The Ultimate Hate Crime : THE GOVERNMENT : Proving That Washington Can Indeed Work--and Fast

Politics is everywhere--even in the midst of carnage like that the nation witnessed in Oklahoma City. The most startling political fact of the disaster’s early aftermath is that government looked good. More specifically, President Bill Clinton looked good. Will he and his 1996 campaign advisers understand why? If they do, they can start capturing some of the agenda of their ideological adversaries.

Clinton responded to the Oklahoma City bombing like, well, a President. He was on TV quickly, saying what had to be said about the evil of the deed. The next day he cautioned soberly against people’s rushing to stereotypical conclusions about who the perpetrators were.

Events were organized so that he and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno--who also held a press conference, reassuring folks that the government would ask for the death penalty if it got the chance--did not step on each other’s lines. The Clintons even dealt nicely with the potentially embarrassing White House dinner for the president of Brazil on the night of the explosion, which could have looked like unseemly cavorting in the face of disaster. The occasion was appropriately somber. Hillary Rodham Clinton wore black.

Then came the exemplary way U.S. public officials performed. We are mind-numbingly accustomed these days to stories about the failure of government. But this time, in spite of the inevitable confusions, rescue workers were saying that the Oklahoma City operation was the most impressive they had ever seen.

The same was particularly true of law enforcement. Within hours, U.S. officials, with the cooperation of their counterparts in Europe, were flying home with a material witness who had left the country. The next day, one of the men suspected of having rented the van involved in the blast was taken into custody. He had been stopped and arrested for an unrelated traffic incident soon after the bombing and put in a local jail. The other suspect connected with the van rental turned himself in.

We do not know, of course, whether we will benefit from the same combination of skill and luck in catching the perpetrators. But a couple of things have already been demonstrated.

First, even if we are dealing with bombers who cannot be deterred by the threat or even certainty of punishment, catching them and their associates so quickly diminishes their frightening stature in the national imagination.

Second, this country tends to think of itself as accustomed to pervasive violence. But what we witnessed last week makes your average grisly urban murder look isolated by comparison.

So what does all this mean for the business of Clinton’s political fate? Recall that one source of his trouble--angry white males, in shorthand--is he seems to embody government’s current tendency to intrude busily into people’s lives to further various annoying social goals while neglecting the most important governmental goal: to protect the lives and property of ordinary citizens from violent predators.

That, and not some national foaming at the mouth, is the reason the campaign against gun control has shown such widespread appeal and staying power: If government will not protect them, a large number of people reason, they will have to protect themselves.

But the bombing is the most dramatic possible demonstration of the limits of that argument.

Your gun may protect you against all sorts of garden-variety threats, but it will not protect you against the monstrosity of true mass murder. To cope effectively with terrorism, you need specialized experts who can identify a vehicle by looking at a fragment of its engine and who know what kind of bomb makes what kind of hole. You need an intelligence operation that can prevent these attacks or, when it does not, provide clues as to where to look for the perpetrators. You need an information network to minimize the chance that the criminals will successfully lose themselves in our extremely big country. You need the help of other law-enforcement officials around the world. You need someone to create a national will.

You need, in other words, a government. A collection of armed, self-reliant, determined private citizens will not do. To say this is to lay out a way in which Clinton can argue that he has not forgotten his duty to protect ordinary citizens from physical harm--and, indeed, is more likely to fulfill that duty than a politician whose program consists of nothing but tearing government down.

For Clinton and the Democrats to pursue this road, the perpetrators of the bombing must be brought to justice; there is little doubt that the Administration will do everything it can to this end. But Clinton and his party must also allow, to themselves and publicly, that the “angries” have a point--that these people are not unreasonable in wanting a shift in government’s priorities.

It will not be easy to persuade the public that Democrats really mean this: For some years, they have been proclaiming their concern for middle America, but they can’t seem to bring themselves to back away from positions and attitudes that have turned middle Americans into angry white males.

Maybe this time Democrats and their President will use their opportunity properly and finally get the tune right.