will

All in the Family

By George F. Will

Wednesday, August 19, 1998; Page A21

Eaten to a honeycomb by corruption, Bill Clinton's presidency effectively ended with his defiantly eccentric claim that his lying in the judicial process about sex in the White House was all a matter of his private life. And there he goes again, lying about prior lies: "My answers were legally accurate" in the Jones deposition, in which he said he had no memory of being alone with the intern with whom he has a precise memory of doing something "not appropriate." (Perhaps using the salad fork on the entree?)

Cornered after seven months by (among many other things) a dress about which he knows the truth, he says he must "take complete responsibility" for having oral sex without having sexual relations. He says he never asked anyone to tamper with evidence, which means that one fine day Betty Currie had, like a bolt from the blue, the unprompted idea to ask the intern to hand over the presidential gifts. Incorrigible skeptics may wish to hear from Ken Starr, who should rise to the challenge of Clinton's recidivism.

Clinton's most canine supporters have been reduced to the appropriate chore of identifying innocuous lies and permissible perjuries, and he has no remaining shred of public purpose, only the personal project of clinging to office. Straining to drain this episode of any public significance and fill it with private bathos, he can be glimpsed hiding behind the skirts of this argument: Hillary forgives him, so the country should, too. The argument's twofold flaw is that it supposes Hillary is exemplary and that the nation is a mere bystander at a marital spat.

The grotesque pantomime of domesticity that the Clintons perform in public is as preposterous as the portrait of Mrs. Clinton as an injured innocent. For some reason (upward mobility? just a guess) she has struck a Faustian bargain, choosing to live, for decades, a life of fraudulent pretense. This long training in mendacity has come in handy in her dissimulations about her roles in the $100,000 cattle futures windfall (a bribe? no, beginner's luck, she says); in a land fraud and elusive billing records pertaining thereto; in cruelties and abuses of power in the Travel Office purge; in the lawlessness of her health care task force ("dishonesty . . . this type of conduct is reprehensible . . . officials run amok," said a federal judge); in the hiring of Craig Livingstone (keeper of the FBI files); and more.

Regarding her husband's intern-toy, Mrs. Clinton has been either willfully ignorant, itself a form of deceit, or, much more likely, her antic defenses of her husband (he's a victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy, leavened by Arkansasphobia) have been lies. Opposites may attract, but that did not happen when Bill met Hillary, so the nation should not take its bearings from her berserk moral compass.

Rather, it must understand why impeachment, although perhaps not necessary given the president's abject and neutered status, was provided by the Founders to deal with an officeholder who acts "in such a manner as to render him unworthy of being any longer trusted." (Federalist 70)

Elliot Richardson resigned as attorney general rather than execute President Nixon's order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and later said: "There is a serious risk when you investigate corruption. You may do more harm than good if all you do is poke a stick in a muddy pool and stir up the mud without clarifying the water . . . politicians govern their conduct in the light of past experiences." Impeachment is a means of clarification for politicians who believe anything is permitted that is not forbidden by criminal statutes or other "controlling legal authority."

Impeachment is not a "constitutional crisis," it is a remedial mechanism provided for political hygiene. The debacles that made Nixon and now Clinton eligible for impeachment are alike in being not about the incidents that precipitated them (a burglary, sex) but about the rule of law. The debacles are dissimilar in a way that makes Clinton's more pregnant with potential long-term civic debasement.

Nixon tried to survive by hiding evidence from the public. Clinton has tried that, too, but his primary strategy, advanced through compliant surrogates, has been to corrupt the public by encouraging indifference to evidence of brazen deceit about scabrous behavior.

John Adams said, "There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state." Clinton's little legacy will be a quickened understanding of the indispensable nature of the sort of dignity from which he has been such a tawdry subtraction.