This sordid truth indicts us for what we have been for the last decade: a petty and childish people, who invested our energies in embarrassing ourselves even as others plotted to strike at our vitals.
The last two presidents stand out in our pantheon as almost uniquely divisive men; toward the end of their second terms, it was hard to find an American who was neutral about either man. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush solidified the animosity and paralysis of the 50 / 50 nation, a regretful phenomenon that has quickly established rather deep roots.
While similar in their solicitation of blind love or blind hate from millions of Americans, Clinton and Bush are fundamentally different in many ways. Clinton was loved, or hated, by obsessing over details, by weighing every conceivable option and ramification, by compromising when reaching a final decision, and by making those "final" decisions amendable in the face of new or countervailing evidence.
Bush, on the other hand, is loved, or hated, by disregarding details as the province of pessimists or cowards, by eschewing the seeking of alternative options as soft-headed dithering, by defining compromise as defeat, and by making final decisions which, however hastily arrived at, can not be reversed or seriously amended, even in the face of objective evidence of their error, because admitting to mistakes is held to be even worse than committing them.
Each president was handled differently by the political opposition, and the choices the opposition made in each case have shaped the country as much as the presidents themselves have. The republican opposition in the 1990's wanted so much to destroy Bill Clinton that they seemed totally unaware that they were disgracing the office of the presidency itself, the nation at large, and any vestigial traces of respect for the government that may have lingered in the hearts of the citizenry.
And here we have the debate: which was worse, the smoke or the fire? Was it Clinton's fault for having an affair and then lying about it? Or was it the Republicans' fault for trying for the first time in American history to remove an elected American president from power for a personal and moral transgression which bore absolutely no relation to the execution of his office? The answer, of course, is both. The problem, of course, is that so few Americans are willing to see it that way.
Firstly, the president's serial infidelity to his wife does not represent simply a "personal choice" which we should all accept as the reality of a "new set of values" of which we should all be anything but, God forbid, "judgemental". What the president did was completely disrespectful to his wife, his daughter, and, after 1992, his office.
To say that it did not matter at all that Bill Clinton was a serial adulterer is to say that there is no such thing as right and wrong, or that the distinction between them is simply academic rather than practical. In the case of Monica Lewinsky, which simply represented the one tryst that was actually proven, the president's conduct was even more unacceptable.
Lewinsky was 22 years old when the affair began. 22. The president was more than old enough to be her father. This was not a harmless dalliance; it bordered on pedophilia. That Lewinsky seemed to have actually believed that the most powerful man on earth was deeply in love with her speaks volumes to her childish state.
The president carried on affair with a woman less than half his age in the building where he lived with his wife and daughter. This is a degree of recklessness and disrespect that is genuinely hard to articulate; it represented a staggering failure of judgement and a blindness to morality and decency that should have shaken us deeply.
The truth, however, was that, at its core, it was a personal failure. The Republicans, driven by a still-difficult-to-comprehend hatred for the Clintons, chose to make it public and to attempt what must be rightly understood as a coup d'etat.
Firstly, the Republicans insisted that a sitting president could be charged in a civil case alleging wrongdoing before becoming president. They ignored the fact that this threatens all future presidents of any party with any number of frivolous accusations by former staff or political enemies. This is an unacceptable diversion from the business of the presidency; civil suits can wait. The nation can not.
Secondly, they empowered an independent counsel who job became looking for a crime rather than proving that a pre-alleged crime had or had not taken place. With these pieces in place, they simply waited for Clinton to slip. To his everlasting and well deserved disgrace, he did.
Perhaps only such a sleazy prosecution could make such a sleazy defendant look like a victim. Ken Starr's report on his Whitewater investigation mentioned the word "Whitewater" three times. It mentioned the word "sex" three hundred times. No other figure speaks so clearly to what really went on here.
Ken Starr subpoenaed the President's doctor to tell him whether or not the president's penis had a distinct curvature. He subpoenaed a vial of the president's blood to determine whether the president had ejaculated onto Ms. Lewinsky's clothes. He had the sitting president, under oath, answer graphically explicit details about his sexual contact with Ms. Lewinsky. This is where our focus was while al-Qaeda metastasized into a global threat.
When President Clinton struck at al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan following the African embassy bombings of 1998, Republicans accused him of doing so to divert attention from the sex scandal, thus implying that the relative curvature of the president's penis was where the nation's attention should rightly be. Funny that nobody accused the Republicans of impeaching the president to divert attention from the global terrorist threat.
Just as we all know that we would not have invaded Iraq if it were not for 9/11, we also know that Al Gore would have been president if it were not for Monica Lewinsky. (Gore actually won the 2000 election, but that's another blog.)
George W. Bush ran on "restoring honor and dignity" to the office. "Honor and dignity" in this case meant "marital fidelity", which is in itself a very worthy cause. In terms of being an effective president, however, you don't embody "honor and dignity" simply by virtue of not cheating on your wife. In other words, Lincoln is not considered great because he didn't cheat on his wife. There are other elements to greatness than not being a scumbag.
The best we can say of George W. Bush's performance as president, when measured against Bill Clinton's, is that Bush has probably not had any affairs. That's great. But what if an independent council had hounded Bush every day of his eight years? What if this person had forced Bush to testify, under oath, about personal conduct before he was elected? What if Bush had been forced to testify about oh, I don't know, cocaine? One doesn't need an active imagination to picture Bush being forced to lie about one indiscretion or another to save himself and his family public embarrassment.
For fuck's sake, Bush wasn't even under oath when he testified to the 9/11 Commission! If we're looking for "honor and dignity" in the White House, we would be well advised to look past Bush's refusal to be sworn to tell the truth to the 9/11 Commission, which nicely complemented his refusal to allow any recording devices, notes, or oral accounts of what was said during their "candid discussion".
The difference, of course, is that Bush does not face an opposition like Clinton did. Bush's opposition reads more like this: "We'll suspend the constitution for you, but only for six months at a time". While Clinton committed personal crimes, there is a reason that he was not impeached for official misconduct. That reason, simply enough, is that there was none.
Can we imagine what the Republicans would have done if Clinton had governed as Bush has? The Republicans in the 1990's disgraced this country by attempting a coup d'etat which hinged on the public embarrassment of the elected president for a personal sin. The Democrats today disgrace this country by allowing President Bush to commit any manner of executive error and sin and then explaining "we were lied to", before proceeding to do absolutely nothing about the lies.
In 1998, the Republican mentality went like this: "Two American embassies in two countries were blown up five minutes apart by a global terrorist network? Bummer.......do you think Clinton's dick is really curved?"
In 2007, the Democratic mentality goes like this: "Yes, I voted to allow the President to violate all domestic and international law by waging aggressive war against a sovereign nation that had not attacked or threatened to attack the United States. Yes, the president has established a constellation of secret prisons around the world where kidnapped suspects are held without charge. Yes, the president has allowed American personnel to torture detainees. Yes, the president has suspended habeus corpus for American citizens in the event that the President deems them unworthy of such luxury, but it wasn't my fault; he took advantage of my trust."
The only bright spot here is that the American people, in large numbers, see these people for what they are. They saw Clinton as sleazy yet competent and empathetic. They saw the Republicans as hateful and vindictive. They see Bush as arrogant and incurious. They see the Democrats as the very definition of spineless.
From this multifaceted failure of leadership, can we find one person who motives and priorities are anything other than hopelessly venal and self-centered? Monica '08.
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