Why Chatterbox Cares
Is Chatterbox obsessed with Flytrap? Yes. Is this obsession justified?
Chatterbox's pro-Clinton friends, along with Anthony Lewis, Molly Ivins,
everyone associated with the movie Primary Colors , and the American
people speaking as one, say no. Even Chatterbox's guru, Charles "Bhagwan"
Peters of the Washington Monthly, one of the few journalists who gave
credence to the Gennifer Flowers tapes early on, argues that the voters rightly
don't care much about Flytrap because they've known the rough contours of
Clinton's character for years.
Let's concede what the voters apparently believe: Clinton has been a good
president, especially considering the alternatives. Chatterbox fully expects
that within weeks of his leaving office--whenever that happens--we'll want him
back. So why care about Monica? Four reasons, in order of ascending
impeachability:
1) The ease of his corruption: We knew Clinton had affairs and lied
about them to the press and public. We didn't quite know the unhesitating grace
with which--if the current charges are true--he orchestrates a campaign to
deceive the courts. Hey, honey, you don't have to turn over those gifts if you
no longer have them in your possession! (It was especially shocking to see
New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who worships the legal process
and has taught at Harvard Law, glide smoothly over the distinction between
lying to your friends and lying under oath.) True, if Clinton lies about sex
that doesn't mean he necessarily lies about Social Security. The slope isn't
all that slippery. But it's a slope. Does anyone doubt that if Clinton lied
under oath about sex he also lied about Whitewater? About what was given in
exchange for campaign contributions? Maybe it stops somewhere, but where?
2) The overconfidence: What kind of alarmingly self-deluded
defendant, knowing what Clinton must have known about his own behavior, would
have failed to settle the Paula Jones case? So she upped her demand to $2
million? Pay it! There is a failure of judgment here. One day Clinton's
hypertrophied faith in his ability to pull anything out of the fire with a
flurry of last-minute salesmanship will prove wrong. Actually, it's already
been proven wrong, since the election, on the "fast track" trade issue, and
maybe on Iraq.
3) The role mottle: Christopher Hitchens has complained about the
annoying, cloying quality of the modern babble about "role models." He's right.
Unfortunately Hitchens didn't design the human brain, which learns by
imitation. As Chatterbox's Darwinian mentor, Robert Wright, notes, we give our
presidents a lot, and in exchange we ask them to be a little better in
the moral example department than the rest of us. (See this piece by
Wright for the basic Darwinian story.) Does Clinton want to restore the family
in the ghettos? That will require suppressing the very impulses that Clinton
himself has so conspicuously failed to control.
4) Social equality: Clinton's defenders--including those ordinary
focus-grouping Americans--offend the most when they suggest that a certain
latitude in moral and criminal matters goes with the president's exalted
position. Director Mike Nichols says "men who get a lot accomplished have
powerful libidos. What's the problem?" The big chief gets many women! That's
been true through most of human history. It's not supposed to be true in
America. America, in this sense, is a conspiracy against human nature--and not
just in that we expect monogamy when the rule of history has been polygamy.
More perversely, we also expect social equality--nobody is better than anyone
else, we all play by the same rules--when the characteristic of previous human
society has been the instinctive ranking by status. What Clinton is saying is
that he doesn't have to play by the same rules. He's too important to be sued
while in office. He's too important to be subject to the intrusive,
out-of-control sex harassment inquiries that bedevil his subjects. He boosted
the GNP and brought us disaster relief, and we should be grateful and shower
him with fleshy offerings. ("Hey, man, what's the fuss about? He gave a blow
job to the economy" is the man-on-the-street interview Chatterbox expects to
see any moment now.)
Chatterbox always suspected that Democrats who focus compulsively on the
income charts (ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich, for one) would be all too
willing to trade off America's precious social equality for a minor increase in
income equality and prosperity. Now Clinton is making that deal explicit. An
impeachable sin? Maybe. Maybe not. But (more than reasons 1 through 3) it goes
to the fundamental character, not of Clinton but of our national
enterprise--something that's worth impeaching even a good president to
preserve.
Chatterbox has spoken!
IT'S EVERYWHERE: Note that Clinton's ultimate sin--the sin of
corporatism, of seeing society as a single body with individual human
components performing different social functions and having different, unequal
rights--is the same as Kenneth Starr's sin. Starr thinks his role is so goddamn
important that his prosecutors get a special right to criminalize free speech
as "obstruction of justice." Less obviously, Clinton's sin is the same one
reporters commit when they denounce Starr for impeding "our ability to gather
information for the public"--as if the press were a separate institution with
special privileges and (inevitably) obligations, the eyes of the social corpus
nobly gathering information on behalf of poor, ignorant citizens. Better to
stick to the social-egalitarian line: Reporters are citizens, with the
same rights and obligations as other citizens (same as Sid Blumenthal, same as
Matt Drudge, same as your mother), which include the right to say nasty things
about Kenneth Starr.
