The events of the past week -- President Clinton fighting a sexual harassment suit in the Supreme Court, Speaker Gingrich under investigation for violating tax laws and providing false information to Congress, and top House Democrats implicated in the illegal dissemination to the press of a tape of a cellular telephone call involving Gingrich -- have brought the Washington scandal-and-ethics regime to a new level. At a moment of convergence like this one, it is wise to stand back from the partisan heat and reflect on its implications.
For instance, almost immediately upon hearing of the illegal tape recording, Republicans in the House of Representatives began calling for a Justice Department investigation and even a special prosecutor. Rather than use congressional power to smoke out the various hidden actors in this little melodrama in full public view and thus hold these elected officials accountable to the people who voted for them and the rest of the American people, the members will allow the matter to descend into the silence imposed by a proper criminal investigation. Isn't the real issue here not the criminal activity, but the political activity and ideological motivation that gave rise to it? And isn't the revelation and explanation of this matter the responsibility of the political process?
It seems that, yet again, we conservatives have taken a wrong turn in pursuit of an important goal. On occasion, over the course of the past four years, we have sadly undermined and trivialized the case against the character and ethics of President Clinton, his administration, and the recent conduct of the Democratic party with indiscriminate and sometimes patently absurd allegations that delegitimize and discredit more serious charges.
Scandals have been thought of as the best, maybe even the only, way of defining public character in an age seemingly without shame but with a hair- trigger mistrust and dislike of government. But by placing too much emphasis on scandal and potential acts of criminality rather than on the ideological and political failings of our opponents, we have adopted the very tactics that we rightly deplored when liberals used them in an attempt to destroy the Reagan administration. We have also inadvertently given an unfriendly media an easy way out of focusing as intently and passionately on these scandals as they would if they had occurred on the Republicans' watch.
In the process, the hard work of developing a serious political and ideological indictment of the Clintons has, in too many cases, fallen by the wayside. This proved a colossal strategic mistake for the Republican party, as we saw in the last presidential election. And it has proved a crutch for conservatives.
Two examples should suffice to make the point. On Election Morning 1996, the media columnist for the New York Post gave over his column to speculating that the reason Clinton had refused to release his medical records in the closing weeks of the campaign was that he had had the infamous "distinguishing characteristic" identified by Paula Jones in her sexual harassment suit against him surgically removed or altered. There was no proof whatsoever to back up the wild claim, but there it was in black and white anyway. The columnist in question is Hilton Kramer, the eminent conservative intellectual, editor of the fearsomely highbrow New Criterion, whose sensibility is usually as far from the National Enquirer as one could possibly get.
Was this what the conservative case against Clinton had boiled down to -- talk about the president's private parts? It seems that when it comes to the Clintons, the usual regard conservatives have shown for careful argument based on fact has been overtaken by a mix of strong personal distaste for the first couple and what they represent in the culture and an understandable frustration with the political realities of the 1996 election.
This was evident as well on Election Eve, when spokesmen for the Clinton and Dole campaigns appeared on CNN's Crossfire and were given a clear shot -- several uninterrupted minutes on Crossfire! -- to make the case for each candidate. Ann Lewis, deputy chair of the Clinton campaign, went first and concentrated on substance and issues: the state of the economy; jobs created on Clinton's watch; welfare reform; the free-trade pact with Mexico.
Then it was Susan Molinari's turn. Astonishingly, the Republican representative from New York spent her entire segment trying to explain Filegate and why voters should care about it. Molinari never quite got straight what she was alleging in the Filegate matter, but even if she had, it's doubtful that many undecided voters on the eve of the election could have been brought in a minute or two to view Filegate as the definitive reason to vote for Bob Dole.
The conduct of Dole himself was almost as discouraging. He was reluctant to go after Clinton on the character issue for most of the campaign (we know now that Dole's reluctance was due to his own skeleton in the closet). And when Dole finally did bring up the issue, he never found a persuasive way of relating voters' real doubts about Clinton's private character to his performance in public office. Dole settled on a pale rerun of the 1992 Bush campaign against Clinton's character -- TV commercials showing Clinton's claim that he "didn't inhale" and faint reminders from the campaign that Clinton didn't have a military record. (And Dole, too, began muttering incoherently about Filegate.)
The character attacks, to be sure, have taken their toll; they likely prevented Clinton from winning more than 50 percent of the vote in either 1992 or 1996. But the number of voters responding to these attacks appears to be small and fixed, and they abandoned Clinton for good in 1992 in any case. Indeed, even if Dole had raised more serious issues like Whitewater and Paula Jones on the campaign trail, polls last year suggested that character -- at least defined in this way -- would not have inflicted further damage on Clintons candidacy. Upwards of 70 percent of poll respondents said Clinton couldn't be trusted -- and yet this same group overwhelmingly favored him for president. For conservatives who have staked so much on the importance of character, the downgrading of the issue in politics should be an especially troubling development. We need to try to figure out why this is.
First, we have to acknowledge the unusual nature of Clinton's appeal and his undisputed brilliance as a politician. Much of the public clearly has accepted Clinton's personal defects and made their peace with them. For whatever reason, voters have given him a pass they have not extended to other politicians under fire. To be sure, Clinton has lowered the bar on acceptable behavior simply by surviving so many allegations about his character, beginning with his introduction to the American public in the Gennifer Flowers scandal. But "defining deviancy down" is not enough to explain why arguably lesser charges than those made against Clinton brought down a succession of politicians -- from Gary Hart, to John Tower, to Jim Wright, to Bob Packwood -- and yet Clinton remains virtually unscathed.
It could be argued that Clinton's questionable character has actually been a net plus. Clinton plays the role of a wayward child who does wrong, then bites his lip and asks for forgiveness. For some voters, Clinton's character flaws seem to make him more approachable and more human -- in short, more like them.
More important, of course, was Clinton's ability to adopt much of the Republican agenda. This took the GOP by surprise and left the opposition with seemingly little ground to fight on. Hillary Clinton's healthcare plan was not adopted and Lani Guinier was not named to the Justice Department. Instead, Clinton ended the federal welfare entitlement. Absent an ideologically galvanizing issue, Republicans and conservatives turned to Filegate and " distinguishing characteristic."
It is also a testament to Clinton's political skill that the Democratic establishment and certain segments of the media have protected him from exposure. For this group, the question of Clinton's character comes down to a simple power calculation: They apparently are willing to countenance and defend a certain level of political corruption as the price of finally having a winning politician in the White House after two decades of arch losers like Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis.
But it does no good to blame the media, though blame is surely merited. The media have been generally hostile to Republicans and supportive of Democrats, yet Republicans do manage to prevail at the polls, as they did in retaining control of Congress even as Clinton was being reelected. No, the problem is deeper than media bias. It can be found in the way conservatives and Republicans have defined their attack on Clinton almost exclusively as a matter of personal ethics instead of joining it to a broader discussion of the character of Clinton's policies, as in, for example, his refusal to ban partial-birth abortions.
In retrospect, it is possible to see why the emphasis on personal foibles turned out to be quite dicey. As Dole's own alleged record of infidelity shows, personal-character warfare is a dangerous game because it knows no partisan boundaries.
Yet, in their desire not only to defeat but to destroy the Clintons, many conservatives have lost sight of their principled view -- held since the Watergate period -- that the Washington ethics machinery ushered in by liberal reformers, including the independent-counsel provision, is destructive and needs to be scaled back substantially. How ironic it is that conservatives have spent the past two years looking to an independent counsel to do their political work for them! Perhaps now that what former Nixon White House counsel Leonard Garment has called the Guns of Watergate have been turned on Newt Gingrich, Republicans will once again see the merit of tempering their ethics attacks and recommitting themselves to conducting political debate where it belongs: in the political, rather man the legal, arena.
Conservatives will no doubt continue to disagree about the tactical and strategic wisdom of engaging the liberals on their own terms in tit-for-tat ethics warfare, or remaining above the fray for the sake of the long-run health of our political system. But maybe both sides in the debate could agree that when charges are made against the character of our political adversaries, those charges should be, must be, grounded in fact.
While it is no substitute for a political platform, journalistic inquiry into various aspects of our leaders' character -- including their private behavior -- is, in my view, perfectly appropriate and defensible. But in the Clinton case, conservatives took this too far: Not content to show the president as weak and unprincipled, which is directly relevant to the way he carries out his public duties, they wanted to portray him as evil.
The Troopergate and Whitewater stories of early 1994, some of them by me, spawned a virtual scandal industry in the right-wing press, on talk radio, in right-wing interest groups like Floyd Brown's Citizens United, on the Internet, and in the promotion of such items as Jerry Falwell's anti-Clinton videos. Recent White House accusations of a vast political conspiracy among these groups to infiltrate the mainstream press and bring down the president are silly, especially since the promotion by these groups of unfounded and irresponsible stories has been a tremendous boon to White House damage- control efforts.
Just last week, the Wall Street Journal summed up White House scandal spin this way: "Because no one could prove the President sneaked out of the White House for a liaison at the Marriott Hotel, there must be nothing to the accusations in the Paula Jones lawsuit the Supreme Court will hear today."
The Journal editorialist, of course, was being facetious, but on the level of public perception, there may be a real connection here. Outlandish claims about the circumstances of Vince Foster's death from Accuracy in Media's Reed Irvine and reporter Christopher Ruddy, among others; preposterous stories about Clinton's having fathered illegitimate children and even having political enemies in Arkansas murdered; tales of strange doings at Arkansas's Mena Airport from dubious sources like Terry Reed; the promotion of attack books like former FBI agent Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access (which contained the spurious Marriott allegation) -- all helped lead an already cynical electorate to shut out other messages about Clinton's character. In a culture with such a glut of information from so many varied sources, it is impossible to expect the public to distinguish the good from the bad, the credible from the fantastic. At a certain point, everything attains the same level of credibility, and all charges, even serious ones, become joined in the minds of many voters with Falwell's Clinton Chronicles. It was with this kind of exaggeration, overstatement, and outright dissimulation about the Clintons -- in a mirror image of the October Surprise hoax promoted by the Left against Presidents Reagan and Bush in the 1980s -- that conservatives really forfeited the character issue.
It might be argued that all of these reckless attacks have been confined to the lunatic fringe and therefore haven't really mattered. But that's not true. For one thing, the climate created by the right-wing scandal industry has given an already reluctant press another excuse not to cover real scandal news. For what it's worth, one New York Times reporter has told me that he and other reporters, in pushing for increased Whitewater coverage at the Times, are concerned that they will be seen as tools of Floyd Brown and Jerry Falwell -- precisely the line the White House pushes.
The Foster conspiratorialists have provided the biggest distraction from the important issues at stake in opposing Clinton. As Laura Ingraham noted in a recent column in the New York Times, the incoming chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Dan Burton, launched his own Keystone Kops investigation of Foster's "murder," including a reenactment of the death scene in his backyard. When Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr finally issues his report on the Foster matter, we will see that the only scandal attached to Foster's death is the amount of public money Starr and his staff had to spend to rebut these conspiracy theories -- which, by their very nature, are not rebuttable.
What was rebuttable was the Aldrich book. While it was shut out of any discussion in the mainstream media after it was exposed on the day of publication as unreliable, Unlimited Access was a number-one bestseller. Even a cursory reading of the text by someone with no knowledge whatsoever of the Clinton White House ought to have revealed an animus so deep and an author so credulous that Unlimited Access could not be taken seriously as an expose. Yet the book was celebrated on right-wing talk radio across the country and even on the Journal editorial page.
This sorry spectacle marked perhaps the final stage in conservatives' surrendering the chance to make a credible case against Clinton's character. Indeed, after I publicly disputed a key portion of the Aldrich book that might have been politically damaging to the president, I was told by more than one prominent conservative that I should have kept my mouth shut. In other words, truth was not to get in the way of the impending election. At one point last fall, I discussed my disillusionment over the conservative embrace of the Aldrich book with a conservative intellectual who had read it and agreed that it was worthless. Yet when I said the book was stoking an irrational hatred of the Clintons, he replied: "I'm not sure that's a bad thing."
Injecting hatred and phony charges into our politics is a pretty bad thing, no matter who is targeted. If this is what the conservative opposition to Clinton has devolved to, perhaps the question we should be asking is whether the character of some of Clinton's critics is really any better than the character of Clinton himself.
David Brock is the author of The Seduction of Hillary Rodham (Free Press) and an investigative writer at the American Spectator. This article is based on remarks delivered at the Dark Ages III conference in late December.