I believe history is more likely to view it as a verdict that kept the Constitution's process of impeachment and removal intact so that they might serve their crucial mission if and when we face a genuine threat of tyranny."
Yes, but as in the Hitchcock film, the more pertinent point is that a trumped-up accusation was able to proceed without any violation of constitutional process. "The Wrong Man" turns on the moment when a juror is so eager to convict that the judge has no choice but to declare a mistrial. Fonda is freed by a fluke: He's out on bail awaiting a second trial when the real thief is caught. Clinton's fate turned on the public's perception of the basic unfairness of the proceedings against him, a perception that a majority of representatives and a not-insignificant number of senators were willing to ignore. The terrifying thing about how close we came to a right-wing nullification of two presidential elections is that it was all done in the guise of democracy by elected officials so bull-headed they called the very name House of Representatives into question.
Still, there are at least two things to celebrate here. One is the apparent self-destruction of the right wing and its willingness to take the entire Republican Party down with it. The other is something that would have seemed unthinkable a year ago when the Monica Lewinsky story broke: the relative sophistication of the public's insistence that private sexual behavior is not a gauge of how well an elected official does his job.
As always when it comes to America and sexual morality, what's going on here is complicated. Alongside Clinton's high approval rating and the majority's belief that he should remain in office has been an equally high disapproval of his behavior. Those high numbers may be partially due to the impossible ambiguity of the question "Do you approve or disapprove of the president's behavior?" What behavior is it referring to? The allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice, or Clinton's dalliance with Lewinsky? And if it's the latter, just what do people disapprove of, that he cheated on his wife, or that he fooled around with an intern considerably younger than he was?
But I think the real reason for the strength of both Clinton's approval ratings and the disapproval of his behavior (which I take to mean his sexual behavior) has to do with what some commentators have rightly maintained is the way the public recognizes its own shortcomings in Clinton. There are plenty of people who've strayed in their own marriages and know that it's still possible to love your spouse, who don't think of themselves as bad people and who believe that whatever happened is their own damn business. But even those people still feel a need to maintain the expected public stance that holds that good people just don't fool around. It's not that the public is incapable of both disapproving of Clinton's behavior and deciding that it doesn't warrant removal from office. It's that Americans tend to be more direct than that -- if they were truly disgusted at what he did, Clinton would be gone.
What's being played out here is the classic disjunction between what Americans know about sex and the chaos it wreaks, and what they allow themselves to acknowledge. What was being played out by Dianne Feinstein and the other Democratic senators pushing for censure -- even with acquittal an inevitability -- is exactly what Phil Gramm characterized it as: covering their asses. While we largely have the prudish zealotry of the Republicans to thank for Clinton's acquittal (as well as their own hara-kiri), one of the most troubling aspects of this whole process has been how even Democrats have accepted the assumptions of the right about what constitutes morality.
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