THE LONG GOODBYE
Title: THE LONG GOODBYE , By: Lowry, Richard, National Review, 00280038, 09/01/98, Vol. 50, Issue 16
Whether President Clinton is impeached, resigns, or serves out his term, his Presidency is over.
THE last week in July, President Clinton treated an audience at an education conference in Washington, D.C., to a full-throated denunciation of the Republicans who are blocking his education and training agenda. “Some would deny Head Start opportunities to as many as 25,000 of our disadvantaged children,'’ the President intoned as part of a long litany of charges. A few days later, he was back at it in an even harsher speech at a hospital in Maryland where kids work in a summer-jobs program. According to the President, if the GOP Congress has its way, kids working this summer “would not have a job next year.'’
Both speeches were broadsides against the GOP, rehearsing Democratic campaign themes on an issue on which Republicans have traditionally been vulnerable. Both were also totally ignored. They came, respectively, the day after Monica Lewinsky cut her immunity deal with Ken Starr and the day the White House tried to revive the claim of attorney - client privilege in connection with Bruce Lindsey. On CNN, footage from the hospital event was used as a backdrop for reports about the latest developments in the Lewinsky scandal.
Clinton’s critics have always said that his is the Administration of the “Big Lie.'’ Actually, it has been a running accumulation of little lies, about scandals, policy, and his personal life. Until now — when, by happenstance, one particular lie has become all-consuming, the Big Lie that eclipses all the other prevarications and exaggerated pronouncements. Now when Clinton accuses Republicans of taking jobs from young people, it’s irrelevant, drowned out by the steady deconstruction of his denial in the Lewinsky case.
It is a fitting end. And it is an end. Ever since the Lewinsky affair broke in January, the scandal has drained the meaning and vigor from Clinton’s Presidency, leaving the facade of his office undisturbed but steadily rotting out the inside. Clinton still smiles and gives speeches and travels abroad. His advisors grind away formulating policy in the White House and the Old Executive Office Building. But his Presidency is over. If Nixon gave us “the imperial Presidency,'’ Clinton is creating “the exiguous Presidency,'’ diminished, without serious purpose, reedy of voice.
Interngate has debilitated the Clinton Presidency in myriad ways. At the most basic level, it has distracted the President and his advisors, many of whom are left guessing what Clinton’s select coterie of personal lawyers will decide on a given day. More fundamentally, it has frayed the cords that attach moral authority to power, leaving the President’s high approval ratings dangling unconnected to the wellsprings of real authority. These are the effects a tawdry, high-profile sex scandal would predictably have on any politician. But, for Clinton, the Lewinsky scandal is even more damaging.
It has served to make his fundamental political project impossible. Clinton had planned to spend his second term making a renewed call for mutual obligation and responsibility, and doing it with the tool he brandished to such effect in 1996: the sheer communication power of the Presidency. Now, perhaps the most popular word in American politics, “responsibility,'’ has become an embarrassment to him. And his power to “move a message'’ has been compromised both by the media’s obsession with Monica Lewinsky and by his own need to lie low.
The price of the scandal was evident almost immediately in February’s disastrous “town hall'’ meeting in Columbus, Ohio, to discuss Iraqi policy. President Clinton, the master of the form, didn’t dare subject himself to live-fire questions from an audience. It was left to his lieutenants Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, and Sandy Berger to field questions, sounding as flat and unconvincing as they had when they left the President’s first post-Monica Cabinet meeting to profess their faith in his denials. Meanwhile, the tone of questions from the audience was rude and distrustful.
Democratic consent is a fragile thing, dependent on a sense that public officials are accountable, not just to elections, but to laws and propriety. The Clinton Administration has attenuated that sense by skating over “snafus'’ from Waco to Filegate to Monica. In Columbus, it was seeing its cynicism reflected back at it — and it wasn’t pretty. In less stark ways, the Columbus experience has been repeated again and again over the last seven months, with Clinton missing from public debates and the Administration abandoning one moral crusade after another against a backdrop of public indifference.
“It took him out of the box for a lot of the year,'’ one GOP aide says. “In 1995, early 1996, he was everywhere. He was on TV, having press conferences. This year he was either hiding from the press or he was out of town.'’ His child-care initiatives disappeared without a trace, as did the great anti-tobacco crusade and his education agenda. All these happened to be initiatives for “the children'’; this ready justification for any policy inevitably lost resonance when it was revealed the President’s alleged paramour was a 21-year old intern who still has baby fat.
Meanwhile, Clinton has had to tone down talk of “responsibility.'’ His post-Monica State of the Union address was still soaked through with themes of accountability and responsibility, but they have been fading since. “I think that hurts him and it hurts Democrats,'’ says one Democratic strategist. Responsibility was a key part of Clinton’s pivot in 1996, when he consciously set out to win back middle-class families for the Democrats by talking about values. This freed the rest of his traditional Democratic agenda from the taint of discredited social liberalism, giving it a new life.
The scandal puts this Clinton-initiated revival at risk for two reasons. One is that it needs continual rhetorical spade work that the President can no longer do. The other is more fundamental. The re-positioning of the Democrats in 1996 was mostly symbolic. The party of acid, amnesty, and abortion became the party of curfews, school uniforms, and V-chips. The Lewinsky affair trumps them all, and the risk for the Democrats is that by standing by the President too long they become by association the party of sexual dysfunction and lies.
Clinton’s Presidency is already irrevocably tainted by both. His approval ratings are high, but clearly are being carried by the economy (his personal rating is now below 40 points in some polls). The approval numbers don’t translate into clout on Capitol Hill and the President is in no position to appeal over the head of Congress directly to the public. Meanwhile, the point of his second term on a fling with an intern. Let’s hope he at least had fun.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): President Clinton boarding a helicopter.
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By RICHARD LOWRY
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Source: National Review, 09/01/98, Vol. 50 Issue 16, p32, 2p
