Clinton’s Levitas

October 19, 2000

Earlier this year, during the primary campaigns, the word on every pundit’s lips was gravitas — as in George W. Bush doesn’t have it. (John McCain had oodles of it.) American politics isn’t hospitable to gravitas; a Washington or a Jefferson couldn’t get elected nowadays. Their gravitas would pull them down.

But we have plenty of the opposite quality, which we may as well call levitas. Our politicians are lighter than air, constantly making empty gestures and saying things they can’t possibly mean because their words themselves are meaningless (even when they manage to form complete sentences). Try to imagine George Washington giving Martha a long liplock on national television, or pecking Oprah Winfrey on the cheek. Or Jefferson testing an idea on a focus group.

Bill Clinton, our silliest president ever, has levitas in abundance. It has enabled him to rise to the top; he has achieved incredible traction on the greasy pole to power. You feel not so much that he is a president as that he gives an impersonation of one, with a sort of mock-gravitas that invites comic responses. As our comedian-in-chief, Jay Leno, has observed (seriously!), “The guy never left high school.” How true. Clinton is like a student council president imitating what he’s seen grownups do.

A case in point was the memorial service for the sailors killed by the bombing of the USS Cole. Clinton spoke, and he knew it was an occasion for tough talk: “To those who attacked them, we say: You will not find a safe harbor. We will find you, and justice will prevail.”

There was something profoundly comical about this puffy hedonist, who spent his college years (and much of his presidency) making love, not war, trying to strike fear into the hearts of suicide bombers. Picture him going mano a mano with fanatics who are willing to kill and die for a cause. Not exactly the Clinton style, is it? Adding to the effect was the fact that some of the men he was threatening were already dead.

Clinton adopted this same jut-jawed pose when he ordered us to listen to him as he denied having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. That was levitas at its purest: his words were absolutely empty, totally false and spoken only for effect.

True levitas can be achieved only by the glib. Clinton always knows the prescribed thing to say at the moment. His words become memorable only in retrospect, through irony: when we find out what the truth was.

Eight years of unbroken levitas may have rendered the American presidency permanently absurd. Maybe it started before Clinton. The dignity of the office had gradually eroded through the days of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and the first George Bush.

We even learned a few things about our young martyr, John F. Kennedy, that told us, long after the fact, that we’d been taken in by an illusory Camelot. While publicly fighting the Cold War for the Free World, he’d been whisking girls in and out of the White House. In those days the fad word was charisma. All Kennedys had charisma, at least until Chappaquiddick. Some of them think they still have it.

Today the presidency is attended with a certain amount of mocking irony. When we see old newsreels of Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, the tone of solemn reverence for the presidency seems as quaint as the black-and-white film. Gravitas came with the office. A comedian making dirty jokes about Ike and Mamie was inconceivable. Lenny Bruce went to jail for less.

During the time of Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge, presidential iconoclasm was the exclusive property of H.L. Mencken. Today we all watch the presidency waiting for the punch line or the pratfall.

Bill Clinton came to the White House hoping to be the next Jack Kennedy, his youthful hero. Instead he became the one and only Bill Clinton, incommensurably absurd. Irreverence, opportunism, mendacity, and sexual revolution converged on the Oval Office to ignite the greatest explosion of raucous laughter in American history.

Some presidents have been tragic figures; this one is a picaro, a comic rogue. He has taught us the meaning of levitas.

Joseph Sobran

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