I wouldn’t describe myself as “content” with the above, or with those so easily satisfied and so credulous that they hailed the welfare bill as a “tough decision” one year, and then gave standing ovations to a cornucopia of vote-purchasing proposals in the “Lewinsky” budget that confirmed Frum’s analysis so neatly a week after it was written. He is right, also, to remind people of the Defense of Marriage Act, a straight piece of gaybaiting demagogy and opportunism which Clinton rushed to sign, afterward purchasing seventy separate “spots” on Christian radio stations in order to brag about the fact. Nobody on the Left has noticed, with Frum’s clarity, that it is the Left which swallows the soft promises of Clinton and the Right that demands, and gets, hard guarantees.
Clinton is the first modern politician to have assimilated the whole theory and practice of “triangulation,” to have internalized it, and to have deployed it against both his own party and the Republicans, as well as against the democratic process itself. As the political waters dried out and sank around him, the president was able to maintain an edifice of personal power, and to appeal to the credibility of the office as a means of maintaining his own. It is no cause for astonishment that in this “project” he retained the warm support of Arthur Schlesinger, author of The Imperial Presidency. However, it might alarm the liberal Left to discover that the most acute depiction of presidential imperialism was penned by another clever young neoconservative during the 1996 election. Neatly pointing out that Clinton had been liberated by the eclipse of his congressional party in 1994 to raise his own funds and select his own “private” reelection program, Daniel Casse wrote in the July 1996 Commentary:
Today, far from trying to rebuild the party, Clinton is trying to decouple the presidential engine from the Congressional train. He has learned how the Republicans can be, at once, a steady source of new ideas and a perfect foil. Having seen where majorities took his party over the past two decades, and what little benefit they brought him in his first months in office, he may even be quietly hoping that the Democrats remain a Congressional minority, and hence that much less likely to interfere with his second term.
Not since Walter Karp analyzed the antagonism between the Carter-era “Congressional Democrats” and “White House Democrats” had anyone so deftly touched on the open secret of party politics. At the close of the 1970s, Tip O’Neill’s Hill managers had coldly decided they would rather deal with Reagan than Carter. Their Republican counterparts in the mid-1990s made clear their preference for Clinton over Dole, if not quite over Bush. A flattering profile of Gore, written by the author of Primary Colors in the New Yorker of October 26, 1998, stated without equivocation that he and Clinton, sure of their commanding lead in the 1996 presidential race, had consciously decided not to spend any of their surplus money or time in campaigning for congressional Democrats. This was partly because Mr. Gore did not want to see Mr. Gephardt become Speaker, and thus perhaps spoil his own chances in 2000. But the decision also revealed the privatization of politics, as did the annexation of the fund-raising function by a president who kept his essential alliance with Dick Morris (a conservative Republican and former adviser to Jesse Helms) a secret even from his own staff.
Of course, for unanticipated reasons also having to do with presidential privacy, by the summer of 1998 Mr. Clinton found that he suddenly did need partisan support on the Hill. So Casse was, if anything, too subtle. (For Washington reasons that might one day be worth analyzing more minutely, both he and David Frum form part of a conservative subculture that originates in Canada.) He was certainly too flattering to those who had not required anything so subtle in the way of their own seduction. Even as the three-dimensional evidence of “triangulation” was all about them, many of the “core” Democratic constituencies would still settle for the traditional two-dimensional “lesser evil” cajolery: a quick flute of warm and flat champagne before the trousers were torn open (“Liar, liar—pants on fire”) and the anxious, turgid member taken out and waved. Two vignettes introduce this “New Covenant”:
On February 19, 1996—President’s Day—Miss Monica Lewinsky was paying one of her off-the-record visits to the Oval Office. She testified ruefully that no romance, however perfunctory, occurred on this occasion. The president was compelled to take a long telephone call from a sugar grower in Florida named, she thought, “something like Fanuli.” In the flat, decidedly nonerotic tones of the Kenneth Starr referral to Congress:
Ms. Lewinsky’s account is corroborated… Concerning Ms. Lewinsky’s recollection of a call from a sugar grower named “Fanuli,” the President talked with Alfonso Fanjul of Palm Beach, Florida, from 12.42 to 1.04 pm. Mr. Fanjul had telephoned a few minutes earlier, at 12.24 pm. The Fanjuls are prominent sugar growers in Florida.
Indeed, “the Fanjuls are prominent sugar growers in Florida.” Heirs of a leading Batista-supporting dynasty in their native Cuba, they are the most prominent sugar growers in the United States. They also possess the distinction of having dumped the greatest quantity of phosphorus waste into the Everglades, and of having paid the heaviest fines for maltreating black stoop laborers from the Dominican Republic ($375,000) and for making illegal campaign contributions ($439,000). As friends of “affirmative action” for minorities, Alfonso and Jose Fanjul have benefitted from “minority set-aside” contracts for the Miami airport, and receive an annual taxpayer subvention of $65 million in sugar “price supports,” which currently run at $1.4 billion yearly for the entire U.S. sugar industry. The brothers have different political sympathies. In 1992, Alfonso was Florida’s financial co-chairman for the Clinton presidential campaign. Having been a vice-chairman for Bush/Quayle in 1988, in 1996 Jose was national vice-chairman of the Dole for President Finance Committee.
Alfonso Fanjul called Bill Clinton in the Oval Office, on President’s Day (birthday of Washington and Lincoln), and got half an hour of ear time, even as the President’s on-staff comfort-woman du jour was kept waiting.
Rightly is the Starr referral termed “pornographic,” for its exposure of such private intimacies to public view. Even more lasciviously, Starr went on to detail the lipstick traces of the Revlon corporation in finding a well-cushioned post for a minx who was (in the only “exculpatory” statement that Clinton’s hacks could seize upon) quoted as saying that “No one ever told me to lie; no one ever promised me a job.” How correct the liberals are in adjudging these privy topics to be prurient and obscene. And how apt it is, in such a crisis, that a Puritan instinct for decent reticence should come to Clinton’s aid.
My second anecdote concerns a moment in the White House, which was innocently related to me by George Stephanopoulos. It took place shortly after the State of the Union speech in 1996 when the president, having already apologized to the “business community” for burdening it with too much penal taxation, had gone further and declared that “the era of big government is over.” There was every reason, in the White House at that stage, to adopt such a “triangulation” position and thereby deprive the Republicans of an old electoral mantra. But Stephanopoulos, prompted by electoral considerations as much as by any nostalgia for the despised New Deal, proposed a rider to the statement. Ought we not to add, he ventured, that we do not propose a policy of “Every Man For Himself”? To this, Ann Lewis, Clinton’s director of communications, at once riposted scornfully that she could not approve any presidential utterance that used “man” to mean mankind. Ms. Lewis, the sister of Congressman Barney Frank and a loudly self-proclaimed feminist in her own right, was later to swallow, or better say retract, many of her own brave words about how “sex is sex,” small print or no small print, and to come out forthrightly for the libidinous autonomy (and of course, “privacy”) of the Big Banana. And thus we have the introduction of another theme that is critical to our story. At all times, Clinton’s retreat from egalitarian or even from “progressive” positions has been hedged by a bodyguard of political correctness.
In his awful $2.5 million Random House turk
ey, artlessly entitled Behind the Oval Office, Dick Morris complains all the way to the till. “Triangulation,” he writes, “is much misunderstood. It is not merely splitting the difference between left and right.” This accurate objection—we are talking about a three-card monte and not an even split—must be read in the context of its preceding sentence: “Polls are not the instrument of the mob; they offer the prospect of leadership wedded to a finely-calibrated measurement of opinion.”
By no means—let us agree once more with Mr. Morris—are polls the instrument of the mob. The mob would not know how to poll itself, nor could it afford the enormous outlay that modern polling requires. (Have you ever seen a poll asking whether or not the Federal Reserve is too secretive? Who would pay to ask such a question? Who would know how to answer it?) Instead, the polling business gives the patricians an idea of what the mob is thinking, and of how that thinking might be changed or, shall we say, “shaped.” It is the essential weapon in the mastery of populism by the elite. It also allows for “fine calibration,” and for capsules of “message” to be prescribed for variant constituencies.
In the 1992 election, Mr. Clinton raised discrete fortunes from a gorgeous mosaic of diversity and correctness. From David Mixner and the gays he wrung immense sums on the promise of lifting the ban on homosexual service in “the military”—a promise he betrayed with his repellent “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. From a variety of feminist circles he took even larger totals for what was dubbed “The Year of the Woman,” while he and his wife applauded Anita Hill for her bravery in “speaking out” about funny business behind the file cabinets. Some Jews—the more conservative and religious ones, to be precise—were massaged by Clinton’s attack on George Bush’s policy of withholding loan guarantees from the ultra-chauvinist Yitzhak Shamir. For the first time since Kennedy’s day, Cuban-American extremists were brought into the Democratic tent by another attack on Bush from the right—this time a promise to extend the embargo on Cuba to third countries. Each of these initiatives yielded showers of fruit from the money tree. At the same time, Clinton also came to office seeming to promise universal health care, a post–Cold War sensitivity to human rights, a decent outrage about the Bush/Baker/Eagleburger cynicism in Bosnia, China, and Haiti, and on top of all that, “a government that looked more like America.” Within weeks of the “People’s Inaugural” in January 1993, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt arranged a deal on the Everglades with the Fanjul family, leaving Al Gore’s famous “environmentalist” fans seething and impotent at the first of many, many disappointments.
TWO
Chameleon in Black and White
In his hot youth in the 1960s, Bill Clinton had been, on his own account, a strong supporter of the civil rights movement. Recalling those brave days during the April 1997 anniversary celebrations of Jackie Robinson’s victory over Jim Crow in baseball, he told an invited audience:
When I was a young person, both I and my family thought that the segregation which dominated our part of the country was wrong… So he was like—he was fabulous evidence for people in the South, when we were all arguing over the integration of the schools, the integration of all public facilities, basically the integration of our national life. Whenever some bigot would say something, you could always cite Jackie Robinson… You know, if you were arguing the integration side of the argument, you could always play the Jackie Robinson card and watch the big husky redneck shut up [here the transcript shows a chuckle] because there was nothing they could say.
Actually, there would have been something the big husky redneck could have said. “Huh?” would have about covered it. Or perhaps, “Run along, kid.” Jackie Robinson—a lifelong Republican—broke the color line in baseball in 1947, when Clinton was one. He retired from the game in 1956, when Clinton was nine. The Supreme Court had decided in favor of school integration two years before that. Perhaps the seven-year-old boy wonder did confront the hefty and the white-sheeted with his piping treble, but not even the fond memoirs of his doting mama record the fact.
As against that, at the close of Mr. Clinton’s tenure as governor, Arkansas was the only state in the union that did not have a civil rights statute. It seems safe to say this did not trouble his conscience too heavily. Let us consult the most sympathetic biography of Clinton ever published, The President We Deserve, by the excellent British correspondent Martin Walker of The Guardian. (His book was simultaneously published in London, under the even happier title The President They Deserve.) Described as “truly sensational” by Sidney Blumenthal in the New Yorker (and thus by a reviewer who, we may be sure, intended no invasion of privacy), Walker’s account of Clinton’s rise covers his electoral defeat in Arkansas in 1980. Clinton had begun his two years at the State House by inviting the venomous old segregationist Orval Faubus, the former governor of Arkansas, to a place of honor at the inaugural ceremony (a step that might have caused Jackie Robinson to raise an eyebrow), but not even this was enough to protect him against vulgar, local accusations of “nigger-loving.” The crunch moment came in the dying days of the Carter administration, when Cuban “Mariel boatlift” refugees were stuffed into an emergency holding pen at Fort Chaffee, and later protested against their confinement. As Walker phrases it: “The ominous black-and-white shots of dark-skinned Cuban rioters against white-faced police and Arkansans had carried a powerful subliminal message.” The boyish governor knew what to do at once. (His conversion to friendship with Cuban refugees did not come until he met the Fanjul brothers.) He vowed to prevent any more Cubans from landing on Arkansas soil, and declared loudly that he would defy the federal government “even if they bring the whole United States Army down here.” This echo of the rebel yell was correctly described by Paul Greenberg, columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, as “a credible imitation of Orval E. Faubus.” Walker tactfully omits that revealing moment, but goes on to describe, with insights from the Clinton inner circle, the conclusion that Bill and Hillary drew from the ensuing reverse at the polls: “The lessons were plain: Never be outnegatived again.”
Perhaps, like the earlier TV impressions he cites, this dictum only occurs to Mr. Walker in the “subliminal” sense. But its provenance is well established. George Wallace, defeated by a less polished racist in an electoral tussle in long-ago Alabama, swore in public “never to be out-niggered again.” This slogan was well known, and well understood, in all the former states of the Old Confederacy. And after 1980, Clinton clearly began to evolve a “Southern strategy” of his own.
In the 1992 run for the Democratic nomination, that strategy became plain for anyone willing to see it. Clinton took care to have himself photographed at an all-white golf club, and also standing at a prison farm photo-op, wearing his shades in the sunshine while a crowd of uniformed black convicts broke rocks in the sun. Taxed with long-time membership in the “exclusive” golf club—“inclusiveness” being only a buzz-word away—Clinton calmly replied that the club’s “staff and facilities” were integrated, a “legally accurate” means of stating the obvious fact that at least the hired help was colored. He invited himself to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition conference, and there went out of his way (having alerted reporters in the meantime) to pick a fight with the inflammatory rap lyrics of Sister Souljah. Ambushed in this style, the Reverend Jackson exasperatedly—and rather presciently—described the hungry young candidate as “just an appetite.” Clinton fashioned an electoral mantra out of the promise to “end welfare as we know it,” making the morals of the underclass into the salient issue and none-too-subtly leaving the hue of that class to the imagination. Most memorably—I say this in spite of the fact that so many people have succeeded in forgetting it—he quit the thick of the New Hampshire primary, in January 1992, in order to fly back to Arkansas and give personal supervision to the execution of Rickey Ray Rector.
Rector was a black lumpen failure, convicted of a double murder, who had shot himself in the head on arrest and achieved the same result as a frontal
lobotomy would have done. He understood his charge and trial and sentence not at all. Nursed back to life and condemned to death, he had spent a decade on Death Row in Cummins prison. His execution number came up in a week when Clinton, according to one report of the poll numbers, had lost twelve points as a result of the Gennifer Flowers disclosures. These two “numbers” were accordingly made to intersect. In 1988, Clinton had backed the ludicrous presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis, a personal coward and political dolt who had lost an easy argument about capital punishment in a public debate with George Bush, and who had also suffered from a sleazy “subliminal” campaign about a dusky parole-breaking rapist named Willie Horton. Official Democratic folklore (which also carefully forgot that Horton had first been used by Senator Al Gore as a weapon against Dukakis in the primaries) coagulated around the view that no candidate should ever be out-Hortoned again. The mass media ministered to this “perception.” In the week of the Flowers revelations, Time magazine helpfully inquired: “Suppose Clinton does sew up the nomination by mid-March and the Republicans discover a Willie Horton in his background?” The quasi-sentient Rickey Ray Rector was to provide the perfect rebuttal to such annoying speculations about the governor’s credibility.
A few columnists—the late Murray Kempton, Jimmy Breslin, and your humble servant among them—commented with disgust on this human sacrifice, but the press pack preferred to use Clinton’s successful lying about Gennifer Flowers as the test of his fitness for high office. It was not until more than a year later that the whole story of Rector’s last days was recounted by Marshall Frady in a long essay in the New Yorker. Served his traditional last meal, Rector had left the pecan pie on the side of the tray, as he incoherently explained to his queasy guards, “for later.” Strapped to a gurney, he had tried to help his executioners find a viable vein (his blood vessels were impaired by an antipsychotic drug) before they inflicted a “cut-down” and slashed the crook of his arm with a scalpel to insert a catheter. It seems he thought they were physicians trying to help him. For many poor Americans of all colors, jail is the only place where doctors, lawyers, teachers, and chaplains are, however grudgingly, made available to them. An hour was spent on the cut-down process, before the death-giving chemicals could kick in. Warden Willis Sargent, a tough former Army non-com, was assailed by misgivings as the deadline approached. “Rickey’s a harmless guy,” he said. “This is not something I want to do.” The police department witness, Lieutenant Rodney Pearson (Rector had shot a cop) found himself having second thoughts as he watched an obviously gravely retarded and uncomprehending prisoner being subjected to the “strap-down.” The chaplain, Dennis Pigman, resigned from the prison system shortly afterward, saying: “I hate murder. I hate murderers. But to execute children? What was done to Rickey Ray Rector was in itself, absolutely, a crime. A horrible crime. We’re not supposed to execute children.”