Toward the opening of the campaign season, and on the cusp of an anticlimactic and apathetic millennium, Norman Podhoretz wrote a very striking cover essay for National Review. In this article, the former editor of Commentary sought to persuade the fans of William F. Buckley that Bill Clinton was not really all that bad. Mr. Podhoretz of course had made his name as a campaigner for the “neo-conservative” opinion that the origins of all moral rot lie in “The Sixties.” With his wife, Midge Decter, and his gifted polemicist son, John, and by means of a nexus of other family and political filiations on the Right, he had inveighed against antiwar and anti-imperialist groups, against homosexuals and feminists, against cultural pluralism and anything smacking of the dreaded “correctness.” He was one of the many prominent conservative Jews willing to countenance a pact with the Christian Coalition.
Staying at least partly in character, Podhoretz stipulated rather matter-of-factly that Clinton was of course a liar, a crook, a traitor to friends and family alike, a drug-user, a perjurer, a hypocrite, and all the rest of it. However, he argued, this could be set against his one great and unarguable achievement, which was the destruction of “McGovernism” in the Democratic Party. Clinton might, said Podhoretz, have wavered occasionally on matters like the sell-out to China. But he had forever defeated the liberal, union-minded, bleeding heart and environmentalist faction, of the sort that had once stuck up for Vietnamese or Nicaraguans or (worst of all) Palestinians:
Bill Clinton is a scoundrel and a perjurer and a disgrace to the office he has held. Yet it is this scoundrel, this perjurer, this disgrace to the presidency of the United States who has pushed and pulled his party into moving in a healthier direction than it had been heading in since its unconditional surrender to the Left nearly thirty years ago. As if this were not extraordinary enough in itself, the explanation for it can be found in the very defects of Clinton’s character I have just listed.
In my experience, very few politicians have solid principles that they are unwilling to sell out for the sake of winning elections. They are, most of them, “the hollow men, the stuffed men” of whom T. S. Eliot wrote, and in Clinton we have perhaps as extreme an embodiment of this professional deformation as can be unearthed. If he had been a man of any principles at all, a man with something inside him besides the lust for power (and the other lusts that power contributes to satisfying) he would have been incapable of betraying the people and the ideas he was supposed to represent. If he had not been so great a liar, he would have been unable to get away not only with his own private sins but with the political insults he was administering to some of his core constituencies. And if he had not been such a disgrace to the presidency, he would not have been impeached, and would not thereby have forced even the intransigent McGovernites of his party, who had every reason to hate him, into mobilizing on his behalf for fear of the right-wing conspiracy they fantasied would succeed him.
The admission that Clinton is a political conservative, who has moved the Democratic Party to the right while relying on rather prostituted “correctness” constituencies, is one that few authentic conservatives allow themselves. The concession does, however, show an understanding of “triangulation” and it does possess some explanatory power. By the spring of 2000, it was clear that the liberal pulse of the party was to all intents and purposes undetectable. Even former Senator Bill Bradley, returning to the hustings after marinating for a while in the casks of Wall Street, looked discountenanced by the utter failure of the patient to respond. And he was only seeking to awaken the liberal reformist instinct in its mildest and most manageable form. He didn’t even brush the G-spot.
Indeed, in what had begun as a rather stilted and fixed campaign, the only outlet for insurgent feeling was that offered in a Republican primary by the eccentric Senator from Arizona. John McCain achieved at least an initial burst of speed by his proclaimed dislike of the system, by his professed distaste for campaign-finance racketeering and by his (apparently) unscripted and unspun style. It was puerile anti-politics but it worked for a space, and drew for its effect on many voters who had registered as Democrats or independents. Nowhere within the echoing emptiness of the Democratic fold was there any hint of a live dialogue. And McCain, of course, had voted to impeach and to convict Clinton, and had gravely upset Governor Bush of Texas, in the course of the South Carolina primary, by comparing him to the incumbent President. (“You don’t,” said Bush in a tone of outrage, “you just don’t say that of a man.”)
Meanwhile Vice President Gore rather noticeably did not ask his boss to campaign for him, and was often ridiculed for the campaign-finance fiascos and lies in which Clinton had involved him, and discovered that he had all along been very downcast by the President’s selfish and thoughtless conduct—never exactly specified, but wincingly hinted at. Looking somewhat like (and very much resembling) a dog being washed, Mr. Gore also feigned excitement at the local campaign he and his backers liked the least: the decision by Hillary Rodham Clinton—the other half of a “buy one, get one free” sleazy lawyer couple—to try and succeed to the vacant Senatorship from the great state of New York.
Everything about this campaign, and everything about this candidate, was rotten from the very start. Mrs. Clinton has the most unappetizing combination of qualities to be met in many days’ march: she is a tyrant and a bully when she can dare to be, and an ingratiating populist when that will serve. She will sometimes appear in the guise of a “strong woman” and sometimes in the softer garb of a winsome and vulnerable female. She is entirely un-self-critical and quite devoid of reflective capacity, and has never found that any of her numerous misfortunes or embarrassments are her own fault, because the fault invariably lies with others. And, speaking of where things lie, she can in a close contest keep up with her husband for mendacity. Like him, she is not just a liar but a lie; a phoney construct of shreds and patches and hysterical, self-pitying, demagogic improvisations.
In the early days of her campaign, and just before (this following a clumsy fan-dance of inordinate length) its formal announcement, even her staunchest backers at the New Yorker were manifesting alarm. Her kind of slithery rhetoric, wrote the devoted Elizabeth Kolbert, would not quite do. An instance from an address to the Democrats of Westchester County:
What’s important to me are the issues. I mean, who, at the end of the day, is going to improve education for the children of New York? Who’s going to improve health care for the people of New York? Who’s going to bring people together? And that’s what I’m going to be talking about.
Mrs. Clinton’s standards were not set high (“improve” instead of the once-bold “reform”? And a Senator “bringing people together,” instead of vigorously representing them?). But Ms. Kolbert’s standards were not high, either. (Given the chance to ask her candidate a question, she managed to inquire courageously about the difficulty of running as someone from out-of-state, and this as late as January 2000.) But even she had to cringe at the following, delivered to a solidly sympathetic yet bored audience at Riverside Church on the Upper West Side:
I think it’s appropriate to take a few minutes to reflect on some of the issues that people of faith have in common, and from my perspective, as I have traveled extensively through New York and been in the company of New Yorkers from so many different walks of life, I agree that the challenges before us, as individuals, as members and leaders of the community of faith, as those who already hold positions of public responsibility and those who seek them, that we do all share and should be committed to an understanding of how we make progress, but we define that progress, deeply and profoundly.
This, in a prepared text, where even the bored annotators didn’t bother to notice that progress was defined as both deep and profound. (Not unlike Vice President Gore’s robotic assurance that his use of marijuana had been “infrequent and rare.”) Liars can often be detected in that latter way, brashly asserting more than has been asked of them: Mrs. Clinton’s chloroform rhetoric is an i
ndication of another kind of falsity; one that is so congested with past lies and evasions—and exposures—that it can only hope to stay alive on the podium by quacking out the clock, ducking or stunning the “question period” and saying nothing testable or original or courageous. This is not, as the New Yorker would have us believe, a problem of dynamism or a lapse in the all-important “presentation.” And the once-proud New York Democratic Party had actually asked for all this. In the clumsy, sycophantic words of Representative Charles Rangel, whose original idea it was, the Party “pulled together an offer that the First Lady can’t refuse”: the offer of a coronated nomination without any primary contest. “You can always promise no primary to an 800-pound gorilla,” said the Congressman stupidly to the New York Times, as if the short-circuiting of voter choice was an achievement to beam about. (We don’t have the First Lady’s reaction to the primate or the weight comparison: a mirthless grin probably covered it.)
The “Hillary” campaign was inaugurated by a positive Niagara of dishonesty and deceit, much of it related to that most base and obvious pander of the New York politico—the conscription of ethnic politics. New York Jews are hardened by now to the most shameless promises; New York Puerto Ricans perhaps somewhat less so: both constituencies were to receive double-barreled insults to their intelligence almost before the bandwagon had begun to roll. Mr. Clinton had decided to pardon and release some Puerto Rican nationalists, imprisoned for placing indiscriminate bombs in lower Manhattan; the cause was popular among Puerto Ricans but less favored by other communities. Mrs. Clinton, who almost certainly solicited the favor from a President who almost never employs his power of pardon—and who slew the helpless Rickey Ray Rector—then denounced the clemency when it proved to play badly, and then claimed that she had never discussed any stage of the process with her husband. (On other occasions, she slyly lets on that they have no secrets from each other: the classic alternation of ditsy “little me” housewife and “strong woman.”) But “we talk,” she had told Tina Brown’s Talk magazine already. “We talk in the solarium, in the bedroom, in the kitchen—it’s just constant conversation.” Hard to keep Puerto Rico out of it.
Then, if I may quote myself writing in The Nation of May Day 2000, there was the open scandal of the Pakistanian connection:
Remember when every liberal knew how to sneer at George W. Bush, not only for forgetting the name of Pakistan’s new dictator but for saying that he seemed like a good guy? Well, General Musharraf’s regime has now hired, at a retainer of $22,500 per month, the DC law firm of Patton Boggs, for which Lanny Davis, one of the First Family’s chief apologists, toils. Perhaps for reasons having to do with the separation of powers, Patton Boggs also collects $10,000 monthly from Pak-Pac, the Pakistani lobby in America, for Davis’s services in its behalf. Suddenly, no more Dem jokes about ignorance of Pakistan.
Last December, after Clinton announced that Pakistan would not be on his itinerary when he visited the subcontinent, his former White House “special counsel” arranged a fundraiser in Washington at which lawyers from Patton Boggs made contributions to the First Lady’s Senate campaign that now total $25,500. So, not very indirectly, Pakistani military money was washed into her coffers from the very start. Then, in February, another Pak-Pac event, in New York, was brought forward so as to occur before the arrangements for the President’s passage to India had been finalized. Having been told that the First Lady did not grace any event for less than $50,000 upfront, the Pakistanis came up with the dough and were handsomely rewarded for their trouble by the presence of Lanny Davis and by a statement from Mrs. Clinton that she hoped her spouse would stop off in Pakistan after all. And a few days later, he announced that, after much cogitation, he would favor General Musharraf with a drop-by.
How does this look to you? One way of deciding it is to try the cover stories on for size. “I wish I could say I had the influence and had applied the right pressure for the President to visit Pakistan, but I didn’t, so I can’t.” That’s Lanny Davis. Is this what he tells the Pakistanis in return for his large stipend? “If anybody thinks they can influence the President by making a contribution to me, they are dead wrong.” That’s Hillary Clinton. Is that what she said at the Pak-Pac fundraiser?
One thing that strikes the eye immediately is how cheap this is. And inexpensive, too. The Pakistani nuclear junta must be rubbing its eyes: For such a relatively small outlay of effort it can get the First Family to perform public political somersaults.
The problem with Pakistan is that it is a banana republic with nuclear weapons, run by ambitious and greedy politicians who are scared of their own military-industrial complex. Aren’t you glad you don’t live there?
As for the Holy Land (the third “I” in the Last Hurrah trilogy of Ireland, Italy, and Israel), Mrs. Clinton came to New York with the uneasy memory of an unscripted remark about the desirability of a Palestinian state. Eager to live down this momentary embrace of a matter of principle—where else, one wonders, are the Palestinian people to live? Under occupation? In camps? In exile? Even Shimon Peres is for a state by now—she rushed to contradict her husband again, and demand that the United States embassy in Israel be moved forthwith to Jerusalem, before the status of that city has been determined by continuing negotiations. This well-worn pander proposal, set out in a letter to an Orthodox congregation, was somewhat eclipsed by a highly incautious visit to Israel and the occupied territories, in which she sat mutely through a poorly-phrased and paranoid attack on Zionism by Chairman Arafat’s first lady. There was therefore nothing for it but the announcement, in August 1999, that Hillary Rodham Clinton had made the joyous discovery of a Jewish step-grandfather on (I hope) her mother’s side. For abject currying, this easily outdid the witless and obvious donning of the New York Yankees cap. Gail Sheehy, not her most critical biographer, tells us that the First Lady has had numerous tucks and lifts and has deployed the magic of liposuction on her thighs and rear end. This is clearly not designed to please her husband; we shall see if it pleases New Yorkers. It may work. More than artifice is involved in the claim made at her 1999 Thanksgiving press conference that: “I don’t pay attention to polls.” Not long afterward, a poll was taken about whether Mrs. Clinton should make an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, an invitation to which had been languishing on her mantelpiece for many months. The poll showed that New Yorkers wished she would appear: she duly turned up accompanied by none other than her pollster. Mr. Letterman—as preoccupied as Ms. Kolbert with the “carpet-bagging” non-issue—asked her to name the New York state bird, the state flower and so forth. She answered all the questions correctly; it took a few days before Mr. Letterman admitted that he’d shown her the quiz in advance. Small dishonesties are the reflection of big ones; every trip Mrs. Clinton takes, with sirens blaring and New York traffic brought to a stop, is underwritten by the taxpayer.
That at least cannot be said for the mansion the Clintons bought for themselves in the upscale suburb of Chappaqua. “Bought for themselves” is, in any case, a euphemism: the First Couple is somewhat cleaned out by legal expenses—despite having made use of the Justice Department as private firm—and the $850,000 paid to Paula Jones had to be extracted from the First Lady’s blind trust and cattle-futures fund. (One wonders what the “constant conversation” in the family home was like on that special morning.) Thus the job of financing the mortgage and closing the deal fell on one single opulent fund-raiser, the egregious Terry McAuliffe. Here again, the entire business was infected with duplicity from the very start. Mr. McAuliffe, who posted the $1.35 million necessary to secure the house in the first place, was at the time facing a grand jury in the matter of some extremely dubious business involving the Teamsters Union. His role in franchising the public rooms of the White House for fund-raisers during the 1996 election (see here) almost certainly resulted in the aborting of his nomination as secretary of commerce in Clinton’s second term. Never before had a sitting President made himself so beholden
to an active money-man and influence-peddler. Yet when questions were finally asked, both Clintons stuck mechanically to the line that the Office of Government Ethics had reviewed the deal and found it unobjectionable. Not everybody knows that the Office of Government Ethics is forbidden to answer questions from the press until its report is completed: the brazen lie got the Clintons through the news cycle of house-purchase and, by the time the Office of Government Ethics had announced that it had said no such thing, the story was well down-page. By that time, also, Mr. McAuliffe’s good offices had given way to a bank loan offered on much more favorable terms than any average citizen can hope to command. And still the drizzle of tiny lies continued: on 16 November 1999, the First Lady’s media flack, Howard Wolfson, announced on Larry King Live that the President himself would be moving to the Chappaqua home in the New Year. For a sitting President to quit the Executive Mansion is likewise news: Ms. Hillary when asked about this said blandly, “I haven’t really talked to him about that.” She claimed also that she had not told the President about the announcement of her candidacy—even as that announcement contained the boast that he would be campaigning for her. Only those who are totally habituated to falsehood will so easily and naturally lie when the truth would have done just as well.