Wednesday, February 11, 1998; Page A21
Assume for the sake of crazy, far-fetched argument that President Clinton is lying about Monica Lewinsky. The line from the president's increasingly cornered defenders is that this doesn't matter, that this is a lot of huff and puff about nothing more than a married man's bit of on-the-side stuff. And, anyway, Ken Starr has committed acts a lot worse than anything the president did, not that he did anything.
No. The Lewinsky matter is not about the minor and personal question of whatever an individual does in the pursuit of happiness behind closed doors. And it is not about the diversionary question of prosecutorial misconduct. It is about the largest, most central and most public of questions: whether we demand that the president obey the law, whether we accept that the president lies to us.
There are a great many laws on the books of this country, many of them onerous and some of them odious. Nevertheless, we are all required to obey them all. You have to tell the truth under oath, and so does the president. You may not conspire to obstruct justice, and neither may the president. You must not paw women who come to you seeking employment, and so too must not the president. To excuse the head of government from the laws that govern the rest of us is not to tolerate one man's peccadilloes; it is to tolerate the corruption of democracy.
And it is this fomenting of corruption that is the great problem with Clinton. The president has always had around him a constellation of defenders -- the planet Rodham, the moon Blumenthal, the satellites Carville and Begala -- who are prepared to do whatever is necessary in defense of anything Clinton does. These are people who believe in total-war politics, and they accept, to borrow from what Churchill said about truth, that Clinton is so precious that he should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
Fine, if that's as far as it goes. But year by year, scandal by scandal, the defense of Clinton has made the rest of us accomplices to these lies. The most serious consequence of this has been to devastate what is left of liberalism's claim to be the philosophy of moralityin politics.
In 1992 Clinton said that his enemies were targeting him for a woman he didn't sleep with and a draft he didn't dodge. Liberals knew in their hearts that both claims were lies, but they told themselves that this didn't matter.
In the Whitewater affair, liberals were presented with a case of political corruption of a sort that they had classically fought, a conspiracy by a circle of political insiders to loot a savings and loan and to defraud a government loan program for women and minorities. Whitewater too, liberals decided, didn't signify.
When Hillary Rodham Clinton was found out to have made $100,000 on a no-risk $1,000 investment in commodities deals with a lawyer who represented one of Arkansas' largest regulated businesses, liberals who had taken to the streets against Reagan's Decade of Greed said -- oh, never mind. When the Clinton 1996 campaign subverted the entire system of campaign finance laws, liberals said, well, everybody does it. Lately, with independent counsel Starr getting troublesome, liberals have been saying it is time to scrap the liberal independent counsel act.
And now this. On "Meet the Press" last Sunday, Tim Russert asked Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) whether the allegations that the most powerful boss in the world had sexually exploited a 21-year-old female intern raised questions about Bill Clinton's treatment of women. No, no, said Pelosi, they raised questions about Ken Starr's treatment of women.
"There's a point of sensitivity that women have about Kenneth Starr's attitude toward women; how he's investigating, exploiting Monica Lewinsky, how he used Linda Tripp to do that," said Pelosi, with a face so rigidly straight it seemed it might crack. "The Susan McDougal case comes back to mind, because here again is a humiliation of a woman because she won't tell him what he wants to hear in that case. And now you see the humiliation of Betty Currie." Yes, Susan McDougal was humiliated, and so was Betty Currie. But the agent of their humiliation wasn't Ken Starr; it was Bill Clinton. And he is the agent, too, of the humiliation of Nancy Pelosi.
The problem with Clinton is not only that he lies; it is that he makes liars out of everybody else. The problem is not only that his moral standards are low; it is that he requires that everybody else lower theirs to meet his. By the time he is finished, so too will be the quaint idea of a higher ground in politics.
Michael Kelly is a senior writer for National Journal.