PERSPECTIVE ON THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY : There’s Plenty of Hypocrisy, but Whitewater Is Not the Key

Maybe the Clintons didn’t do anything illegal, several reporters on the Whitewater beat told me recently, but still they are guilty of massive hypocrisy. Since I am credited by the media with having inspired Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “politics of meaning” speech a year ago, surely I should see that the Clintons were hypocrites for denouncing the selfishness of the Reagan-Bush years only to be revealed as immersed in that same profit frenzy.

To understand why this is misguided, one has to think deeply about politics in a way normally prohibited by sound bites. The essence of the politics of meaning is its critique of the way contemporary economic, political and social institutions foster selfishness and cynicism. Although we imagine that we can overcome the corrosive effects of public selfishness through private religious devotion or ethical commitment, the “me first” ways of the competitive market gradually corrode private life. Even our families and friendships are weakened because everyone has learned that this is a society in which “looking out for No. 1” is the bottom line.

The epidemic of selfishness shapes every area of our lives. Corporations deplete the Earth’s resources with abandon. Their justification? Profit. This rip-off mentality pervades the middle class; tens of millions of Americans spent last week conjuring up reasons to pay less in income taxes, imagining that anything they could get away with was justified since “everyone else is doing it.” Then, both the wealthy and the middle class turn to the poor to embody a higher ethic and are shocked when the same mentality leads the less advantaged to condone the kind of looting on the street level that corporations engage in on the planetary level.

The politics of meaning suggests that we need to challenge this ethos of selfishness. But it rejects the assumption that those who are doing the challenging will necessarily be on a higher level. Quite the contrary--the point of this kind of societal critique is that the corrosive dynamic affects everyone, including the reformers.

This is how it has always been and must necessarily be. Those who advocate a higher moral ideal will always be less than the ideal they advocate.

Our social reformers will always be “wounded healers,” people who do not yet fully embody the ideals to which they aspire. Judaism and Christianity both recognize this in their holy texts. The Israelites, recent beneficiaries of liberation from Egypt and recipients of God’s revelation, revert to building a golden calf. Instead of destroying them, God reveals to Moses the need for compassion. The New Testament tells a similar story about the very “rock” on which the church will be built, Peter--who three times before the cock crows denies his association with Jesus. Would we say that these religions should never have started and that their adherents are hypocrites because they articulated ideals they could not fully live?

Yet somehow, Americans have got it in their heads that their leaders must be on a higher moral plane than everyone else. This insistence guarantees that our leaders will be liars who learn to hide who they really are because we demand that they appear flawless. And when the inevitable flaws come to light, we feel shocked and disappointed and so retreat to cynicism.

Of course, this process serves best the protectors of the status quo. They will always look less hypocritical because they openly advocate the very cynicism and selfishness that they also live.

But are we really well served by this? Would America have been better off if Martin Luther King Jr.’s romances had been exposed, his credibility decreased and his ability to lead a moral crusade for civil rights compromised? Would it have been better had John F. Kennedy been shown to be a philanderer before he could inspire a generation to ask what they could do for their country? And if the Clintons are politically crippled by a focus on the minor-league role they may have played in the selfishness of the 1980s, will the country really benefit?

This is not an argument for a blank check for our political leaders. If they commit crimes, they should be prosecuted. And there is hypocrisy worth publicly attacking--namely, the disparity between their public pronouncements and the policies they support. If someone wants to critique the Clintons for failing to embody a politics of meaning in the way they’ve dealt with Bosnia, Haiti or the homeless, then we could have a reasonable discussion. What is unreasonable is to fault them for being self-interested in their private lives. In this society, everybody is.

But isn’t that what they wanted to change? Yes, and there was nothing hypocritical in saying that. If they had said, “We want Americans to become like us because we have magically managed to transcend the selfish dynamic of this society,” then the criticisms would make sense. This elitist attitude, embedded in Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, produced widespread antipathy since in Carter’s case he seemed to be saying he was on a higher moral plane than most Americans.

A politics of meaning does not fault people for being motivated by self-interest. Each of us has a part of ourselves that wants to transcend the selfishness and live according to our highest values and a part that thinks that unrealistic. To the extent that we believe everyone else will be motivated by selfishness, it is harder for anyone to move toward idealism.

The Clintons could address this complicated moral issue by saying: “Yes, we were part of the same dynamics that we were criticizing, and that was our point. In a society that rewards selfishness, everyone is going to act like that. By advocating a politics of meaning, we were advocating a change in the dynamic that we could only make together as a nation. Without that change, no matter how idealistic people are, they will get caught, as we did, in the pursuit of self-interest. It was because we recognized that, not because we thought we were more moral than anyone else, that we decided to challenge the dominant selfishness.”

This level of honesty is precluded by our collective fantasy that our politicians must be morally better than we are. And it is precluded by cynical media that will interpret this as merely another bit of Clinton self-interest.

The heart of Whitewater remains the relentless and ferocious assault on the Clintons by all those forces that resist change in America. The Clintons were naive to not explicitly critique media cynicism before it got out of hand and talk more honestly about their situation.

Yet nothing they could have done would have fully protected them from ruling elites terrified of substantial change. The military-industrial complex, wary of a progressive Democrat presiding over what it feared would become substantial pressure for a “peace dividend”; industrial and agricultural conglomerates worried about environmental sanity cutting into their profits, insurance and drug industries fearful of health reform--all would inevitably gang up on Bill Clinton.

Nor could anyone fully withstand the wrath of media angered that a President’s wife could challenge their fundamental belief that no one can be motivated by anything other than self-interest. By casting the change agents as self-promoters, the media serve the status-quo interests of those who own the means of mass communication and wish to discredit any change that might question their right to put selfish interests above the common good. The media are truly consistent: They both advocate and embody cynicism.

It is still not too late for Clinton to save his presidency. If he could consistently embrace a politics of meaning or any other unifying principle, reframe most of his agenda around that principle and then persuade people of its legitimacy and of how his programs flow from it, he would have a better chance.

That’s precisely what he has not done with health care. One has no idea how the parts of his program flow from central principle. His supporters are left with nothing more to say than that we want universal coverage--a fine point, but one that provides little basis to respond to the other plans that also claim that.

Indeed, the details of the Clinton plan do not flow from a politics of meaning, but rather from the Clintons’ alleged “realism” that led them to adopt a pro-insurance plan. If they thought that could avoid savage assault from the Republicans and the special interests, the Clintons must have had a rude awakening. What they have endured was no less gentle than had they adopted a principled stand and fought for the kind of single-payer plan that Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) has outlined.

This is the hypocrisy worth criticizing--not what happened in the Clintons’ personal finances years ago, but what they are doing in public policy now. It is here that Americans have been most disappointed, suspecting that the Clintons have not produced policies that embody a consistent politics of meaning. Taunted by the Republicans for this failure, supporters feel unable to explain what the Clintons are really about.

In a recent town-hall meeting, audience members asked President Clinton, “Why should we trust you?” Some in the media interpreted that as a reference to Whitewater. But what participants were trying to say was this: “You act in such a compromising way that we don’t believe we can trust you. You don’t really level with us about your principles and you don’t seem to fight for them.”

It’s this inability to follow through on principles, reflected as much in the health-care plan as in the ill-conceived way we relate to the slaughter in Bosnia or Haiti, that makes Clinton so vulnerable when the media and the privileged gang up on him as they have been doing on Whitewater.