Dangerous Liaisons

Only Rep. Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres) knows whether he has been exposed to legal peril through his involvement with Chandra Levy. But whatever the facts may be, it is certain that he has strayed into dangerous political and moral terrain.

After giving Condit cover during the opening gambits of Levy’s disappearance, Democrats have begun to desert him. California Sen. Barbara Boxer was one of the first to leave the reservation, and now Rep. Charles W. Stenholm (D-Texas) and House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) are inching away. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, recently said, “[Condit’s] political career, as a practical matter, I assume, is gone,” while California Sen. Dianne Feinstein proclaimed July 31 that, “He lied to me, and that’s something I just can’t forgive.”

Yet, Condit’s biggest (non-legal) problem isn’t that his colleagues have turned away from him--they’re just insulating themselves and won’t attack him any more than is necessary for political survival. His real problem is that liberal members of the media have started to turn on him, too.

Commentariat types from Paul Begala all the way up the food chain to the New Republic are making anti-Condit noises. But not for the reasons you might think. They don’t dislike Condit for his apparent serial adultery or begrudging cooperation with the police in Levy’s disappearance. They despise him because he’s a hypocrite. Unhappily for Condit, in the modern political world, hypocrisy is the last mortal sin.

The Chicago Sun-Times labeled Condit as “one of the more blatant hypocrites in public life.” Calling on the congressman to resign, columnist Marianne Means thundered that “Condit has been exposed as a hypocrite,” and, she added almost as an afterthought, “an adulterer and a skirt-chaser.” Salon.com’s Joan Walsh wrote, “Frankly, I think Condit’s political and personal hypocrisy--he was one of the few Democrats to blast [former President] Clinton for the Lewinsky affair, despite his own womanizing past--has always made it fairly easy to defend scrutiny of his private life.” One Democratic strategist, Peter Fenn, slyly alluded to “the hypocrisy question,” while Begala claimed that the difference between Condit and Clinton is that “Clinton was not a hypocrite.” Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter said that “Condit now joins Newt Gingrich in the Hypocrisy Hall of Fame,” and the New Republic, in urging Condit to step down, noted that “Rep. Condit’s response to President Clinton’s comparatively innocuous offenses was to vote to begin an inquiry into impeachment.”

Politicians used to have all sorts of rules to follow. They couldn’t use drugs, play around on their wives or lie under oath, among other things. In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter confessed to sinning in his heart, and Rep. Wilbur D. Mills (D-Ark.) stepped aside after being connected to ex-stripper Fanne Foxe. In the 1980s, Sen. Joe Biden had his presidential bid torpedoed by allegations of plagiarism. and Colorado Sen. Gary Hart’s White House campaign was felled by a fling with a grown woman who didn’t even work for him.

The road from Carter to Condit runs through the central political figure of the 1990s, Bill Clinton. The former president was almost never hypocritical. Sure, he felt the need to lie sometimes, and he was--literally, not pejoratively speaking--shameless. The long list of Clinton scandals extended far beyond his affairs with Monica S. Lewinsky and other women. There was his unquenchable ambition, his questionable fund-raising, the housewarming gifts, the last-minute pardons, to name some. Throughout it all, Clinton remained always unashamed. And you can’t be a hypocrite without a sense of shame.

In her book “Hypocrisy and Integrity,” Ruth W. Grant defines a hypocrite as “a person who pretends to be morally better than he is for the sake of some advantage to himself.” The hypocrite believes in the concept of shame and, thus implicitly, in the ideas of right and wrong. Gilbert Meilaender, an ethics professor at Valparaiso University, says that hypocrisy is something of a good sign, because it shows that you can still tell right from wrong.

But for many modern liberals who have been shaped by the Clinton years, hypocrisy represents a dangerous threat: a return to an era when shame served as an enforcer of social mores. In the liberal canon, whose paramount ideals are tolerance and moral and cultural relativism, there is no place for shame. People who believe in it are enemies who must be attacked.

Their abhorrence of shame explains why, during the 2000 presidential campaign, rumors of George W. Bush’s reckless youth provided liberals with an opening to criticize him not for having used drugs, but for being against drugs after having used them. It explains why special vitriol is reserved for pro-life politicians who favor the death penalty; and it explains why Gingrich, former Rep. Robert Livingston (R-La.) and Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) (Livingston and Hyde admitted to having had extramarital affairs) all foundered on the rocks of public opinion during Clinton’s impeachment ordeal.

One of Clinton’s more enduring legacies may not be either the ‘90s boom economy or his impeachment, but rather a reworking of liberal attitudes toward conventional morality. Because of the hard-line positions most liberals took in supporting the former president, they have now been backed into a corner where they are no longer credible critics of vice; instead, all they can do is to rail against the tribute “that vice pays to virtue.” When Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott recently suggested that infidelity was incompatible with congressional public service, GOP Rep. Christopher Shays replied brusquely, “If infidelity is the test, there’d be a number of members of Congress who should resign.”

Which shows exactly how far hypocrisy has come. The Connecticut Republican didn’t say whether or not adultery is a serious character flaw. He simply swept aside the question of morality by saying, in essence, tu quoque . What if only three members--or 30, for that matter--of Congress were adulterers, then would Shays agree that infidelity should be a test? This is what hypocrisy does: It marginalizes our moral vocabulary.

Condit’s critics who simply fault him for his hypocrisy do harm to the rest of society by moving real moral failings beyond criticism. As for Condit, he can take comfort in the fact that no one seems to much mind his marital infidelities. But the assault that continues on his left flank may prove to be his undoing. If only he had kept quiet during the unpleasantness of 1998-99, the hypocrisy police would probably have given him a pass.