Clintonian (adj.)

February 22, 2001

Well, we can stop guessing what Bill Clinton’s legacy will be. The word Clintonian will never be used as a compliment. And he can’t blame his enemies. He can thank his friends, his allies, his half-brother, his brother-in-law, his wife, and, most of all, himself. He has made himself a lasting symbol of political corruption.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any slimier, out pop two of Clinton’s kinfolk to serve as the ultimate negative character witnesses. His half-brother, Roger Clinton, presidentially pardoned for drug dealing, has reportedly been investigated by the FBI for seeking “payments for help in arranging pardons,” reports Newsweek magazine.

“The inquiry was dropped after Justice lawyers spotted a legal problem,” the story continues. “Since Roger Clinton wasn’t a federal official, it was not a crime to seek money to deliver action by the government.” No, it wasn’t a crime. It was merely Clintonian.

Then came the news that Hillary Clinton’s rich lawyer brother, Hugh Rodham, whose only known legal talent is his relation to Bill, had procured a presidential pardon and a commutation of the Clintonian variety: the proper channels were bypassed and mercy was extended on that famous final morning of the Clinton administration.

Bill and Hillary professed themselves “dismayed” by Rodham’s role, for which he received $400,000 in contingency fees, and issued carefully worded — that is, Clintonian — denials that they had known what Rodham was up to during his frequent recent visits to the White House. They had demanded that he return the money, though he had broken no law; he had merely discerned, and cashed in on, the Clintonian ethos.

Somehow Roger Clinton and Hugh Rodham had picked up the same idea: that as long as Bill Clinton was in the White House, special government services were for sale. The theory may have originated with crazed Republican Clinton-haters, but it seems to have held up pretty well in practice. Like McCarthyite witch-hunters, Clinton-haters have been vindicated by the record.

Today it’s the erstwhile Clinton-lovers who have a lot of explaining to do. Why couldn’t they see until this month what was obvious to the Clinton-haters many years ago? Both Clintons are among the most ethically uninhibited people ever to enter, let alone inhabit, the White House.

One of the most amorous of the Clinton-lovers, Albert Hunt of the Wall Street Journal, asks why Bill didn’t check up on the financier Marc Rich before granting him a highly irregular pardon. “Rewarding campaign contributors is too simple an explanation,” he deep-thinks.

On the contrary, when it comes to Bill Clinton, simple explanations explain an awful lot. He may be cunning, but subtle he is not. However crooked his path, his destination is usually clear enough. If he were equidistant from a pile of money and a comely White House intern, the only question is which he would grab first.

Any crude explanation of Clinton’s motives deserves to be embraced unless you can think of an even cruder one. Rich’s ex-wife visited Clinton a hundred times in a single year. Why did the president of the United States make so much time for one private citizen? Two possible answers come to mind. One is that she gave him a lot of money. The other is suggested by her large and generously exposed bosom. If the cruder answer is wrong, more credit is due to her virtue than to his. (Then again, why would a virtuous woman make so much time for Bill Clinton?)

We aren’t dealing with Hamlet here. Anyone who sees Clinton as a refined and complex specimen of Western man, tortured by philosophical scruples, is, as Shakespeare might say, full of it. Clinton is living proof that conscience doesn’t necessarily make cowards of us all. After eight years of scandal, exposure, impeachment, FBI semen analysis, and Jay Leno, his audacity remains absolutely unimpaired.

Almost incredibly, he still expects us to believe his denials. As long as he can fool some of the people some of the time, he is satisfied.

How can you sum him up? Coarse, lecherous, venal, treacherous, slippery, reckless, sociopathic? All these may be true enough, but only one word will really capture him: Clintonian.

Joseph Sobran