This sort of tactic works well enough for the daily news cycle, and for the latest opinion poll. But it may not be enough to satisfy the high-minded that they are, as ever, on the right side. (Or, to put it another way, that the side they are on is the right one.) The niche market of the intellectuals—once described by Harold Rosenberg as “the herd of independent minds”—was to be served by its own designated hero, the former playwright Arthur Miller. Writing in the New York Times on October 15, 1998, the author of The Crucible shared the following thoughts:
Witch-hunts are always spooked by women’s horrifying sexuality awakened by the superstud Devil. In Europe, where tens of thousands perished in the hunts, broadsides showed the Devil with two phalluses, one above the other. And of course mankind’s original downfall came about when the Filthy One corrupted the mother of mankind. In Salem, witch-hunting ministers had the solemn duty to examine women’s bodies for signs of the “Devil’s Marks”—a suggestion of webbing, perhaps, between the toes, a mole behind an ear or between the legs, or a bite mark somewhere. I thought of this wonderfully holy exercise when Congress went pawing through Kenneth Starr’s fiercely exact report on the President’s intimate meetings with Monica Lewinsky. I guess nothing changes all that much.
Oh but surely, Mr. Miller, some things have changed? Just to take your observations in order, Miss Paula Jones—the witch or bitch in this case, depending on whether you take the verdict of James Carville or Edward Bennett—did not accuse the president of flaunting two phalluses. Indeed, she implied that it would have taken two of his phalluses to make one normal one, which could even be part of the reason why he paid her the sum of $840,000 to keep quiet. (This payment involved dipping into the “blind trust” maintained by his wife, and perhaps put aside for a rainy day after her success in the cattle-futures and other markets.) Stepping lightly over this point, Mr. Clinton has admitted to nothing at all except the defilement of his relations with his wife and the mother of his daughter, and has used the pain of them for Bible-bearing photo-ops on every Sunday morning since then. No woman’s body was probed by the inquisitors of the Starr team, though there do seem to have been some very close examinations—and even a few bite marks, according to some—visited by the chief executive on certain females. Rather, the Starr team examined the body of the world’s most powerful man, as a result of a legal process that had been initiated by one of the world’s least powerful women and seconded on a 9–0 vote by the Supreme Court. You are right in describing the Starr findings as “fiercely exact,” because not even the Alpha male defendant has challenged them. Yet Congress had no choice but to “paw through” said findings, which were lawfully commissioned by the Alpha male’s usually complicit female attorney general. And the evidence there discovered—necessarily a bit grungy, as is common with investigations of sexual harassment, and with evasions of same—consisted not of “Devil’s Marks” but of matching DNA.
The above does not prove that Clinton is The Evil One, but it does prove beyond a peradventure that Arthur Miller is The Stupid One. Would he let it go at that? He would not. Digging a deeper ditch for himself, and handing up the shovel, he continued:
Then there is the color element. Mr. Clinton, according to Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, is our first black President, the first to come from the broken home, the alcoholic mother, the under-the-bridge shadows of our ranking systems.
Thus, we may have lost the mystical power to divine diabolism, but we can still divine blackness by the following symptoms: broken homes, alcoholic mothers, under-the-bridge habits, and (presumable from the rest of Arthur Miller’s senescent musings) the tendency to sexual predation and to shameless perjury about same. I can remember a time when Ronald Reagan’s genial caricature of the vodka-soaked welfare mother was considered “offensive” by all those with OK opinions, if only because half the white children in America had been brought up by caring nannies—sober and decent black ladies—who had to tend to their own children when they had finished with their day jobs. But in Reagan’s day, the children of the most shiftless white or black mother were still guaranteed a federal minimum. And Reagan would never have dared to stage a Primary Colors photo-op execution—if only for fear of the fulminant liberal response that Clinton avoided. In the asinine remarks of Miller, the Left’s hero of the 1950s, political correctness has achieved its own negation.
In July 1998, during the third and last televised forum of his national “dialogue” on race, Clinton was confronted by the Native American poet and novelist Sherman Alexie, who complained that many of his fellows were still living in the United States’ version of the Third World. Responding, Clinton announced that his grandmother had been one-quarter Cherokee. This claim, never advanced before, would, if true, have made him the first Native American president. It didn’t wash with Alexie, who later observed that people “are always talking about race in coded language. What they will do is come up to me and say they’re Cherokee.” Clinton did his best to be the first to laugh. Within weeks, Clinton’s symbolic pandering brought him a balloon of black sympathy in the bell curves of the opinion polls. He had hired Jesse Jackson to replace Billy Graham as Minister of choice and to counsel his stricken daughter, and he had closed his “atonement” appeal for the November 1998 elections at a fund-raiser in a black church in Baltimore, Maryland—an unconstitutional action for which he was later sued by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. By these last-minute improvisations, he had, without calling any undue attention to the fact, become the first president to play the race card both ways—once traditionally and once, so to speak, in reverse. His opportunist defenders, having helped him with a reversible chameleonlike change in the color of his skin, still found themselves stuck with the content of his character.
THREE
The Policy Coup
History does not record the nature of the luncheon for which Hillary Clinton was so late that she could only spare a “Hey kiddo” for an endangered and isolated friend. But at that stage of 1993, she was, to outward appearances, all radiant energy and business in pursuit of health care for all. Many initiatives were put “on hold” because they were thought subordinate to this overarching objective. The late Les Aspin, Clinton’s luckless and incompetent secretary of defense, once told me that he had planned to make a brief personal appearance in Sarajevo, in order to keep some small part of the empty campaign promise made by Clinton to the Bosnians, but had been ordered to stay at home lest attention be distracted from “Hillary’s health-care drive.” To this day, many people believe that the insurance companies torpedoed a worthwhile if somewhat complex plan. In numerous self-pitying accounts, the First Lady and her underlings have spoken with feeling on the point. Perhaps you remember the highly successful “Harry and Louise” TV slots, where a painfully average couple pondered looming threats to their choice of family physician. As Mrs. Clinton put it in a fighting speech in the fall of 1993:
I know you’ve all seen the ads. You know, the kind of homey kitchen ads where you’ve got the couple sitting there talking about how the President’s plan is going to take away choice and the President’s plan is going to narrow options, and then that sort of heartfelt sigh by that woman at the end, “There must be a better way”—you know, you’ve seen that, right? What you don’t get told in the ad is that it is paid for by insurance companies. It is time for you and for every American to stand up and say to the insurance industry: “Enough is enough, we want our health-care system back!”
It is fortunate for the Clintons that this populist appeal was unsuccessful. Had the masses risen up against the insurance companies, they would have discovered that the four largest of them—Aetna, Prudential, Met Life, and Cigna—had helped finance and design the “managed-competition” scheme which the Clintons and their Jackson Hole Group had put forward in the first place. These corporations, and the Clintons, had also decided to exclude from consideration, right from the start, any “single-payer” or “Canadi
an-style” solution. A group of doctors at the Harvard Medical School, better known as Physicians for a National Health Program, devised a version of single-payer which combined comprehensive coverage, to include the 40 million uninsured Americans, with free choice in the selection of physicians. The Congressional Budget Office certified this plan as the most cost-effective on offer. Dr. David Himmelstein, one of the leaders of the group, met Mrs. Clinton in early 1993. It became clear, in the course of their conversation, that she wanted two things simultaneously: the insurance giants “on board,” and the option of attacking said giants if things went wrong. Dr. Himmelstein laid out the advantages of his plan, and pointed out that some 70 percent of the public had shown support for such a scheme. “David,” said the First Lady, before wearily dismissing him, “tell me something interesting.”
The “triangulation” went like this. Harry and Louise sob-story ads were paid for by the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA), a group made up of the smaller insurance providers. The major five insurance corporations spent even more money to support “managed competition” and to buy up HMOs as the likeliest investment for the future. The Clintons demagogically campaigned against the “insurance industry,” while backing—and with the backing of—those large fish that were preparing to swallow the minnows. This strategy, invisible to the media (which in those days rather liked the image of Hillary versus the fat cats), was neatly summarized by Patrick Woodall of Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen:
The managed-competition-style plan the Clintons have chosen virtually guarantees that the five largest health-insurance companies—Aetna, Prudential, Met Life, Cigna, and The Travelers—will run the show in the health-care system.
And Robert Dreyfuss of Physicians for a National Health Program added:
The Clintons are getting away with murder by portraying themselves as opponents of the insurance industry. It’s only the small fry that oppose their plan. Under any managed-competition scheme, the small ones will be pushed out of the market very quickly.
As indeed it was to prove. Having come up with a plan that embodied the worst of bureaucracy and the worst of “free enterprise,” and having seen it fail abjectly because of its abysmal and labyrinthine complexity, the Clintons dropped the subject of health care for good. The president threw away the pen that he told the Congress he would only use to sign a bill for universal and portable coverage, and instead proposed no bill or remedy at all. Thus was squandered a political consensus on health care which had taken a decade to build up, and which had been used by the Clintons as a short-term electoral vehicle against a foundering George Bush. Since they had been gambling, in effect, with other people’s chips, the First Couple felt little pain.
The same could not be said for the general population, or for the medical profession, which was swiftly annexed by huge HMOs like Columbia Sunrise. Gag rules for doctors, the insistence on no-choice allocations of primary “caregivers,” and actual bonuses paid to physicians and nurses and emergency rooms that denied care, or even restricted access to new treatments, soon followed. So did the exposure of extraordinary levels of corruption in the new health-care conglomerates. Until the impeachment crisis broke, no comment was made by the administration about any of these phenomena, which left most patients and most doctors measurably worse off than they had been in 1992.
By the fall of 1998, with his personal and legal problems mounting, the president could attract defenders of the caliber of Gore Vidal, who spoke darkly about a backdoor revenge mounted by the insurance oligarchy through the third-party agency of Kenneth Starr. Perhaps encouraged by this, Clinton belatedly came out for a Patients’ Bill of Rights, proposed by many in Congress to protect Americans from the depredations of HMOs. This last triangulation—offering to help plug a wound that he had himself inflicted—was perhaps the most satisfying of all. In a strong field, it remains perhaps the most salient example of the Clintonian style of populism for the poor and reassurance for the rich or, if you prefer, big pieces of pie for the fat cats and “good government” for the rest.
Whether the “capital” is moral or political or just plain financial, the Clinton practice is to use other people’s. Some good judges would cite campaign financing, even more than health care, as the classic demonstration of that principle in operation. Perhaps more than any one thing, the system of private political fund-raising licenses the plaintive yelp, routinely emitted by anyone indicted or accused, to the effect that “everybody does it.” Even by this debased standard, however, the Clinton administration was to achieve prodigies of innovation and excess. It was also to show ingenuity in the confection of excuses and alibis. One of these excuses was “privacy.” No sooner had the suggestion been made that the Clintons were auctioning off the Lincoln Bedroom than Neel Lattimore, then the First Lady’s press secretary, replied with indignation: “This is their home, and they have guests visit them all the time. Mrs. Clinton and Chelsea have friends that spend the night, but these names are not available to the public.” The vulgar “public,” which actually owns the White House, has no right to peek inside. Second-order stonewall replies took the more traditional form of the “security” defense, the separation of powers defense, and the flat-out lie. The Center for Public Integrity in Washington, which first tried to ventilate the matter, was told by the social secretary’s office that: “No one in the White House will release that kind of information about guests anyway. I think it’s for security reasons.” The president’s associate counsel, Marvin Krislov, discovered that “The Office of the President is not an ‘agency’ for purposes of the Freedom of Information Act,” a “finding” that was worth having for its own sake. And Amy Weiss Tobe, press secretary to the Democratic National Committee, said of the story: “This has become an urban myth, like the alligators in the sewers of New York. It is just not true.”
There may be no carnivorous reptiles in the underground waterways of Manhattan, but it was eventually established that almost eighty major donors and fund-raisers had indeed been thrashing about in the Lincoln and the Queen’s bedrooms at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The invitations were sometimes offered as rewards, and sometimes as inducements. Steve Grossman, president of the Massachusetts Envelope Company and of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), contributed at least $400,000 to the Democratic Party and to Mr. Clinton’s election campaigns between 1991 and 1996. Nor was an overnight stay at the White House—following a state dinner for the president of Brazil—his only reward. His wife, Barbara, was appointed by the president to the National Council of the Arts, and he himself became a “managing trustee” for the Democratic National Committee. Other beneficiaries-cum-benefactors included David Geffen and Steven Spielberg of DreamWorks ($389,000 and $236,500, respectively), the Waltons of Wal-Mart ($216,800), the Nortons of Norton Utilities ($350,750), and Larry and Shelia Lawrence of the Hotel del Coronado and associated real estate ($100,000, counting contributions from their companies and their company’s employees). Despite the rumors about a liaison between the president and Mrs. Lawrence, the Clintons always insisted on high standards of propriety, stipulating for example that unmarried couples—even consenting ones—could not sleep together in Mr. Lincoln’s chamber. Mr. Lawrence later achieved a brief celebrity by his triple crown of buying, lying, and dying: buying the ambassadorship to Switzerland, lying about his wartime service, and consequently being exhumed from Arlington Cemetery, where he had been mistakenly interred with full fund-raising honors.
The franchising of the Lincoln Bedroom gave way ultimately to the selling of the Oval Office itself. At forty-four separate “coffee” meetings between August 3, 1995 and August 23, 1996, President Clinton personally received the sweepings of the international black-bag community in his official quarters, and asked them for money. “Nice to see you again,” he says to Roger Tamraz, pipeline artist and fugitive from justice, on one of the videos shot by the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). These videos became a source of controversy, for two re
asons. During the Senate inquiry into the breach of campaign finance laws, in October 1997, the White House promised to turn over all materials relating to solicitation. The tapes, however, were not “discovered” by administration officials until the deadline was almost past. Then there was a further delay in handing them to the Justice Department. The legal deadline for Attorney General Reno to decide on whether or not to “expand” her inquiry was Friday, October 4. The tapes—the existence of which had been confirmed to Senate investigators the preceding Wednesday—were delivered to Justice on Saturday, October 5. No official explanation for this—at minimum—1,680-minute delay was ever offered by the White House.