The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals

National Review, Oct 12, 1998 by Matthew Scully

High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case against Bill Clinton, by Ann Coulter (Regnery, 358 pp., $24.95)

MAY it please the court: I rise in defense of William Jefferson Clinton. Defendant Clinton stands accused in these books of moral turpitude, of "defining public morality down," and of "assaulting" the ideals and standards of the people of the United States of America. "He is a reproach," writes William J. Bennett in The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals. By various means well known to the public, Bill Clinton "has defiled the office of the Presidency of the United States."

Twice elected to the said office, Mr. Clinton "has debased the White House," claims attorney Ann Coulter in High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case against Bill Clinton. "Instead of reflecting Americans' virtues and aspirations, President Clinton reflects the country's dark side. . . . Like a cancer, his own lack of integrity has infected the nation." Indeed, she writes, "One of the most terrible things Bill Clinton has done to this country is to make it respectable to lie."

As to the public-morals charge, my client has entered a plea of nolo contendere and is now touring the country supplicating for mercy. He has agreed to cease and desist from all further spurious and legalistic arguments and to refrain from any further abuses of power, asking only that be allowed to complete the term to which he was elected and that a forgiving public consider not only his own contrition but the sanctimony of his accusers, both Democratic and Republican.

Consider attorney Coulter's injudicious "cancer" comparison. Though her brief is for the most part a lively and unanswerable case as to the constitutional points, here she employs a threadbare device well known to Republican speechwriters: Take every ill in American culture, and throw in a few age-old vices like lying and adultery while you're at it, and lay them in a tidy bundle at the door of Bill Clinton.

Typically the charge is wrapped, as in Mr. Bennett's book, in unctuous flattery of the American people themselves, honest, decent, hardworking, clean-living citizens all, who must surely be offended at these "assaults" on their moral standards. The "infection," we are led to believe, this "defining down" of public morals, can somehow be stopped if only Mr. Clinton is remanded forthwith to the custody of Arkansas.

What is this but an attempt by conservatives to play upon the very themes Mr. Clinton himself has so often manipulated, absolving the people themselves of responsibility, as if they have somehow been victimized by this man they twice elected to the highest office in the land, knowing full well his checkered history as to veracity and probity?

For all its wisdom, Mr. Bennett's case is fraught with contradictions. Like Miss Coulter, he considers the 1978 independent-counsel statute a "bad" and "unconstitutional" law, "undercutting one of the Framers' first principles," separation of powers. But bad and unconstitutional laws usually produce bad and pernicious results, a fact of logic he sacrifices to his moral quest against Mr. Clinton. He extols Americans for their unique "moral streak": "Europeans," Bennett remarks, "may have some things to teach us about, say, wine or haute couture. But on matters of morality in politics, America has much to teach Europe." This in a book indicting American culture, "repudiating" America's twice-elected leader, and sprinkled with quotations by such great American moralists as C. S. Lewis, Vaclav Havel, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Pope John Paul II.

Miss Coulter, too, ascribes seemingly all the vice and vulgarity of modern culture to Mr. Clinton. "He has such a mastery of popular psychoses," she observes, "he could be Jerry Springer." But scan some of the chapter titles in her otherwise thoughtful brief: "Kiss It," "Blasting the Bimbos," "Fostergate," "Earning Her Presidential Kneepads." Goaded on, one suspects, by her editors, she describes the President as "a horny hick," an O.J.-like character, and a "pervert." The tone adds little to her case, and indeed she and all the other pundits who have spent the last eight months talking and talking and talking about this scandal would do well to examine their own sense of public decency. That Bill Clinton reminds his critics of Jerry Springer does not give them license to mouth off at the President of the United States in the tone of one of Jerry Springer's guests.

The "citizen-to-citizen" flattery dispensed with, Bennett closes his essay with the "hope" that Americans will "affirm" public morality, realizing that they have been "played for fools" by Bill Clinton. It is an admirable hope. But a hope is not an argument, and a close reading of the book will reveal that deep down his quarrel is with the people themselves. He has found an elegant way of saying that America is in danger of becoming a nation of amoral saps who must be protected from the consequences of their own electoral decisions.