CLEANING UP AFTER CLINTON
Tell, David
CLEANING UP AFTER. CLINTON Davis and Hitchens on Truth and Lies By David Tell For years, Lanny Davis wagged his friendly tail from the pet-shop window of local politics in suburban Washington and...
...On Kathleen Willey: "I just couldn't take this story seriously...
...But that is a private matter...
...One of them is Christopher Hitchens, the transplanted Englishman who contributes brilliant, snarly prose to many of our better magazines and also to the Nation...
...And that he even better understands our president's various left and liberal defenders—with whom Hitchens otherwise, more times than not, sees eye to eye...
...For his general endorsement of the Starr investigation and the House impeachment articles it inspired, he has lately been accused, by the Nation's Katha Pollitt, of treason against progressivism: of having given aid and comfort to the likes of Hyde and Barr and Lott...
...Gosh...
...Once, he recalls, unable to wait till morning, he stayed by his office computer past midnight for the opportunity to read a minor, late-breaking wire by his favorite reporter, John Solomon of the Associated Press...
...what he said was therefore news, and they were professionally obliged to write it down...
...Say what else we might about him, Lanny Davis is transparently sincere...
...Just the same, if summary there must be, suffice it to say that Hitchens understands our scandalous president with rare and unsparing precision...
...What if he were to become a more aggressive pooch...
...But under the circumstances, it is also rather beside the point, or should be...
...Good spin, by contrast, is "surrounding bad facts with context, with good facts (if there are any), and, if possible, with a credible, favorable (or less damaging) interpretation of these facts...
...If a politician is "on our side," if he claims to endorse most of what most of us consider righteous policy—even though he is a lying bastard, and a felon in the bargain—well, we now think that is fine enough...
...It is theoretically impossible, for example, that your president has perjured himself, obstructed justice, and deputized his aides to conceal the crimes...
...And that you remember what your "mother and father" taught you "about the importance of having a Democrat in the White House...
...Which should be plenty bad enough...
...That he has bilked Indian tribes and said kind things about Richard Nixon...
...He was speaking for the president of the United States, after all...
...Bad spin, he advises, is "hiding or obscuring bad facts, by releasing information selectively and misleadingly, and sometimes by being less than completely forthright in answering media questions...
...Davis's new chronicle of these labors, Truth to Tell, is not nearly so infuriating as its title would imply...
...That he has signed the anti-homosexual Defense of Marriage Act...
...And so, by necessary inversion, a story that does threaten serious harm simply cannot be "true...
...Michael Weiss-kopf of Time magazine, "one of the best in the business—a middle-of-the-road journalist, without an ideological or personal ax to grind, with a level of integrity and a concern for accuracy and fairness that were as high as those of any journalist I had encountered over the years...
...And, oh joy, the trade lingo he learned...
...Or, as Kid Lanny all but burbles with equivalent awe-struck enthusiasm: Gosh...
...I've met...
...It is the anti-politics of "triangulation," and a good bit of it is repulsive no matter where you sit...
...Puppy heaven...
...And when questions arose about the curious wordplay of the president's Lewinsky denials, "I couldn't believe the press had reached this level of cynicism...
...The habit of measuring a politician's public character by his humility before the law and other such niceties appears largely lost...
...And the answer is found in the conception of political truth-telling embodied by Davis's rulebook of "spin...
...The book is an insidebaseball memoir as might be written by some wide-eyed, farm-boy rookie after just a single spring-training session in the big leagues...
...I've met...
...M^-rk McGwi-re...
...With this in mind, the only real dupe to emerge from the dreary scandal catalogue of Truth to Tell is the author himself...
...So it goes, page after cringe-making page, Davis incontinent with pride just to have breathed the same air as such titans...
...How must this feel...
...So here, at great length, he reminds his erstwhile lefty friends that in political combat Clinton has routinely shot their wounded...
...In the future, there will likely be another such president: lawless, appalling, and popular all at once...
...This is a progressive politics, Hitchens asks...
...But the sarcastic "team spirit" taunt he hurls in reply ill suits his cause...
...He will be surrounded by another collection of Lanny Davis toadies...
...His new book is a withering treatment of the contemporary culture of Clintonism, the considerable subtlety of which analysis defies fair summary...
...And we are prepared to root for him...
...Hitchens has no doubt been provoked beyond endurance by his critics on the left...
...On the no-show jobs that Clinton staffers arranged for Webb Hubbell after he was forced to resign from the Justice Department: "I gave so little credence to the seriousness of the story...
...Which is to say: Lan-ny Davis started doing "damage control," urging White House reporters to accept as plausible—and circulate throughout the country—an account of Clintonism sufficiently "full" and "con-textualized" as to smother all the hideous details...
...No One Left to Lie To is a veritable bible of anti-anti-anti-Clintonism...
...Christopher Hitchens does not believe this, of course...
...But it isn't, as the events of the past year make clear...
...But the larger, good-spin truth will always protect you, and if there is but a single Republican among the carpers, it will be fair for you to "label any criticism as pure politics...
...In a White House packed with soul-dead shysters, Davis appears actually to have believed the lies he told...
...And before the year was out, the Clinton West Wing, where it takes a village of useful idiots, had marked him for greatness...
...Notice: There are good and bad "facts," but they are always something less than Truth...
...It is pathetic instead...
...Bill Clinton has breached the barrier...
...You have not really told the Truth—that is, issued good spin—until you have manipulated these facts into a story that will not seriously harm you...
...All this would seem an unusually creepy philosophy, if it were in fact unusual...
...The rest of us should point no accusing finger at the reporters who listened to Davis's endless spiels and dutifully recorded his "viewpoint...
...Which he now waves around the way a prep-school boy handles his pipe: This or that news story did or didn't "have legs," he lets drop with a knowing wink...
...Whom is Katha Pollitt aiding and comforting, Hitchens wonders...
...And now he pats you on the head for having filed your dispatches "comprehensively, accurately, and with our viewpoint expressed...
...Put another way: For thirteen months until January 1998, Lanny Davis got paid federal money to lie a lot...
...What must it be like to read that you embraced a "culture of trust" with this next-to-useless Jimmy Olsen chipmunk...
...That way, Davis says, the worst that's likely to happen is that people will shrug off the facts and figure: "How bad could it be...
...Within days of this brainstorm, Davis was all over the David Tell is opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Yes, there will be people who carp at you over mere facts...
...The rest of his book is an eloquent claim that the president is bad not because he is an imperfect socialist, but just because he is bad...
...John Huang's visits to the Oval Office struck Davis as "a nonstory from the beginning...
...What if he were to phone up his better-connected Democratic acquaintances and beg that they recommend him to the cable-TV squawk shows as a down-the-line defender of the scandal-plagued First Couple...
...No, it is not...
...Then, one day, scratching at the New York Times, Davis chanced upon a William Safire column about Hillary Clinton and Whitewater, and he got to thinking...
...Embarrassing, one suspects...
...Our hero was hired up as "special counsel to the president" for work on the administration's principal domestic policy initiative...
...There in the opposition bunker, one expects to find a man of Christopher Hitchens's notable nerve and talent— willing to reject the president for the simple and sufficient reason that he is corrupt, irrespective of his position on the death penalty, welfare reform, or anything else...
...His "first reaction" to Monica Lewinsky "was that there couldn't be a basis for this rumor...
...For to engage in a sectarian dispute over whether the president is either a "lesser evil" or a "crypto-right-wing-er"—and thus does or doesn't deserve support against Ken Starr—is itself to concede the Lanny Davis premise: that Clinton's honor can ultimately be tested only in the realm of supra-factual, agenda-contingent "truth," quite apart from what he's actually done...
...Yet there do remain a few vocal dissenters on the continent...
...That he has authorized the execution of a hopelessly braindamaged black man...
...nation's airwaves, playing tireless, yap-py fetch with the imaginary tennis ball of Bill and Hillary's perfect virtue...
...So the question becomes: How to explain such invincible credulity...
...Imagine you are one of the many White House reporters effusively praised in Truth to Tell for having been willing to engage Lanny Davis in "an ongoing back-and-forth dialogue to sort out the facts and legal issues accurately...
...Provided, of course, that you are Lanny Davis...
...In No One Left to Lie To, Hitchens cannot resist the temptation to retort in kind...
...Drained of its party-hack aspect, and in only slightly less extreme a form, the Lanny Davis standard of political integrity—the ethos of a high-school pep rally—is the one America now accepts...
...CLINTON Davis and Hitchens on Truth and Lies By David Tell For years, Lanny Davis wagged his friendly tail from the pet-shop window of local politics in suburban Washington and dreamed of life downtown, where the lucky dogs do their business not on last week's Potomac Valu-Shopper—but right there, live, on CNN...
...That he has sold out health-care policy to the big insurance companies...
...Thus the Clinton White House fashions its cult metaphysics: That which does not flatter our leader is a threat to the cosmos and so must be false...
...But even that lovely doctrine can be pushed too hard—one would not have thought it possible—and at various points, Hitchens reaches beyond the limit of his own best argument...
...And it will once again be a lonely, thankless task to call attention to his crimes...
...That he has relied for advice on Dick Morris, a "conservative Republican...
...Innumerable times, with the deadline clock ticking, he has made you run a frantic find-the-buried-body race through some multi-thousand-page release of subpoenaed documents—nattering in your ear the whole while...
...But no one would buy him...
Vol. 4 • June 1999 • No. 36
