Character Witnesses

January 30, 2001

Not exactly a class act, were they? I refer, of course, to Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose exit from the White House was so multifariously graceless that it’s hard to know where to start.

I’m tempted to begin with the physical trashing of the White House and other executive offices, but since Bill himself didn’t do it, let’s set that aside for a moment.

Clinton’s last-minute pardons to his half-brother, friends, cronies, and donors not only shocked his supporters; they even showed that “Clinton-haters” had overestimated him. The manner of his departure amounted to a merry three-word farewell address to the nation: “So long, suckers!”

Not that he really fooled us. Throughout the 1998 impeachment wrangling, Clinton’s defenders never defended his character. No Democrat doubted or denied that Clinton was a lecher, a liar, a perjurer, et cetera, fully capable of obstructing justice in his capacity as the chief enforcer of the laws of the United States.

Nobody credited Clinton with a speck of honor. Nobody contended that he would never lie to the public. Nobody vouched for his fidelity as a husband. And the quality of his defenders — such worthies as Larry Flynt, Geraldo Rivera, Alan Dershowitz, James Carville, and Jesse Jackson — virtually convicted him in itself.

But somehow his character was a “private” matter, irrelevant to his official duties. Never mind that he used all the powers of his office, for months, for the purely personal purpose of saving his own hide. Among other things, he turned his vice president and cabinet into flunkeys who professed their full faith in him. And of course there was the little business of bombing a “terrorist” pill factory just as impeachment loomed. Killing a few foreign folks here and there is, after all, a presidential prerogative.

The same Democratic senators who voted to acquit Clinton are now vociferously dubious about John Ashcroft’s moral fitness to serve as attorney general. Leading these defenders of public standards is Edward Kennedy, who was upstaged by Clinton as the nation’s most conspicuous degenerate. If you want to know what Clinton really was — and is — you need only listen carefully to those who stick up for him.

When asked whether he believed Juanita Broaddrick’s charge that Arkansas’s Attorney General William Clinton had raped her in 1978, Al Gore, not yet “my own man,” mumbled that he wasn’t familiar with the details, but that we should “forgive” Clinton for “mistakes” in his “personal life.” Lacking Clinton’s nimbleness in mendacity, Gore neglected to say that he believed his boss incapable of such a crime. By his silence he made it very clear what he did believe.

We don’t really disagree about Clinton’s character. There has been a tacit consensus all along. And every new revelation merely shows that even the most cynical of us have been giving him too much credit.

Now Clinton has received a new testimonial, of the usual kind, from his own forces. Before leaving Washington, Clinton-Gore underlings looted and vandalized their own offices — leaving “cut cables, phone lines, and electric cords, plus a mess of rubbish,” reports the New York Post — just to spite the incoming Bush-Cheney people. Unseduced by the new spirit of bipartisanship, some left obscene recorded phone messages. Tipper Gore was so embarrassed that she called Dick Cheney’s wife to apologize.

But the real point here is that people in any organization take their cues from the top dog. He sets the tone. Most employees of a president would consider the dignity of the office and of the man who occupies it, and would refrain from indulging any mischievous impulse that might disgrace him. Even if their own self-respect didn’t inhibit them, they’d know better than to make the boss look bad.

Not this bunch. They knew their boss. Their valedictory orgy of destruction eloquently bespoke the Clinton ethos. They were doing what they figured the vandal-in-chief, leaving office with a plea bargain, would approve and probably get a kick out of.

Forget what Clinton’s enemies say about him. His friends — and the kind of friends he attracts — say far more damning things than any detractor could. His character witnesses might as well have been character assassins.

Joseph Sobran