It Was the Sex, Stupid
Tell, David
I It Was the Sex, Stupid Why the American people excused Clinton BY DAVID TELL A hundred years from now, there will be a scholarly consensus about the nature and course of public opinion during...
...Luntz, a pollster, thought impeachment was a "loser...
...Obeying the law is the office—which means a law-breaking president must no longer be tolerated, not for a minute...
...This is how most of the chief combatants on both sides remember it...
...This is how the polls suggest America changed its mind about the scandal...
...But there is a fundamental sense in which the history books will be wrong—for those memories are unreliable and those polling numbers deceptive...
...There is a sense in which America never changed its mind, slowly or otherwise...
...The largest reason the public stuck with Clinton, however, David Tell is opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Another day or week or month of argument would have only made things worse...
...His memoir Sellout, written with Alan I? Henry, is nominally an "inside" account of congressional activity following delivery of the Starr impeachment referral in early September 1998...
...If not at the end, during the Senate trial, then maybe back in the first days, when the nation was still in shock and any result still seemed possible...
...That can't be right...
...No Democrat featured in The Breach seems ever to have conceived the president's crimes as an intrinsic crisis of government...
...By the time Henry Hyde arrived in the Senate, any American who wished to know already knew...
...And so this is how we can assume the history books will someday read...
...Baker's reporting is a helpful reminder of the cynicism with which leading Democrats responded to the president's Ken Starr problem...
...Then he said, 'My God, I can do it again!' And he did...
...To his own party, Clinton's "unacceptable behavior" was unacceptable only insofar as it was a public relations threat to legislative plans and electoral fortunes...
...Perhaps it's best we just draw the curtain on this good man, David Schippers, and wish him pleasant dreams...
...Few crimes in history have been so widely and meticulously inspected as Bill Clinton's misdeeds with Monica Lewinsky...
...He is concerned instead to tell us what he thinks it means...
...But the Republicans, in Baker's reconstruction, made little better showing...
...The logic is elusive...
...Both our parties, then, employed the same calculus in the Lewinsky scandal...
...Unperturbed, they use the wait to trade loud excitements about their host's spectacular new scandal...
...Could ordinary Americans have remembered it for them...
...The story will go like this: First there were those five days in January 1998 when the country went almost blank with shock and we waited to see whether Bill Clinton wouldn't just concede disgrace and preemptively resign...
...He tells us that it is this republican character that we are meant most to love in our national gov-ernment—not so much what things the government does, but how it does them: the elaborate traditions and rules by which it is ordered, and the willingness of its officers to subordinate themselves to those traditions and rules...
...But one oblivious woman gibbers on an extra, fatal moment, her words now audible to the entire room...
...But only a minority of that majority did so for the civil-religious reasons advanced by David Schippers...
...In a roundabout but eloquent manner, he tells us he thinks the particular genius of our constitutional design is the restraint it erects between momentary popular sentiment and ultimate collective action...
...For what the polls missed, they missed...
...I It Was the Sex, Stupid Why the American people excused Clinton BY DAVID TELL A hundred years from now, there will be a scholarly consensus about the nature and course of public opinion during the Monica Lewinsky scandal...
...To Democratic senators who already knew the charges were true, as Sellout elsewhere makes plain, but who were determined to acquit the president anyway...
...There is a sense in which the entire country operated from the start according to a single unconscious but central assumption: The president may sometimes be a felon and keep his job—if his politics are otherwise convenient to us or his felony somehow fails to spark our anger...
...It turns out that right up to the point of her not unfriendly Senate deposition about the president, Lewinsky's lawyers withheld from her the fact that it was Clinton himself who had first and most persistently slandered her as an obsessional, threatening stalker...
...Neither party remembered the purpose of American government...
...When Schippers attempted to clue her in, Lewinsky began to weep—and her lawyers quickly ended the interview...
...A fair number seem never to have been able to explain their votes at all...
...Look back at Baker's faux pas lady...
...I would," she is heard to say to her companion...
...It cannot be that the Senate acquitted the president because it did not see the scandal his way, Schippers prays, for that would make the senators infidels and heathens—non-believers in America's civil religion...
...Clinton rose up slightly as though he were about to withdraw...
...No, he decides, they must be sinners: men and women who knew full well what they should have done, and didn't do it...
...But neither is she any kind of Democratic foot soldier...
...And in the endless meanwhile, a majority of the electorate lost its appetite for the controversy and pronounced the judgment from which it never subsequently swerved: Clinton should serve out his term...
...It also turns out that Juanita Broaddrick told House investigators Clinton raped her twice in 1978...
...But what they caught was undeniable: Most people thought the president was guilty...
...She is an independent-thinking American Everywoman...
...The Senate must have deliberately "betrayed" itself by denying House prosecutors a full opportunity to present evidence that would "prove the charges...
...he has been delayed...
...After his famous finger-wagging denial, the answer was clearly no, and there followed a few weeks of active speculation over whether authoritative evidence from Kenneth Starr might—and ought —soon prove sufficient to drive the president from office against his will...
...Note this lady well, for while Baker makes very little of her, she may be the most important person in his book...
...As Schippers retells it: "Finally, the ordeal appeared to be completed...
...For Schippers is not primarily concerned to complete the documentary record...
...The answer, actually, is no...
...Wouldn't you...
...Here it is, the very first week—while Clinton's party line remains that he scarcely even knew Lewinsky—and this woman already believes he's lying...
...Nor can it be reasonable for Schippers to suppose that a full-scale trial would have produced a public outcry intense enough to turn the tide...
...Most people wanted him retained in the White House just the same...
...The book does contain some fresh detail...
...David Schippers, chief counsel to the House Republicans who led the Clinton impeachment, does not believe a presidential felon should ever keep his job...
...Prove the charges to whom...
...I don't believe that," Sellout's author announces defiantly on the book's penultimate page...
...And it is no serious criticism to report that Sellout hasn't too much other news to make...
...And he does not believe the American people disagree with him...
...The Breach is a serious first-draft history of the Lewinsky scandal's last six months or so, from the institutional perspective of major-party politics, and focusing largely, of course, on Capitol Hill...
...Something of far less consequence, in other words, than his fulfillment of official responsibilities...
...Most people were irritated with men like Schippers...
...Neither party thought the fact of a president's felonies alone was enough to determine that his useful service was at an end...
...Something, therefore, properly of little concern to us...
...Echoed in this verdict were bits of argument long advanced by the president's professional defenders: His accusers' motives were suspect, and their allegations did not warrant a major interruption in the cycle of American politics...
...Trouble is, that seems to be a very lonely faith these days—an impression Schippers winds up inadvertently confirming by the very desperation with which he attempts to deny it...
...I believe," instead, that "the great unpolled American people knew" all along that he and his allies "were honorably performing their constitutional duty...
...She views the scandal as nothing more than a piece of unusually excellent gossip—about sex...
...And their leaders seem to have analyzed Clinton's illegalities with one eye locked on electoral politics...
...President Clinton has invited some friends over for a private movie screening...
...So when the president has perjured himself in the government's courts—even in civil litigation, and even about sex—he has not made a discretely "private" mistake we may leniently weigh in the balance against his "official" performance...
...Schippers says all this and more, and gets quite worked up about it, too, as well he should, for it is the one true faith of American civil religion...
...But no such evidence was forthcoming from Starr, until spring became summer became fall...
...Vox populi: "I would...
...These tales are news enough...
...And the crimes alleged against the president seem hardly to have penetrated her consciousness at all...
...When the president finally does appear, all who notice fall awkwardly silent...
...Trent Lott, for example, settled Senate impeachment strategy with regular input from Frank Luntz, that noted constitutional scholar...
...She is a private guest in the White House, so she's no Republican...
...was the understanding, developed over many months, that his had been merely a private error, a "lie about sex...
...Yes, well...
...The vast majority of them did of course vote to impeach or convict the president...
...In Peter Baker's fine new book The Breach, there is a scene one evening at the White House a few days after Monica Lewinsky has become a household name...
...But he is not there to greet them at the appointed hour...
...Wouldn't you...
Vol. 6 • October 2000 • No. 7
