There Goes The Neighborhood

National Review, Nov 9, 1998 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

NEW YORK, OCTOBER 9

The nomenklatura is moving pretty fast in the direction of-Clinton. Richard Brookhiser, in The New York Observer, spots it with a clean bullet. "The establishment has turned away from impeachment, yet 50 per cent of the public, according to polls, believes that if the President perjured himself he should be impeached." Same journal, same issue, columnist Todd Gitlin, with day-before-yesterday's view of how the pundits were weighing in on Clinton-Lewinsky. "Not only in New York does our nonleading leading journalism inspire dismay. In Copenhagen, where I happened to be when Mr. Starr's report was released, journalists at the two leading dailies . . . asked me in considerable anguish to explain not only how Mr. Starr's inquisition could have gone so far but why the press was colluding in what they considered this blind and reckless sabotage of the world's lead government." You want the feel of hard-tow strategic liberal opinion? Have a look at the front section of this week's New Yorker. The sound is of James Carville, if he woke up literate. The first editorial subhead is, "Has Starr humiliated us all?" (Answer: Yes.) The by-line is, no less, E. L. Doctorow (Ragtime), who informs us that every President lies to the American people, that in any case Clinton's lie "lacks grandeur," and that in Starr "two powerfully combined illiberal traditions" are at work: "the fundamentalist religious and the political far right," and these have "driven [him] past willfulness to obsession." On to Cynthia Ozick, who deplores Starr's report as bad literature; Bobbie Ann Mason, who asks, "Shouldn't the punishment fit the crime?" (Answer: Yes); to William Styron, who is quite beside himself, speaking of Starr's "cruel and indefensible pillory" and of his report's "invincible repulsiveness." He has singled out the animating monster of it all. He recounts in contrast the happy atmosphere of the recent French court under Mitterrand, where nobody gives a whit that a mistress and bastard child are sitting about; not even, one supposes, the bastard. "What the French don't possess is the equivalent of the American South, where a strain of Protestant fundamentalism is so maniacal that one of its archetypal zealots, Kenneth Starr, has been able to nearly dismantle the Presidency because of a gawky and fumbling sexual dalliance." And note this, because the movement of elite opinion is very rapid right now, "Absent, too, from the French scene are media with fangs bared to go to work on the presidential throat." We have here a problem of an undistributed middle, as the logicians classify it. If the South alone is truly fired up about Clinton, how is it that the "media" in New York are so avid to do the work of the fundamentalist far-right South? Where do Mr. Styron et al. get the impression that the Southerners are uniquely the tricoteuses waiting to see royal blood spill? Well now, I took the question to Dr. Gallup. And he did a regional poll released on October 7. Question: Based on what you know at this point, do you think that Bill Clinton should or should not be impeached and removed from office? South. Yes, should: 32 per cent. How does that question line up elsewhere? Rocky Mountain is 34. Pacific is 29. Midwest is 34. New England is 29. Mid-Atlantic is 27. In short, there is, statistically, zero difference on the question in the nation at large. The good old libertine "Pacific" is, at 29 per cent, only 3 points different from the South's 32 per cent, which is more latitudinarian than the Midwest's 34. Mr. Brookhiser's finding is the most tantalizing. "If the President perjured himself, 50 per cent want impeachment." But he did perjure himself, and that is not the finding of a crazed fundamentalist zealot. It is the finding of six months' research by a battery of lawyers. To question that Clinton committed perjury is more difficult than to maintain the innocence of O. J. Simpson. That innocence was proclaimed by a majority of black Americans because O.J. is a black American. The innocence of Mr. Clinton is asserted because Clinton is a Democratic President popularly elected. Would an impeachment and conviction reverse the will of the people? "This childish objection," Mr. Brookhiser writes, "vanishes with a moment's thought. If Bill Clinton goes, Bob Dole is not shoved in in his place. A lot more people supported the Richard Nixon-Spiro Agnew ticket in 1972 than ever voted for Bill Clinton-Al Gore. Yet by 1975, the President and Vice President were Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller, for whom no one had voted. No one, however, spoke of the will of the people being reversed, since they were two Republicans who had duly replaced their crooked Republican predecessors." But Brookhiser is correct; the opinion leaders are gradually slipping away from reality, with which they are always uncomfortable.