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Copyright
1994 Sam Smith
When millions of Americans first saw
Bill Clinton on television, he bored them. While nominating Michael
Dukakis at the 1988 Democratic convention, Clinton talked so
long the crowd started interrupting, yelling "We want Mike."
According to biographers Charles Allen and Jonathan Portis, "It
was clear to television viewers that Clinton was confused and
frightened." The governor pleaded for patience, but when
he said the words, "In conclusion," the conventioneers
broke into cheers. One disgruntled delegate observed, "He
wrote eight drafts but forgot to throw out the first seven."
To those who had heard about Clinton,
it was somewhat surprising. After all, a myth was already beginning
to form around the Arkansas governor. His advance notices had
been uniformly favorable: he was bright, capable and, above all,
articulate. He was still considered a young rising star ten years
after he had been first elected governor.
Clinton had also been the beneficiary
of what one journalist has called the Great Mentioner. He had
already been noted, remarked upon and welcomed in the smokeless
salons where national politics are created. Clinton mattered.
How one comes to matter in Washington
politics is guided by few precise rules, although in comparison
to fifty years ago the views of lobbyists and fundraisers are
far more significant than the opinion, say, of the mayor of Chicago
or the governor of Pennsylvania. This is a big difference; somewhere
behind the old bosses in their smoke-filled rooms were live constituents;
behind the political cash lords of today there is mostly just
more money and the few who control it.
Thus coming to matter has much less to
do with traditional politics, especially local politics, than
it once did. Today, other things count: the patronage of those
who already matter, a blessing bestowed casually by one right
person to another right person over lunch at the Metropolitan
Club, a columnist's praise, a well-received speech before a well-placed
organization, the assessment of a lobbyist as sure-eyed as a
fight manager checking out new fists at the local gym. There
are still machines in American politics; they just dress and
talk better.
There is another rule. The public plays
no part. The public is the audience; the audience does not write
or cast the play. In 1988, the 1992 play was already being cast.
Conservative Democrats were holding strategy meetings at the
home of party fund-raiser Pamela Harriman. The meetings -- eventually
nearly a hundred of them -- were aimed at ending years of populist
insurrection within the party. They were regularly moderated
by Clark Clifford and Robert Strauss, the Mr. Fixits of the Democratic
mainstream. Democratic donors paid $1000 to take part in the
sessions and by the time it was all over, Mrs. Harriman had raised
about $12 million for her kind of Democrats.
The play was also being cast by a group
that called itself the Democratic Leadership Council. Although
lacking any official role in the Democratic Party (and often
appearing more a Democratic Abandon Ship Council), the DLC claimed
it was the voice of mainstream party thought. In fact, it was
primarily a lobby for the views of southern and other conservative
Democrats, yet so successful was its media manipulation that
it managed with impunity to call its think tank the Progressive
Policy Institute.
In such places the important Democratic
politics of the late 1980s was being made. Clinton may have bored
millions of Americans on TV that night, but Clifford, Strauss,
Harriman and the DLC found him intensely interesting, extremely
intelligent -- an appealing pragmatist, willing to compromise,
and fully at home with the policy jargon of the capital. He was
not the only horse in their stable -- Pamela Harriman, for example,
also liked Al Gore and Jay Rockefeller -- but as good as any
they had.
The appeal of Clinton to these matchmakers
went beyond mere political calculations. Clinton was not only
politically realistic, he was culturally comfortable. He projected
the image of an outsider, yet had adapted to the ways of capital
insiders. Official Washington -- including government, media
and the lobbies -- functions in many ways like America's largest
and most prestigious club, a sort of indoor, east coast Bohemian
Grove in which members engage in endless rites of mutual affirmation
combined with an intense but genteel competition that determines
the city's tennis ladder of political and social power. What
appears to the stranger as a major struggle is often only an
intramural game between members of the same club, lending an
aura of dynamism to what is in truth deeply stable.
The Yale law degree, the Rhodes scholarship,
the familiarity with the rhetoric of the policy pushers all helped
Clinton fit into the club. But perhaps most of all, Clinton knew
when to stop thinking.
Just as the Soviets tolerated free thought
only within the limits of "socialist dialogue," so
debate in Washington is circumscribed by the limits of what might
be called Beltway discourse. Ideas that adjust or advance the
conventional wisdom are valued. Those that challenge it are ignored
or treated with contempt. Beltway discourse is informed by a
number of disciplines but tends to ignore others. The teachings
of law and political science as well as those of economics and
similar pursuits of quantification are considered important;
those of history, anthropology, religion, literature, philosophy
and the arts tend to be discounted.
Clinton had a fine sense of the limits
and the language. The media, the major enforcer of Beltway discourse,
naturally found Clinton appealing. Clinton not only spoke the
policy patois the Washington media understood and appreciated,
he shared their orthodoxy about the future of the Democratic
Party. By the late 1980s there was a wide-spread consensus among
both the press and the Democratic leadership that the party's
problems could be traced to several factors:
- The loss of control by party bosses
due to excessive democratization of nomination and convention
procedures.
- Undue pandering to such traditional
constituencies as blacks, liberals, and women.
- The need for a new and far more conservative
Democratic platform.
By the 1988 convention, this consensus
had taken root. US News & World Report reported:
That the Democrats went beyond
all bounds to appear bland and "normal" is incontrovertible.
The brief, boring and bulletproof platform gave "platitudinous"
new meaning. "Notice," complained New York Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, offering only one example, "that
the word city does not appear in our platform. We talk about
suburban hometown American and I figure that doesn't mean the
South Bronx."
With the rise of this orthodoxy, the
media's language changed. What was once a civil rights cause
now became "demands of special interest groups." The
conservative Democrats' self-definition as "moderates"
or "mainstream" was uncritically adopted. And "liberal"
began to be used, even in purportedly objective articles, as
a pejorative. It made someone like Clinton looked very good.
By the time of the 1992 New Hampshire
primary the press would be overwhelmingly in the Clinton camp.
Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Republic reported he had surveyed
several dozen journalists and found that all of them, had they
been a New Hampshire voter, would have chosen Clinton. Hertzberg
noted that this was a change from previous elections when the
press had tended to split their primary choices, sometimes sharply.
He suggested that the "real reason members of the press
like Clinton is simple, and surprisingly uncynical: they think
he would make a very good, perhaps a great, president. Several
told me they were convinced that Clinton is the most talented
presidential candidate they have ever encountered, JFK included."
While the most that even reasonably informed
Americans knew about Bill Clinton when he spoke in Atlanta in
1988 was a string of favorable adjectives from the Great Mentioner,
the governor himself was well enough positioned to have already
given serious consideration to running for president. He had
reflected, waffled and finally backed out, citing among other
things his responsibilities to his daughter Chelsea. But now,
in the wake of his convention debacle, he faced a big political
problem anyway. He had gone national and flopped.
The incident provided a glimpse of a
personality America would only really begin to understand some
months after Clinton had been inaugurated:
- There was, for example, the elaborate
but futile preparation -- multiple drafts of a effort that would
ultimately misfire.
- There were the 19th hole rationalizations
-- ranging from valid complaints about the failure to dim the
lights in the convention hall to a disingenuous claim that he
had plowed ahead out of obligation to Dukakis.
- There was the sense that Clinton perceived
the speech -- much as he regarded politics itself -- in intensely
personal terms. It was not the disservice to Dukakis that seemed
to matter, but the fact, as he put it to a reporter, that "I
just fell on my sword." This was not the comment of a second
banana -- of the warm-up act -- but of a man who, like so many
successful individuals of the 80s, found himself in a lonely
battle against the rest of the world and who was, in the end,
his own best hero.
- Finally there was the recovery, the
come-back. Our country loves comebacks, perhaps because they
help keep the American Dream alive by giving everyone another
chance. They are entertaining, moving and inspiring. Few question
whether such mercurial swings, whatever their appeal in sports
or entertainment, serve any national purpose. The political comeback
is just assumed to be a virtue canceling any failure that necessitated
it.
The speech quickly became a joke. Johnny
Carson ridiculed Clinton, calling him a "windbag."
But Clinton managed an invitation to the show and proved not
only an ingratiating guest but played sax with Doc Severinson's
orchestra. In doing so, he received post-modern America's equivalent
of a presidential pardon: laughter and applause on late night
television. Clinton went on that evening to a party given by
Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. There was a sign
there depicting the White House. On it was a slogan: ON THE ROAD
AGAIN . . . CLINTON '96.
Even in this small incident, four years
before the election of Clinton as president, we find the outlines
of the Clinton style, of the meat of myth and of a politics so
personal that politics seems almost an afterthought. We would
be seduced into the Clinton saga again and again not because
it was noble or tragic, not because of its political substance
or ideological appeal but simply because we wanted to know how
it would turn out: Days of Our Politicians' Lives, starring
Bill and Hillary Clinton.
The beginning of TV-era politics is generally
traced to the Kennedy-Nixon debates. In his book on the Fifties,
David Halberstam quotes Russell Baker describing the battle between
a sweating Nixon and the cool Kennedy: "That night image
replaced the printed word as the natural language of politics."
Adlai Stevenson had seen it coming. A
few months earlier he gave a speech in which he observed: "If
freedom is really the organizing principle of our society, then
we cannot forget that it is not an illusion, propaganda or sedatives,
but truth alone that makes us free. Under the influence of the
politics of sedation and the techniques of salesmanship, I believe
that in recent years self-deceit has slackened our grip on reality."
True enough, but Kennedy and Nixon remained
essentially traditional politicians manipulating a new electronic
world. They each would learn to use it well but in the end would
still unmistakably possess their own virtues or failings. In
our enthusiasm for Kennedy's telegenic ability, we tend to forget
that the reason Nixon was able to debate Kennedy at all was because
of his own remarkable "Checkers" speech, perhaps the
only television address to single-handedly save a political career.
It would be a couple of decades before we felt the full power
of television to create the reality of our politics. Ford, Carter
and Reagan were all televised but television, for better or worse,
could not change their natural state. Reagan seemed to have been
born in syndication and neither Ford nor Carter were willing
or able to adapt to the great eye.
George Bush was another matter. Without
television, Bush would have been just one more dull country club
Republican. His media handlers, however, transformed him from
a stiff flop in the early primaries to a television version of
a president. To be sure, Bush was to JFK as Connie Chung is to
Edward R. Murrow, but that was irrelevant because television
no longer needed or wanted JFK or Murrow. It had discovered that
complex, well-developed characters actually conflicted with the
brutal simplicity of its message. It wanted primal symbols, Punch
& Judy characters, myths and comfortable "concepts."
If politics was to make full use of the medium it could not remain
baroque theater occurring outside of television. It had to become
simple enough for the camera to explain. It had to become television,
each campaign another series pilot.
By the end of the 1980s, television,
it seemed, was more important than anything. Newspapers were
hurting. Peter Teeley, press secretary to then Vice President
Bush, had described cynically but honestly a critical difference
between the media: "You can say anything you want during
a [presidential] debate and 80 million people hear it. [If the
newspapers later correct the record] so what? Maybe 200 people
read it or 2000 or 20,000." In the midst of the Gulf War,
one poll reported that 81% of Americans were getting most of
their news from television. By 1993, as United Nations troops
searched for clan leader Muhammad Farah Aidid, the Somalian general
was insisting on staying only in those safe houses that received
CNN.
Television's secret was that it was more
important than many of the people appearing on it because, while
they could not exist outside of the tube, television had plenty
more where they came from. Bush falters; bring on Clinton. In
fact, it seemed you didn't even need live politicians anymore.
In August 1993, a correspondent appeared on the CBS morning show
to discuss the relative power of senators and the White House.
On his lap, to assist in his report, was a enormous voodoo doll
in the likeness of Senator David Boren.
It is true that Clinton had been reelected
many times by the people of his state, had been judged the best
governor in a newsweekly poll of his peers, was demonstrably
personable, well-informed and intelligent, and far from being
the political equivalent, say, of some eminently replicable network
weatherman. Still, there were important things about the man
that were missing.
Such as history.
In its darkest corners Clinton's past
is his enemy, something to have overcome and to overcome still.
In the Clinton campaign story there was talk of family, but his
mother and half-brother remained in the shadows. There were those
older than himself who helped him on his way, such as Senator
Fulbright, but they too appeared far on the periphery of his
story. His most moving tale was of challenging his abusive stepfather.
His daughter is named not after a relative, but for a popular
song. He has good friends, but apparently hundreds of them. He
has no home and no vacation home. He left the place of which
he has spoken most often, Hope, when he was seven; his family
moved to Hot Springs, a resort for Chicago and New York mobsters
with flourishing illegal brothels and casinos whose patronage
included Chicago and New York mobsters.
Clinton's convention documentary would
try to suggest roots yet, carefully crafted as it was, there
was a void. Clinton was there and people were there, but they
seemed around him, not with him. He reaches out of the crowd
at Boy's Nation to touch Jack Kennedy's hand, just as during
the campaign tens of thousands would reach out to touch his.
A touch. A moment. A moment gone.
It was the normal work of the politician,
but with Clinton there seemed too much. Too many hands, too many
friends, too many words, too many hours before he went to sleep,
too many hours on C-SPAN solving the nation's problems with too
many industrialists and economists -- and, in the end, too little
else. It was as though he was afraid that if he excused himself
from the public eye he might no longer be real. It was not surprising
that Clinton said he wanted to run his administration like a
campaign. His whole life had been one.
Politics used to be about remembrance.
The best politicians were those who remembered and were remembered
the most -- the most people, the littlest favors, the smallest
slights, the best anecdotes tying one's politics to the common
memory of the constituency.
Politics was also about gratitude. Politicians
were always thanking people, "without whom" whatever
under discussion could not have happened. You not only thanked
those in the room -- as many as possible by name -- you even
thanked those without -- for "having prepared the wonderful
meal which we have just partaken of." The politician was
the creation of others, and never failed to mention it.
Above all, politics was about relationships.
The politician grew organically out of a constituency and remained
rooted to it as long as incumbency lasted.
Today, we increasingly elect people about
whom we have little to remember, to whom we owe no gratitude
and with whom we have no relationship except that formed during
the great carnie show we call a campaign. Dallas coach Jimmy
Johnson spoke for many contemporary politicians when he answered
a question about his memories of Thanksgiving Day football games
by saying, "Memories? That's not my style."
At the beginning of the 1992 campaign,
few of us knew -- let alone remembered -- anything about Bill
Clinton. If we were not from Arkansas, we had nothing for which
to thank him. And our whirlwind relationship, our arranged marriage,
was under the constant control of the great American matchmaker:
the media. Clinton's past was not only unimportant to him, but
to us as well.
In an earlier time, Clinton's non-history
would have been an enormous disqualification. Now it wasn't because
Clinton had one huge edge over his opponents: he looked and acted
well on TV. Tom Harkin moved and spoke as mechanically as the
Energizer bunny; Kerry's personality and platform remained a
cipher; Tsongas talked funny; Brown was didactic; but Clinton
was at home.
Against this advantage, facts faltered.
The facts said that Clinton had been an unexceptional governor.
He could claim better prenatal care programs and a decline in
infant mortality, but at the same time the Center for the Study
of Social Policy would rate the state only 41st on children's
issues in general. Arkansas also ranked -- according to the Southern
Regional Council -- in the bottom ten percent of all states in
average weekly wages; health insurance coverage, state and local
school revenue; unemployment; blacks and women in traditional
white male jobs; environmental policy and overall conditions
for workers.
An examination of his record raised warning
flags, not the least of which were rocky relationships with labor
and environmentalists. At the beginning of the campaign Clinton
came under attack by his state's AFL-CIO president who (before
the national union ordered him to shut up) sent around a highly
critical report on Clinton's record. Labor, said Bill Becker,
should expect Clinton's help only 25-30% of the time. And the
League of Conservation Voters ranked Clinton last among the Democratic
candidates on conservation issues.
Greater attention to Clinton's record
also might have brought to more prominent notice the major tax
increases during his tenure. Or the comment by the union official
who said that Clinton would slap you on the back and piss down
your leg. Or the tendency to waffle on issues. Early in the campaign,
David Maraniss of the Washington Post cited Mrs. Clinton's reflection
on the death penalty:
We go back and forth on the
issues of due process and the disproportionate minorities facing
the death penalty, and we have serious concerns in those areas.
We also abhor the craze for the death penalty. But we believe
it does have a role.
Acting on the latter part of this circumlocution,
Clinton left the New Hampshire campaign to oversee the execution
of a lobotomized black murderer named Rickey Ray Rector, a man
so removed from reality, reported Richard Cohen, that "at
his last meal, he set aside a slice of pecan pie so he could
have some later."
Similarly, in February 1992 Clinton said,
"I supported the Persian Gulf war because I thought it was
in our national interest" while one year earlier he had
said "I guess I would have voted with the majority [of the
Senate on the war] if it was a close vote. But I agree with the
arguments the minority made."
Perhaps the most revealing story of this
sort did not appear until after the election. According to the
New York Times, it seems that following five days of agonizing
over a higher education bill, Clinton finally vetoed the measure
with a stamp that read DISAPPROVED. The bill was delivered to
the clerk's office but because it was after closing it had to
be slipped under the door. Clinton then called the state's university
presidents to explain his decision. They convinced him that he
had made a mistake. The Times continued:
So the Governor summoned a
state trooper in his security detail and asked him to go back
to the clerk's office and retrieve the vetoed bill. The trooper
could see through the locked glass door that the bill was lying
on the floor. He took a coat hanger, slipped it under the door
and slid the bill out. He brought it back to Governor Clinton,
who simply crossed out the letters DIS and sent it back as APPROVED.
Although each of these stories appeared
somewhere in the American press, journalistic traditions lessened
their impact. In the first place, most papers prefer to run their
own stories and downplay any other paper's contribution. As a
result, the aggregate investigative output of American journalism
is unavailable except to those who subscribe to expensive clipping
or computer search services. Secondly, as a campaign progresses,
the past becomes less and less important. There is a foreshortening
of concerns; media attention is focused on what happened yesterday
or the day before. Basic information about the candidate developed
early in the campaign inevitably fades, is considered stale and
irrelevant, and we are left to judge by only the most recent
standards.
There is also a compression of language.
A once complex investigative story gets reduced to a candidate's
"controversial relationship" with someone, a 75-page
policy position to a "detailed jobs proposal." In 1993
even the candidates, as though bored with their own rhetoric,
compressed their pitches dramatically, creating a sort of pidjin
politics.
Here is Paul Tsongas:
"Twinkie economics. Tastes good.
No nutrition."
"Cold War? Over. Japan won."
And Jerry Brown on the North American
Free Trade Agreement:
"Clinton: jobs there. Brown: jobs
here. It's real simple. Don't complicate this vote."
There are other journalistic factors
that affect campaigns, not the least of these being peer pressure.
George Orwell once noted, "At any given moment there is
a sort of all-prevailing orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement
not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact." A journalist
wishing to challenge this orthodoxy faces not only the resistance
of sources but the ridicule of peers, well described by D.D.
Guttenplan in the Columbia Journalism Review:
Polls, fundraising, media strategies
-- that's what the [media] insiders on the road want to know
about. Ask a candidate a detailed question about health care
and you're instantly marked as a yahoo. Ask about day care or
job creation or the racial makeup of his staff, and you're tagged
as a fanatic -- some kind of "ideologue." Why this
should be so is difficult to explain, except that "on the
bus," naiveté is the worst possible offense. The
best way to seem sophisticated is to ask the shallowest questions,
preferably with a sneer in your voice.
Why this should be so is perhaps explained
in The Evolution of Cooperation, in which Robert Axelrod
describes how German and English soldiers in the trenches during
World War I tacitly developed a mutually protective relationship,
right down to eliminating salvos during lunchtime and timing
other gunfire so the opposing side would know when to stay under
cover. He quotes a British officer facing a Saxon unit of the
German Army:
I was having tea with A Company
when we heard a lot of shouting and went out to investigate.
We found our men and the Germans standing on their respective
parapets. Suddenly a salvo arrived but did no damage. Naturally
both sides got down and our men started swearing at the Germans,
when all at once a brave German got on to his parapet and shouted
out, "We are very sorry about that; we hope no one was hurt.
It is not our fault, it is that damned Prussian artillery.
Axelrod cites this analysis by Tony Ashworth:
In trench war, a structure
of ritualized aggression was a ceremony where antagonists participated
in regular, reciprocal discharges of missiles, that is, bombs,
bullets and so forth, which symbolized and strengthened, at one
and the same time, both sentiments of fellow-feelings and beliefs
that the enemy was a fellow-sufferer.
A similar bonding -- complete with "regular,
reciprocal discharges of missiles"-- occurs in the trenches
of politics between the media and those it covers. In such a
closed reality, the reader or viewer -- not the news subject
-- becomes the one left out.
The single-mindedness of the press can
be astounding, witness this from the Washington Post of
May 26, 1993:
White House spokeswoman Dee
Dee Myers claims to have won a press office betting pool on how
many [questions about the mass firing of White House travel office
employees] would be asked at yesterday's daily briefing. She
guessed 127 and the tally came in at 118.
Orthodoxy can also be reinforced by the
bias of words used to describe something, as in this query from
an ABC News poll:
Which of these statements comes
closer to your view? Beneath it all, Clinton is an old-style,
tax-and-spend Democrat; OR Clinton is a new-style Democrat who
will be careful with the public's money.
It can be even more blatant. Extra!,
a progressive media watchdog magazine, for example, listed a
few of the terms that purportedly objective journalists used
during the campaign to describe Jerry Brown, one of Clinton's
opponents:
- Annoying--Ted Koppel, ABC News
- Weird--Cokie Roberts, NPR
- A pain in the you-know-what -- Bernard
Shaw, CNN
- Flailing about, spewing out charges
like sparks from a Fourth of July pinwheel. -- RW Apple, New
York Times
- He's a chameleon, a character assassin
and a first-class cynic. -- John Alter, Newsweek.
- Brilliant, self-absorbed, friendless,
idealistic, erratic, opportunistic, cold, hypocritical -New York
Times
- Jerry Brown's more corrupt than the
system - Eleanor Clift, Newsweek
The nature of politics has also been
affected by the decline of descriptive journalism in the wake
of Watergate and television's rise. Real reporters now prefer
smoking guns -- stories that offer the potential of major victory
or defeat, if not of resignation, impeachment or indictment.
Stories that merely reveal character or style, or open a window
on our political experience, are downplayed or relegated to gossip
or "lifestyle" coverage, especially if there is any
suggestion -- without formal proof -- that something is amiss.
In short, a legalistic rather than a literary standard of coverage
has evolved. Politics, once the great American novel, has been
reduced to a case study.
Absent a smoking gun, editors often favor
stories that explain import, perceive perceptions, and reveal
meaning. Detailed chronicles of the daily joys, inanities and
mishaps of politics have faded. News, for example, has literally
started to disappear from the front pages of the Washington Post,
replaced in no small part by the reflections of various writers
about what the unreported news means to them or is supposed to
mean to us. This approach, a futile and often boring attempt
to justify the paper's existence in a world of television and
USA Today, creates some oddities, such as the Post commissioning
a presidential poll and then failing to reveal the results for
nine full paragraphs, during which one has waded deep into the
story after a tedious trek through E.J. Dionne Jr.'s analysis
of the facts we might learn if we only hang on long enough.
Further, a priggishness has infected
a generation of self-consciously respectable journalists. This
can be easily seen by comparing the exuberant reportage of HL
Mencken or AJ Leibling with the stolid work of today's analysts.
The former was intensely descriptive while the latter is written
in an ritualistic and abstract style that sucks life from politics
and which, by making it all seem so boring, may actually be a
cause of electoral apathy. If democracy is no more exciting than
David Broder would have us believe, why bother to vote? When,
rarely, today's columnists do go after a politician with vigor,
the target is almost always someone on the political edges like
Jerry Brown or Pat Buchanan rather than an establishment figure
such as Clinton and Bush.
Here, on the other hand, is an example
from the 1920 presidential coverage of Mencken. It clearly violates
just about canon of contemporary objective journalism yet, with
the benefit of hindsight, hardly suggests that Mencken misled
his readers about the choice before them:
No one but an idiot could argue
seriously that either candidate is a first-rate man, or even
a creditable specimen of second-rate man. Any State in the Union,
at least above the Potomac, could produce a thousand men quite
as good, and many States could produce a thousand a great deal
better. Harding, intellectually, seems to be merely a benign
blank -- a decent, harmless, laborious hollow-headed mediocrity.
. . . Cox is quicker of wit, but a good deal less honest. He
belongs to the cunning type; there is a touch of the shyster
in him. His chicaneries in the matter of prohibition, both during
the convention and since, show the kink in his mind. He is willing
to do anything to cadge votes, and he includes in that anything
the ready sacrifices of his good faith, of the national welfare,
and of the hopes and confidence of those who honestly support
him. Neither candidate reveals the slightest dignity of conviction.
Neither cares a hoot for any discernible principle. Neither,
in any intelligible sense, is a man of honor.
With the current more somber and "responsible"
approach often comes a bowdlerized view of the candidates and
the politics surrounding them. This doesn't mean that the coverage
is better. The media, in its desire to avoid unsubstantiated
political allegations, can easily find itself instead providing
unsubstantiated exonerations. The most prominent example in the
Clinton campaign involved Gennifer Flowers' claim to have had
an affair with the governor. Flowers backed up her allegation
with tape recorded conversations between the governor and herself.
Most of the major media declined to run excerpts from the tapes,
some using the argument that the tapes did not prove the existence
of a sexual relationship. (Clinton himself gave substance to
the recordings by apologizing to Mario Cuomo for pejorative remarks
made on one about the New York governor).
While it was true that the tapes could
be interpreted in a number of ways, they did suggest that Clinton
and Flowers were covering up something and at the very least
provided an enlightening view of the ethical calculus of the
candidate.
Clinton was never pressed by reporters
for the inner meaning of his comment that if "everyone hangs
tough, they're just not gonna do anything. They can't. . . They
can't run a story like that unless somebody says, 'Yeah, I did
it.' " Certainly, when Richard Nixon had similar reflections
on the Watergate tapes we thought it of more than passing interest.
A year and a half later, Adam Nagourney of USA Today admitted
to Vanity Fair, "Nobody pursued it. You could have taken
those tapes and gone to town."12
Back when the Gary Hart story broke,
a public relations man suggested how he would have handled the
scandal: put up billboards featuring photos of FDR, Eisenhower,
JFK and Hart. Underneath would be the single phrase: HART: IN
A GREAT TRADITION.
In a similar vein, some reasonably made
the argument that if Hillary had bought her husband's explanation
that was good enough for them. Still the Flowers story, and the
way Clinton handled it, went directly to concerns about the man
other than adultery. There were times during the campaign when
Clinton's versions of his past reminded one of the Raymond Chandler
character: "smart, smooth and no good." Tracking a
Clinton explanation, whether of past actions or present policy,
could be like trying to dance on a floor covered with marbles.
As Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette put it: "Bill
Clinton is a presidential debate."
Further, in the Flowers case the media
seemed to be having it both ways. The Washington Times pointed
out, for example, that Clinton's alleged affair got far kinder
treatment from the media than had similar stories involving others.
The Flowers story quickly disappeared from the mainstream press.
In contrast, said the Times, the 1980 story about Dan Quayle
-- then just a congressman -- sharing a Florida cottage with
Paula Parkinson and several other members of Congress was the
topic of 11 stories in the New York Times and 16 in the Washington
Post all in one week. During the same period, the major networks
ran 13 stories.
When John Tower was nominated to be Secretary
of Defense, the networks ran 32 stories concerning Towers' alleged
sexual improprieties. The Washington Post ran a story by Bob
Woodward that accused Tower of having "appeared to be drunk"
during two visits to a Texas Air Force base and having fondled
two women. The only source for this story was one former Air
Force sergeant. And during the nine days before the Senate voted
to confirm Clarence Thomas, the networks ran 99 stories -- the
New York Times ran 63 and the Post 61 -- about Anita Hill's allegations,
though they were unbacked by anything so substantial as a tape
recording. More recently the sexual activities of Senator Robert
Packwood have attracted intense media interest while those alleged
of Senator Daniel Inouye, a far more popular Washington politician,
have been downplayed. In the politics of sex, politics counts
at least as much as the sex.
If the media merely reported the public
actions of politicians there would be a strong argument for avoiding
a story like Flowers'. But that's not what happens. The Washington
press, for example, consistently projects a halcyon, virtuous,
and lovable image of our presidents at play, which then inevitably
colors our reaction of them at work. The now mandatory White
House tour, in which a network anchor fawns over the presidential
couple, their pets, furnishings and knickknacks, is only the
beginning.
A double standard develops. If the recipe
for Barbara Bush's or Hillary Clinton's chocolate chip cookies
is important, then at least equally true the tale of Gennifer
Flowers. If it's okay for the children of a politician to be
up on the nationally televised stage, why not the politician's
mistress as well? Besides, the umbrage taken at the Flowers allegations
must be considered in light of Hillary Rodham Clinton's swipe
at George Bush's own friend named Jennifer and the Clinton team's
post-election snooping into Bush personnel files. As it turned
out, someone had been expecting them. The Jennifer Fitzgerald
file was empty.
It may be that the media, deep down,
does not believe that the American people are wise enough to
be trusted with the truth that their leaders are often not what
they would seem. In any event, the result is an expurgated version
of politics which creates the very sort of lie from which the
media claims to be protecting us.
Even beyond Flowers, the press was little
interested in stories that scraped the presidential patina from
the Clinton campaign. The major exception was the draft controversy.
Here Clinton discovered the outer boundaries
of media tolerance. That this line should have been drawn between
marital and national fidelity may reflect the self-protective
instincts of those on the road covering a presidential campaign
for months on end. In any case, the media pursued the draft story
with considerable diligence, missing only a few ancillary matters
such as who paid for Clinton's stay in an upscale Moscow hotel
at a time when the Oxford student was supposed to be broke.
In the end, Clinton survived the story,
but would suffer from this account as much as any that grew out
of the campaign, leaving many with sour reactions over his manipulation
of the draft system as well as its suggestion of underlying arrogance
not unlike that of British scholar Heathcote William Gerard,
who explained his absence from World War I by saying, "I
am the civilization they are fighting to defend."
In other matters, Clinton fared far better.
His precipitous mid-spring interest in fairness as he went after
black and labor votes, for example, attracted little media interest.
The Nation quoted Bob Borosage, a Jackson aide in 1988: "You
have to be a political junkie to remember that Clinton now is
not how he positioned himself for the last four years. The irony
is that Clinton is now using a major theme of fairness against
Tsongas when fairness was the word the [Democratic Leadership
Council] was going to banish from the Democratic lexicon. The
DLC said it was for growth and told people they had to stop talking
about fairness. It's hilarious."
Only a few sharp-eyed reporters caught
Clinton filching ideas from other campaigns. Gwen Ifill of the
New York Times was one, noting Clinton's use of Kerry's cry for
"fundamental change," Harkin's demand for increased
use of ethanol and his "real Democrat" line, and the
anti-corporate rhetoric of Jerry Brown. Later, Christopher Georges,
an editor of the Washington Monthly, would point out in a Times
op-ed that many of Clinton's ideas -- including 39 of the 49
specific proposals in his economic plan -- were virtually identical
to programs advocated by Michael Dukakis in 1988. Included among
the Dukakis clones were Clinton's apprenticeship program, worker
retraining initiative and planned assault on tax cheaters.
Although the national press blanketed
Arkansas early in the campaign, the effort proved only marginally
informative. Thus the public heard about Clinton's success in
attracting new business to the state but little about the wage
differential that was far more appealing to industries than the
governor's charm or skill. It heard about his economic development
efforts, but little about how Clinton's development agency had
favored friends of the governor. There was virtually nothing
in the mainstream press about Mena, Arkansas, a Contra training
and drug running center nor of Clinton's curious reluctance to
investigate what was going on there. Only a handful of reporters
took an interest in Worthen Bank although its $2 million line
of credit kept Clinton alive in the early stages of the campaign.
Only fleeting attention was given the
fact that Bill Clinton's wife had represented a client and co-investor
before a regulatory agency of her husband's government. Or that
federal and state agents, while wiretapping Clinton's half-brother
Roger, heard him describe the governor's mansion as a favorite
trysting place.[SS7] Or that at the beginning of the campaign
Clinton's personal security chief was being sued in a Contra-connected
case in which a federal judge ruled that "an unlawful conspiracy
may exist." This story required no digging; the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette had reported it in January 1992. Yet the tale
barely made it out of Arkansas, Alexander Cockburn's coverage
in the Nation being a rare exception.
Similarly, the media quickly and uncritically
accepted the opinion of the Clintons' attorney friend that there
was nothing amiss with the candidate's investment in the Whitewater
Development Corporation, a judgment that would be badly shaken
by the end of Clinton's first year in office.
Some stories providing a useful view
of the political and social culture in which Clinton operated
would appear in one media outlet but be ignored by others. For
example, Money magazine reported that Clinton annually received
about $1.4 million in admissions tickets to the state-regulated
Oaklawn racetrack to hand out to campaign contributors and others.
Money couldn't find another major racing state that allowed such
gifts and quoted an authority on government ethics as saying
"It creates appearances of impropriety." Said the expert,
"I'm stunned frankly at the amount. It's a staggering amount."
The Clinton campaign's reaction to the story was that the passes,
which have gone to the state's governors since the 1950s, are
a "great nuisance," adding that "I guess the potential
is there for a conflict of interest, but we never let it be a
conflict."13
Nor were such practices a fluke. According
to Brooks Jackson of CNN, the commission that regulates Arkansas's
only greyhound track -- the nation's largest -- held its regulatory
meetings several times a year at the track's exclusive Kennel
Club, with the Southland Greyhound Park paying for the commissioners'
food and booze.14
Once the media has bestowed gravitas
upon a candidate it is reluctant to let contrary facts get in
the way. Thus the media portrayal of Clinton quickly lost its
Arkansas flavor. It was Clinton the Rhodes Scholar, Clinton the
man of policies, who came to the fore and Bubba Bill began to
fade.
As simple political narrative this was
a disservice. If there was one thing that made Clinton stand
out among his political contemporaries it was the complexity
of his character, friendships and past. Without such full --
even if contradictory -- details, the portrait of Clinton was
destined to be more myth and propaganda than reality.
As such it was left to the conservative
Washington Times to tell the story of how a convicted Arkansas
drug dealer got pardoned in the middle of the Washington inauguration,
complete with allegations that Clinton had reneged not only on
payments to the dealer's father (who had worked on Clinton's
last state campaign) but on his promise to help market the father's
recipe for sweet potato pie.
The alleged deal provoked considerable
discussion in Arkansas, but the national media was otherwise
engaged, installing with proper sobriety the next president of
the United States. To any aficionado of southern politics, the
story roots Clinton in a long and engaging if not entirely honorable
tradition. One southerner, to whom I told the story, remarked,
"I didn't believe you until you said the part about the
sweet potato pie."
But this tradition is at odds with what
national statesmen are supposed to be about and so was let pass
by a media which, reported the Washington Journalism Review,
was busy using the phrase "defining moment" 700 times
over an 18-month period.
Our first
post-modern president
Not all the myths of the Clinton campaign
were for public consumption. There were also the myths it created
for and about itself.
Every campaign has them. It's one of
the things that keeps people working 18 hour days for little
or nothing. When a campaign turns out to be a winner, these myths
move easily out of the campaign boiler rooms and into the public
consciousness. Camelot actually began in grimy halls in West
Virginia for it is on the campaign trail that the most mundane
activities start to gain an almost sacred quality.
At the center of the Clinton team's internal
mythology were some of the values that characterized America's
upwardly mobile minority of the 1980s. Most Americans lost ground
in this decade; the real income of a male worker with only a
high school education dropped some 15%. Gaps showed up everywhere.
According to economist Robert J. Samuelson, the difference between
the best and the worst paid college graduates grew as did that
between the best and the worst paid lawyers.
But there was a small group of winners
and the Clinton people were among them. They had gone to the
best undergraduate schools and the best law or business schools.
A few had made millions during the 80s. They possessed boundless
self-confidence, a strong sense of entitlement, a willingness
to work extremely hard and long to win admission to the society
of the hyper-successful, and were neither burdened nor blessed
with notable institutional, family or community ties.
Clinton and his team had grown up as
many of the communal support systems of society were disintegrating.
Family, church, and neighborhood were all on the ropes. Politics
was also breaking down: not only had the machines faded, but
the parties were faltering and Congress splintering. Extraordinary
national common symbols were gone as well: the Kennedys, Rev.
King, and -- just as the 80s began -- John Lennon. Young America
entered the decade very much alone.
Thus the egocentrism of yuppie America
did not originally spring from greed, but from an apparent reality;
it truly seemed a struggle between oneself and the rest of the
world. Quietly, and unnoticed at first, the economy was following
community into disarray and a Darwinian imperative took hold.
Winning became its own justification.
The Clintonites' sense of entitlement
stemmed from qualities they valued in themselves and others:
intelligence, skill in communications, and a managerial ability
to rise above the factions and ideologies of everyday life.
The intelligence they admired was not
that of the philosopher, the artist nor even that of a good street
politician or business entrepreneur. It was of the sort that
excelled in the accumulation and analysis of information and
data. It was the skill of the lawyer or academician who could
find every defect in an argument and compose every possible counter-argument.
As congressional aide and former Washington Monthly editor Jonathan
Rowe would say during Clinton's first year, "The proposals
they send up here are term papers; they have no politics in them."
Politics has many traps for those who
rely on rationality and analysis, for it requires not only objective
calculation but a blending of experience, morality and knowledge
into judgments that can not be parsed and decisions that can
not be charted. And it frequently demands choices before all
their implications can be calculated.
Further, skillful campaigners, no matter
how brilliant their account of the inadequacies and injustices
of current affairs, will not necessarily become wise or intelligent
incumbents. The jobs are so different that one politician, burdened
with the newly discovered problems of office, remarked, "Hell,
I didn't want to be governor; I just wanted to be elected governor."
When Clinton, the lawyer, became president some of the decisions
he faced seemed to propel him towards catatonia. In contrast,
Harry Truman, the haberdasher, directly and simply made even
tougher choices and yet slept well the same night. Clinton, seeing
the possible flaws in a policy, would hesitate, pull back. Roosevelt,
on the other hand, understood that government was a constant
act of experimentation, and that experimentation included failure.
The second virtue, the ability to communicate,
is one common to all animals. What distinguishes human beings,
it has been noted, is that they can also think. This is not a
mere quibble, because people who use the verb communicate a lot
tend to mean something closer to a frog's baroomph than an essay
by Emerson. In response to their communications they seek not
thought nor an articulated response, but a feeling. We are supposed
to feel like having a Michelob, feel like the president's bill
will stimulate the economy, feel like all our questions about
healthcare have been answered.
The rhetoric of contemporary "communications"
is quite different from that of thought or argument. The former
is more like a shuttle bus endlessly running around a terminal
of ideas. The bus plays no favorites; it stops at every concept
and every notion, it shares every concern and feels every pain,
but when you have made the full trip you are right back where
you started.
Consider again Mrs. Clinton's comment
on the death penalty:
We go back and forth on the
issues of due process and the disproportionate minorities facing
the death penalty, and we have serious concerns in those areas.
We also abhor the craze for the death penalty. But we believe
it does have a role.
She paused dutifully at major objections
to the death penalty yet finished her homily as though she had
never been to them at all. In the end, the president would propose
fifty new capital crimes in his first year.
The approach became infectious. As the
Clinton administration was attempting to come up with a logical
reason for being in Somalia, an administration official told
the New York Times that "we want to keep the pressure on
[General] Aidid. We don't want to spend all day, every day chasing
him. But if opportunity knocks, we want to be ready. At the same
time, we want go get him to cooperate on the prisoner question
and on a political settlement."
If you challenge the contemporary "communicator,"
you are likely to find the argument transformed from whatever
you thought you were talking about to something quite different
-- generally more abstract and grandiose. For example if you
are opposed to the communicator's proposed policy on trade you
may be accused of being against "change" or "fearful
of new ideas" and so forth. Clinton is very good at this
technique. In fact, the White House made it official policy.
A memo was distributed to administration officials to guide them
in marketing the president's first budget. The memo was titled:
HALLELUJAH! CHANGE IS COMING! It read in part:
While you will doubtless be
pressed for details beyond these principles, there is nothing
wrong with demurring for the moment on the technicalities and
educate the American people and the media on the historic change
we need.
Philip Lader, creator and maitre d' of
the New Year's "Renaissance" gatherings attended by
the Clintons for many years, liked this sort of language as well.
Said Lader on PBS:
The gist of Renaissance has
been to recognize the incredible transforming power of ideas
and relationships. And I would hope that this administration
might be characterized by the power of ideas. But also the power
of relationships. Of recognizing the integrity of people dealing
with each other.
There is an hyperbolic quality to this
language that shatters one's normal sense of meaning. Simple
competence is dubbed "a world-class operation," common
efficiency is called "Total Quality Management," a
conversation becomes "incredibly transforming," and
a gathering of hyper-ambitious and single-minded professionals
is called a "Renaissance" weekend.
Some of the language sounds significant
while in fact being completely devoid of sense, such as "recognizing
the integrity of people dealing with each other." Some of
it is Orwellian reversal of meaning such as the president's pronouncement
after his first budget squeaked through: "The margin was
close, but the mandate is clear."17 This is the language
not of the rationalists that the communicators claim to be, but
straight from the car and beer ads. One might ask, for example,
exactly what has really been transformed by the "power of
ideas and relationships" at Renaissance other than the potential
salaries, positions and influence of those participating.
The third virtue claimed by the Clintonites
is the ability to arise above the petty disputes of normal life
-- to become "post-ideological." For example, the president,
upon nominating Judge Ginsberg to the Supreme Court called her
neither liberal nor conservative, adding that she "has proved
herself too thoughtful for such labels." In one parenthetical
aside, Clinton dismissed three hundred years of political philosophical
debate. In fact, the Legal Times found that while on the Court
of Appeals Judge Ginsburg had sided only 55% of the time with
liberal Judge Patricia Wald, but 85% of the time with conservative
Robert Bork.
Similarly, when Clinton made the very
political decision to name conservative David Gergen to his staff,
he announced that the appointment signaled that "we are
rising above politics."
"We are," he insisted, "going
beyond partisanship that damaged this country so badly in the
last several years to search for new ideas, a new common ground,
a new national unity." And when Clinton's new chief of staff
was announced, he was said to be "apolitical," a description
used in praise.
Politics without politics. The appointee
was someone who, in the words of the Washington Post, "is
seen by most as a man without a personal or political agenda
that would interfere with a successful management of the White
House."
By the time Clinton had been in office
for eight months he appeared ready to dispense with opinion and
thought entirely. "It is time we put aside the divisions
of party and philosophy and put our best efforts to work on a
crime plan that will help all the American people," he declared
in front of a phalanx of uniformed police officers -- presumably
symbols of a new objectivity about crime.
Clinton, of course, was not alone. The
Third Millennium, a slick Perotist organization of considerable
ideological intent, calls itself "post-partisan." Perot
himself played a similar game: the man without a personal agenda.
The media also likes to pretend that
it is above political ideology or cultural prejudice. Journalists
like Leonard Downie Jr. and Elizabeth Drew don't even vote and
Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post, once instructed
his staff to "cleanse their professional minds of human
emotions and opinions."
"What part of government are you
interested in?" I asked a thirtysomething lawyer who was
sending in his resume to the new Clinton administration. "I
don't have any particular interest," he replied, "I
would just like to be a special assistant to someone." It
no longer surprised me; it had been ten years since I met Jeff
Bingaman at a party. He was in the middle of a multi-million
dollar campaign for US Senate; he showed me his brochure and
spoke enthusiastically of his effort. "What brings you to
Washington?" I asked. He said, "I want to find out
what the issues are."
If you got the right grades at the right
schools and understood the "process," it didn't matter
all that much what the issues were or what you believed. Issues
were merely raw material to be processed by good "decision-making."
As with Clinton, it was you -- not an idea or a faith or a policy
-- that was the solution.
This purported voiding of ideology is
a major conceit of post-modernism -- that assault on every favored
philosophical notion since the time of Voltaire. Post-modernism
derides the concepts of universality, of history, of values,
of truth, of reason, and of objectivity. It, like Clinton, rises
above "party and philosophy" and like much of the administration's
propaganda, above traditional meaning as well.
Like Clinton, the post-modernist is obsessed
with symbolism. Giovanna Borradori calls post-modernism a "definitive
farewell" to modern reason. And Pauline Marie Rosenau writes:
Post-modernists recognize an
infinite number of interpretations (meanings) of any text are
possible because, for the skeptical post-modernists, one can
never say what one intends with language, [thus] ultimately all
textual meaning, all interpretation is undecipherable.
She adds:
Many diverse meanings are possible
for any symbol, gesture, word . . . Language has no direct relationship
to the real world; it is, rather, only symbolic.
Marshall Blonsky brings us closer to
Clinton's post-modernist side in American Mythologies:
High modernists believe in
the ideology of style -- what is as unique as your own fingerprints,
as incomparable as your own body. By contrast, postmodernism.
. . sees nothing unique about us. Postmodernism regards "the
individual" as a sentimental attachment, a fiction to be
enclosed within quotation marks. If you're postmodern, you scarcely
believe in the "right clothes" that take on your personality.
You don't dress as who you are because, quite simply, you don't
believe "you" are. Therefore you are indifferent to
consistency and continuity.
The consistent person is too rigid for
a post-modern world, which demands above all that we constantly
adapt and that our personalities, statements and styles to become
a reflection for those around us rather than being innate.
Later, Blonsky (perhaps illuminating
why Gennifer Flowers and the draft and ever-changing policy positions
don't matter) writes, :
Character and consistency were
once the most highly regarded virtue to ascribe to either friend
or foe. We all strove to be perceived as consistent and in character,
no matter how many shattering experiences had changed our lives
or how many persons inhabited our bodies. Today, for the first
time in modern times, a split or multiple personality has ceased
to be an eccentric malady and becomes indispensable as we approach
the turn of the century.
Other presidents have engaged in periodic
symbolic extravaganzas, but most have relied on stock symbols
such as the Rose Garden or the helicopter for everyday use. Clinton,
on the other hand, understands that today all power resides in
symbols and devotes a phenomenal amount of time and effort to
their creation, care and manipulation. Thus the co-chair of his
inauguration announced that people would be encouraged to join
Clinton in a walk across Memorial Bridge a few days before his
swearing-in. "It signifies the way that this president will
act," Harry Thomason said. "There are always going
to be crowds, and he's always going to be among them."
As a post-modernist, Clinton is in some
interesting company. Such as Vanna White, of whom Ted Koppel
remarks, "Vanna leaves an intellectual vacuum, which can
be filled by whatever the predisposition of the viewer happens
to be." Blonsky reports that Koppel sees himself as having
a similar effect and says of Bush's dullness: "You would
think that the voter would become frustrated... but on the contrary
he has become acclimated to the notion that you just fill in
the blank." And then Koppel warns: "It is the very
level of passion generated by Jesse Jackson that carries a price."
Clinton understands the warning and the value of the blank the
viewer can fill in at leisure.
Of course, in the postmodern society
that Clinton proposes -- one that rises above the false teachings
of ideology -- we find ourselves with little to steer us save
the opinions of whatever non-ideologue happens to be in power.
In this case, we may really only have progressed from the ideology
of the many to the ideology of the one or, some might say, from
democracy to authoritarianism.
Among equals, indifference to shared
meaning might produce nothing worse than lengthy argument. But
when the postmodernist is President of the United States, the
impulse becomes a 500-pound gorilla to be fed, as they say, anything
it wants.
Michael Berman describes one postmodernist
writer's "radical skepticism both about what people can
know and about what they can do [passing] abruptly into dogmatism
and peremptory a priori decrees about what is and what is not
possible." The result, Berman says, can be a "left-wing
politics from the perspective of a rightwing metaphysics,"
not a bad description, it turns out, of President Clinton's health
care policy.
That postmodernism is confusing there
is no doubt. Stephen Miller, writing in American Enterprise,
quotes the editor of a collection of essays on the subject attempting
a definition: "I have regarded Postmodernism as a theoretical
and representational 'mood' developing over the last twenty years."
Novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco says the term appears to
be "applied today to anything the user of the term happens
to like."
Certainly Mrs. Clinton found the concept
troubling. In a speech some have compared to Jimmy Carter's maladroit
oration on malaise, she said:
We are, I think, in a crisis
of meaning. What do our governmental institutions mean.? What
do our lives in today's world mean? What does it mean to be educated?
What does it mean to be a journalist? What does it mean in today's
world to pursue not only vocations, to be part of institutions,
but to be human?
We lack at some core level
meaning in our individual lives and collectively.
Quoting a dying Lee Atwater as saying,
"You can acquire all you want and still feel empty,"
Mrs. Clinton went on:
We need a new politics of meaning.
Now, will it be easy to do that? Of course not. Because we are
breaking new ground. . It's not going to be easy to redefine
who we are as human beings in this post-modern age . . .But part
of the great challenge of living is defining yourself in your
moment.
( Maureen Dowd provided a different view
of the dying Lee Atwater in the New York Times. According to
one associate, Atwater called in friends he had double-crossed
and confessed his lies about them. Said the friend, "It
was not a true conversion but just the best calculation he could
make to settle old scores because he was scared. Lee was spinning
his own death.")
Columnist Charles Krauthammer cast a
skeptical ear towards all this:
Heavy, as we used to say in
college. Yes, there is more to life than power and prestige.
Yes, there is more than politics and economics. Yes, life needs
meaning. Most adults, I dare say, have come to these thundering
truisms early in life.
Trite indeed, a fast-track lawyer's yearning
out of sync with the 94% of Americans who say they believe in
God. Another example of the current trend towards intellectual
cross-dressing in which ministers mess in politics and politicians
pretend they are theologians. Yet in the speech was a cry for
something to grab, something solid in the moment-driven, symbol-pumped
postmodernism of the life she and her husband have known. And
Mrs. Clinton did touch on a common sense that something is missing,
better expressed by UCLA history professor Joyce in the journal
Liberal Education: noted
We live in an era of posts.
The buildings going up around us are postmodern. Our age is postindustrial.
Our literary criticism poststructural. We have postpositivist
sociology, postbehavioral political science, and postanalytical
philosophy: Ours is clearly an age that knows where it has been
and senses that it is no longer there.
Later, she says:
We continue to think within
a liberal frame of reference even as we chip away at the frame.
What we no longer share is liberalism's potent, energizing, cohering
faith in progress. The use of "post" language to locate
ourselves in cultural time indicates that we still identify ourselves
through the old convictions. We have not rejected liberal values
so much as we have lost liberal certitude.
Of course, Bill Clinton, as in other
matters, is far from pure in his post-modernism. He likes facts
and data too much. Writing about the president at the end of
his first 100 days, Arkansas columnist Paul Greenberg remarked,
"What the clintonized culture hath wrought is summarized
pithily in one of the better chapters of Jack Butler's new novel,
Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock: 'People. . . understood
reality as machinery rather than God's own dream of existence,
intelligence as information rather than judgment.'" Clinton
might sell his programs with the postmodernist's flair for symbolism
and indifference to truth and consistency, but he would head
the most rationalistic government this country has seen since
Robert MacNamara and his whiz kids attempted to purify Vietnam.
In Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship
of Reason in the West the Canadian historian John Ralston Saul
argues: "When the 18th-century philosophers killed God,
they thought they were engaged in housekeeping-- the evils of
corrupt religion would be swept away, the decent aspects of Christian
morality would be dusted off and neatly repackaged inside reason."
Instead says Saul, came "a theology of pure power -- power
born of structure, not of dynasty or arms. The new holy trinity
is organization, technology, and information."
Reviewing Saul's work for the Utne Reader,
Jeramiah Creedon wrote:
The new priest is the technocrat,
someone who interprets events not morally but 'within the logic
of the system.' Saul's point is that reason alone has no inherent
virtue; it is simply an intellectual tool. In fact, when reason
is allowed to unfold in an ethical vacuum, untempered by common
sense, the results are apt to be terrible. The classic example
is the 'perfectly rational' Holocaust, planned by the Nazis with
'the clean efficiency of a Harvard case study.' . . . Reason
has also created a recurring human type well suited to perpetuating
it: the leader for whom calculation is everything.
To embrace all of this -- from cold logic
to hip logos -- and to create a technicolor technocracy without
drowning in the contradictions was a tour de force. To the trinity
of organization, technology and information, the Clinton team
had added a spectacular symbolic sound and light show.
In Work of Nations, seminal Clintonite
Robert Reich described the world's emerging new elite as "symbolic
analysts" who spend their time "manipulating symbols.29
Blonksy goes further:
Connotation today -- far beyond
advertising phenomenon -- is no longer merely 'hidden persuasion'
but is in fact a semiosphere, a dense atmosphere of signs triumphantly
permeating all social, political, and imaginative life and, arguably,
constituting our desiring selves as such.
The Clinton campaign would ultimately
become a victim of its own success in manipulating the semiosphere,
for it would not only fool us, it would, once in office, delude
itself. But in July 1992, everything was still in tact, albeit
after a few symbolic alterations in which the media gladly acquiesced.
The message -- what with Ms. Flowers, the draft and the drifts
-- had gone awry. The campaign let it be known that the Clintons
would be "reintroduced" at the convention. They were
and few seemed to find it at all strange or disingenuous, for
we had become postmodern, too.
The convention at times looked more like
a leveraged takeover than a political gathering. Clinton operatives
were busy spinning off the unwanted assets of the Democratic
Party -- blacks, unions, the cities and progressives, as longtime
workers of the firm, from Jesse Jackson to Gov. Casey, were told
they'd have to take a cut in pay or that their services were
no longer needed. If you took a loyalty pledge you got a few
moments on the podium and one sentence in the candidate's acceptance
speech (where liberals were lumped with the homeless as among
the pariahs of America), but after such cameo appearances you
were expected to shut up and get out of the way so the lawyer-lobbyist
kill-or-be-killed tough guys could turn the party into a lean,
mean and profitable corporation.
They didn't fool around. Even the language
had a yuppie baron's tone to it. One businessman reported getting
a call from Clinton fundraiser Rahm Emanuel that began, "The
governor's gonna be in Chicago next week, and he wants to see
you. Bring $10,000 or don't come." The day before the election,
Clinton campaigner Paul Begala told a reporter the campaign couldn't
coast, it had to "drive a stake" through the GOP's
heart. And Newsweek reported Clinton responding to a Bush offensive
by saying, "I want to put a fist halfway down their throats
with this. I don't want subtlety. I want their teeth on the sidewalk."
After you cut through the talk about
a "new covenant" and "inclusion" and so forth,
much of the Clinton campaign was about political power in its
purest sense. There was mention of "vision," but as
they say in Texas, it was all hat and no cattle. These weren't
people out to build coalitions or create a movement, only to
win and make sure everyone knew they had. Later, Time would calculate
that phrase new covenant had virtually disappeared by the spring
of Clinton's first year in office.. A check of five major newspapers
found it mentioned 45 times in July 1992, 31 times in August,
but only four times the following April.
To a few, the convention reintroduction
via film and telethon rhetoric was bizarre and tasteless. Imagine,
one Democrat suggested, FDR on the podium telling the full story
of his struggles with polio or Harry Truman turning off-stage
a la Clinton and saying huskily, "I love you, Bess."
But to many more, especially party workers desperate to end their
12 years of exile, it was an appealing and fully credible myth.
It worked, thanks is no small part to
the semiotic sophistication of Clinton's glitzkreig, which borrowed
from television's disease-of-the-week specials to create the
shameless bathos of the candidates' acceptance speeches and then
immediately proceeded to evoke every male buddy tale from Huckleberry
Finn to Newman & Redford by sending its stars across America
together on a bus. It wasn't Greyhound or, as Washington Post
columnist Tony Kornheiser put it, "891 hard miles with a
warm Dr. Pepper and a stale cheese sandwich," but nobody
seemed to care. Nothing that would happen in the next three months
would quite match it. Fortunately for Clinton, it didn't have
to.
The 80s began with the murder of John
Lennon. In the early 90s, Mark David Chapman explained it this
way: "I wasn't killing a real person. I killed an image.
I killed an album cover."
Within days of the election, Ford began
running a TV ad usingd a voice-over that sounded just like Clinton
delivering a speech to an enthusiastic audience. Or was it really
Clinton delivering a speech to an enthusiastic audience? Or really
Clinton selling cars a few days after his election?
We had helped put Clinton in the center
of the semiosphere. He knew how it worked and how to work it.
But did we?
THE PROGRESSIVE
REVIEW
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