Scandals Offer Reminders That Values Count Most When They Carry a Price

The good news is that public officials are no longer afraid to talk about personal responsibility. As recently as the 1992 campaign, it was a loaded term. When candidate Bill Clinton or then-Vice President Dan Quayle argued that all people must be held accountable for their actions, regardless of their circumstance, critics accused them of insensitivity, or blaming the victim, or even racism.

Those complaints have been marginalized. Across the political spectrum--and in coffee-shop conversations far from marble offices--almost everyone now agrees that reconnecting consequences to actions is the cornerstone of moral order, and the prerequisite for cultural renewal.

It’s one of the few things that Clinton and Bob Dole agree on.

“The problems of our society will only be solved if there is an upsurge of personal responsibility,” says Clinton.

Says Dole: “It’s about time we take personal responsibility--something we forgot in the last two or three decades. . . .”

This isn’t just meaningless rhetoric. One of the most important things political leaders can do is publicly validate private concerns. When Clinton or Dole talk on the evening news about the centrality of individual accountability, they strengthen everyone trying to uphold the principle in daily life.

In that sense, words matter. But deeds matter more. And for all the rhetorical consensus behind personal responsibility as a general rule, we as a society continue to have enormous difficulty applying the principle to specific cases--especially when it means attaching consequences to actions. Two very different recent scandals illuminate the depths of our continuing confusion.

Scandal No. 1 involves Roberto Alomar, the star second baseman for baseball’s Baltimore Orioles.

For those who somehow start their day without benefit of the box scores, the basic facts are these. On the last Friday of the regular season, Alomar was called out on strikes by home plate umpire John Hirschbeck in the first inning of a critical game.

Alomar angrily protested the call, but baseball’s rules prohibit players from arguing balls and strikes and Hirschbeck ejected him. Enraged, Alomar bumped the umpire and spit into his face. Then, after the game he said he didn’t regret his actions because Hirschbeck had become “bitter” after the death of his 7-year-old son from a rare disease in 1993.

In deed, and then word, Alomar had committed arguably the most reprehensible on-the-field act by a professional baseball player in modern times. But in its initial reaction, the Orioles management instinctively confected defenses for the indefensible.

“This is not the time of year for an umpire to be listening to everything that’s said,” said the team’s manager. The umpire “used language that we feel was inappropriate,” said the team’s general manager. Even the team’s owner, labor lawyer Peter Angelos--who gained national respect last year for resisting the use of replacement players during baseball’s strike--portrayed Alomar as the victim.

“There must be some pressure on him to act that way,” the owner said, sounding uncomfortably like those who tried to explain why O.J. Simpson beat his wife.

Only after a wave of negative publicity--led by sports columnists in the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post--did the team grudgingly coerce an apology out of Alomar several days later.

Team officials eagerly accepted the ludicrously lenient judgment of the American League president, who deferred Alomar’s suspension until next year, rather than barring him immediately from the Orioles’ playoff series with the Cleveland Indians. Alomar then hit a game-winning home run in Saturday’s decisive contest. That made his delayed suspension a little like sending a bank robber to jail only after first giving him time to spend his loot.

It seemed never to occur to the Orioles that they might suspend Alomar themselves for disgracing the team, the city and the sport. At the first playoff game in Baltimore last week, some in the stands rightfully jeered Alomar. But the dominant sentiment was expressed by one fan who held up a sign that read: “Robby Got Us Here.” In other words, a .328 batting average forgives all sins.

As he enjoys his double-digit lead in the presidential race, Clinton might hold up the same kind of sign about Dick Morris, the secretive political consultant who helped the president revive after 1994.

But is Clinton’s debt great enough to justify his shrug-of-the-shoulders response to the prostitution scandal that felled Morris in August?

In sharing confidences with a prostitute, even allowing her to listen on the phone as he spoke with Clinton, Morris betrayed his colleagues (to say nothing of his wife), placed the president in an embarrassing position and exposed the campaign to an unpredictable political risk. Yet Clinton has been struck mute on the moral implications of the Morris scandal; when the news broke, the president offered only sympathy for his advisor.

Even after Morris gave Time magazine the most self-serving interview in recent political history--in which he claimed credit for virtually everything but the weight Clinton lost before the convention--and acknowledged that he had violated the campaign’s trust by secretly signing a lucrative book deal months earlier, even then the president who eloquently lectures inner-city young people on their moral obligations still could find nothing but limp empathy.

“I don’t see that there is anything that I [can] say except to wish [Morris and his wife] both well as human beings and hope that . . . they work through this and have good successful lives,” Clinton told PBS’ Jim Lehrer.

Actually, like the management of the Orioles, there was much more Clinton could have said. He could have condemned behavior that could not be defended and, in the process, sent the signal that he considers personal responsibility not an abstraction, but a living conviction that must be upheld even when the consequences are painful, like criticizing a friend.

Well, sure, some people doubtless will say, that’s Clinton--morally obtuse, compromised by his own indiscretions, fearful of angering a man who knows so many of his secrets. How about Dole then? In a test not unlike the Morris case--the accusations of sexual harassment against then-Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) from about 19 women--Dole misplaced his enthusiasm for individual accountability as completely as Clinton did this summer.

In Packwood’s long ignoble fall, Dole’s one star seemed to be partisan advantage. At the start he accused Packwood’s accusers of political motivation (most of them “were on the other side politically,” Dole said).

Eventually Dole offered a perfunctory criticism of Packwood’s behavior. But throughout, Dole’s overriding goal appeared to be keeping Packwood in the Senate as long as possible--rather than clearly demonstrating the unacceptability of his actions.

Well, sure, some people doubtless will now say, that’s just politicians--hypocrites, all of them. But that lets the rest of us off too easy. It’s not just Clinton or Dole or even the management of the Orioles: When the public tests arise, as often as not, we blink at the inconvenient attachment of consequences to actions.

Think of the first jury in the Menendez brothers murder case--who found allegations of child abuse justification for a shotgun blast to the face--or the civil rights leaders who said new national education standards for students were fine, as long as the tests measuring their progress didn’t affect promotion or graduation. Anyone want to bet whether Dallas Cowboy fans will cheer star receiver Michael Irvin when he returns from his drug-arrest suspension next Sunday?

In such daily decisions do we declare our true priorities. As Alan Ehrenhalt observed in his thought-provoking recent book, “The Lost City,” “stable relationships, civil classrooms, safe streets--the ingredients of what we call community--all come at a price.” The price, he writes, are “limits . . . rules and authorities who can enforce them.”

Ehrenhalt is right. The hunger for moral renewal is a palpable and dynamic force in American life. But renewal won’t come merely by lecturing powerless groups--teenage mothers, welfare recipients, juvenile lawbreakers.

A stronger ethical order can be built only brick by brick--in the consistent application of principle precisely when it is most difficult, when it hits closest to home. To cheer Alomar, or to wink at Morris, is to take the parents and teachers and clergy who fight the daily fights to shape the moral sensibility of the young--and spit in their faces.

The Washington Outlook column appears here every other Monday.