Death Of Outrage
William J. Bennett, secretary of education and chair of the National
Endowment
for the Humanities under President Reagan captured the public
imagination with
the best-selling Book of Virtues, a compendium of other
people's writing that
had something to teach about morality. In his new book,
Bennett advances his own
credo of right and wrong, and it is far less
compelling. It is a slim book with
a correspondingly slim premise: that the
American public's failure to be
outraged at President Clinton's lies about
his private life is evidence of our
"moral and intellectual disarmament." The
book has six brief chapters
with the grandiose titles "Sex" (first of
course),
"Character," "Politics," "Law,"
"Judgment" – and "Ken Starr."
Each chapter presents an
italicized "Defense of President Clinton" followed
by Bennett's
refutation of that defense. Claiming to exercise "sound
reasoning,"
Bennett sets himself up as the arbiter of morality and
American ideals. The
result reads like a partisan screed. Bennett is outraged
because so many
Americans are not outraged at the president, even if they
believe that the
allegations of "sexual and criminal wrongdoing are true."
Combining
the words "sexual and criminal" is at the heart of Bennett's
thesis
– and his linguistic sleight of hand. Many people do not endorse
the
criminalization of consensual sex. Bennett may not like this, but that
does not
make him any more morals than they do. One might argue, in fact,
that it evinces
a higher moral sense to distinguish between covering up
crimes and a situation
in which the only crime is the cover-up. Bennett
repeatedly refers to
"crimes," "felony crimes," "criminal conduct,"
284
words "criminal allegations," "criminal wrongdoing,"
"criminal
conspiracy," and "criminal cover-up" –
accusation by accretion and repetition
rather than reason. Ah, words words.
Bennett's language reveals a
pervasive double standard. Defenses of Clinton are
"the words of hired guns,
spinners and partisans." He attributes the
arguments he refutes to "Clinton
defenders," "Clinton
loyalists," "Clinton apologists," and "feminists."
(We
do not read of Starr defenders, loyalists or apologists, or of
Clinton
attackers, haters or enemies.) All these label great, but the
word
"apologist" is particularly underhanded: It reframes explanations
and
defenses as apologies, implying unspecified misdeeds. In Starr, Bennett
sees
only "clumsiness," "missteps," "lapses of political
judgment" and "a
certain tone-deafness." Ignoring criticism of
Starr from a wide variety
of sources, including former special prosecutors and
independent counsels
from both parties, he blames Starr's low popularity on
"a well-orchestrated
and relentless smear campaign" – even as he
dismisses Hillary Clinton's
reference to a "vast right-wing
conspiracy" against her husband as
"fantastic." Bennett's
substitution of implication for reasoning is
particularly evident in an appendix
that juxtaposes statements made about
Watergate with statements made about the
current scandals: for example,
quotes by both Nixon and Clinton that they would
like to get on with the job
of running the country. These juxtapositions imply
that the substance of the
scandals is comparable. But the most revealing
comparison with Watergate
actually comes early in the book: Bennett suggests a
"thought experiment"
which describes moves that actually occurred in
Watergate as if they had
covered up a sexual liaison – actions such as
breaking into a psychiatrist's
office in search of information to discredit a
witness, pressuring the IRS to
investigate reporters, and establishing a
"slush fund" to pay hush money.
Bennett's purpose is to 320 words ask,
If we are willing to forgive
Clinton's lying to cover up a sexual affair, would
we excuse any misbehavior
on those grounds? But the section actually has the
effect of dramatizing how
much more egregious the events of Watergate were.
There are other
instances in which Bennett's examples support the opposite of
what he
supposes. He writes, "Interpreting the actions of a president
solely through
a legal prism habituates Americans to think like lawyers instead
of citizens
. . .. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a
beneficial
influence on society." But in this spirit, legal terms like
"obstruction of
justice" and "suborning of perjury" conjure
up, in most people's minds,
matters far more weighty than engaging in and trying
to cover up illicit sex.
In rejecting this "legal prism," many
Americans are thinking like
citizens rather than lawyers. Faulty, slippery slope
arguments abound. For
example, after quoting citizens who said, of Clinton's
sexual behavior, "Who
are we to judge?" Bennett writes, "Without
being 'judgmental,' Americans
would never have put an end to slavery, outlawed
child labor, emancipated
women, or ushered in the civil rights movement."
But the distinction
between private acts like having sex and public offenses
like slavery, child
labor, and forbidding women and blacks to vote is precisely
the distinction
many Americans are making – and it is a highly moral one.
Bennett
displays contempt for average Americans, calling us fools because we do
not
view the president the same way he does. Rather than seeking to
understand
the moral underpinnings of positions others take, he dismisses
them as debased,
lacking in morality. The people may be the wiser ones when
they refuse to reduce
complex notions of "character" and "morality" to
personal
sexual conduct. How about the morality of a country as wealthy as
the United
States being the only modern industrialized society that does
not provide
universal 308 words health-care coverage to all its citizens? Or
the morality of
the ever widening gap between rich and poor? In this light,
when voters say they
care more about the economy or health care than about
Monica Lewinsky, they are
not just expressing petty self-interest; they are
also taking moral stances. To
my mind and perhaps to the minds of those
Bennett deplores, the real moral
question is not: Did he or didn't he have
sex/ lie about it/ apologize for it,
but How have we all participated in and
been sullied by a political, legal and
journalistic system that has focused
public attention on the president's private
life rather than the many
problems facing the country and the world? Many who
refuse to support the
president's impeachment do not defend his sexual behavior.
They just say
that this behavior should not be the object of an expensive
investigation and
media coverage. Bennett's diatribe is unfair because it is
unbalanced. He
blames only Clinton, and rejects or ignores any roles played by
others. The
public is not incapable of outrage; they simply have different
objects for it
than Bennett would like them to. There is plenty of outrage at
Linda
Tripp's betrayal of friendship when she (illegally) taped conversations
with
Monica Lewinsky and turned them over to lawyers deposing Clinton, leading
to
his denials that constitute the much-touted "lying under oath," but
this does
not count as morality for Bennett; instead, it irritates him.
"Why all the
venom directed at Ms. Tripp?" he asks. Many also feel
outrage at the pouring
of public funds into an independent counsel investigation
that moved far
afield from the Whitewater events it was initially charged
with
investigating. When allegations against the president reached a
crescendo, so
did his approval ratings. Bennett sees this as indifference,
which he bemoans,
as an abandonment of "longstanding 317 words American
ideals." But the
approval ratings didn't just stay the same; they shot up.
This is not a sign of
indifference. It is a backlash, an expression of
outrage against what I call
"the argument culture" – relentless attacks on
figures like the
president by political opponents and the press. There are
many who agree with
Bennett that no president should be "above the law,"
but also feel
that a president should not be pursued with laws that would not
be applied to
other citizens. Such sentiments uphold the longstanding
American ideal of
fairness. Bennett sees the public "giving license not only
to Mr. Clinton's
corruption but possibly to our own as well." But jumping on
the bandwagon
of denunciation gives license to future overzealous
prosecutors, civil
litigants, and political opponents to try to destroy
leaders they dislike by
launching assaults on their private lives and
character rather than debating
them on the issues. According to critics don't
look for President Clinton's
picture in The Book of Virtues; best-selling
author and former Secretary of
Education William J. Bennett considers
Bill Clinton uniquely unvirtuous. In the
wake of the White House intern sex
scandal, Bennett accuses Clinton of crimes at
least as serious as those
committed by Richard Nixon during the Watergate
imbroglio. Rising above
anti-Clinton polemics, The Death or Outrage urges the
American
public--which initially displayed not much more than a collective
shrug--to
take issue with the president's private and public conduct. Clinton
should be
judged by more than the state of the economy, implores Bennett. The
commander
in chief sets the moral tone of the nation; a reckless personal life
and
repeated lying from the bully pulpit call for a heavy sanction. The
American
people should demand nothing less, says the onetime federal drug
czar. In each
chapter, Bennett lays out the rhetorical defenses made on
Clinton's behalf (the
case against him is "only about 279 words sex," harsh
judgmentalism
has no place in modern society, independent counsel Kenneth
Starr is a partisan
prosecutor, etc.) and picks them apart. He may not
convince everybody, but this
is an effective conservative brief against Bill
Clinton Today we see little
public outrage about Bill Clinton's misconduct.
With enormous skill, the
president and his advisors have constructed a
defensive wall built of bricks
left over from Watergate: diversion,
half-truth, equivocation, and sophistry. It
is a wall that has remained
unbreached. Until now. In The Death of Outrage: Bill
Clinton and the
Assault on American Ideals, former cabinet secretary and
best-selling author
William J. Bennett dismantles the president's defenses,
brick by evasive
brick, and analyzes the meaning of the Clinton scandals: why
they matter,
what the public reaction to them means, and the social and
political damage
they have already inflicted on
America.