The character issue just won`t go away no matter how many times Bill Clinton assures us, word of honor, that his is fine. His stock response to questions about his character or absence of same is to say that nobody`s perfect, admit he`s not, and therefore imply he`s no better or worse than anybody else.
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Naturally he phrases this screwy syllogism in more elevated terms, at one point citing presidents past and current of his old, Jesuit-run school: ”The president and the past president of Georgetown University both wrote me very moving letters in the aftermath of the trials through which I have endured, and they reminded me that the true test of character is not perfection. If it were, no one could pass.”
Any distinctions among the wide range of behaviors that fall short of perfection-injustice, abuse of power, equivocation, double parking, cheating at craps-are thus neatly erased. As a campaigner, Bill Clinton is proving highly effective; none of his competitors is better at exercising spin control over ethical issues, perhaps because he has so much experience at it. But as a graduate of Georgetown, he is less than a credit to the Jesuits who have been drawing fine Thomist distinctions between sins mortal and venial since the 16th Century. That`s when Ignatius Loyola dedicated his order to, among other things, the ”perfection of one`s own soul . . . .” Bill Clinton, however, is a leader more in the spirit of this modern age; he comes across as a political sophisticate and moral illiterate. His reasoning is jesuitical only in the pejorative sense of the word.
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Surely Clinton-watching must be the most wearing of hobbies. Just when the devotee thinks he`s collected all the typical straddles of the species Politico Slickus, another appears.
Of all the environmental issues in this campaign, the importance of preserving the nation`s wetlands would seem one on which Bill Clinton has taken an absolutely clear position. A fighting conservationist once he gets outside his own state, Arkansas` governor has been bashing the Bush administration for letting wetlands go unprotected.
Shortly after announcing for president, Gov. Clinton complained to the federal Environmental Protection Agency that the administration was relaxing its regulation of wetlands. At the same time, he told the League of Conservation Voters: ”I strongly condemn George Bush`s efforts to rewrite the definition of wetlands to get around his campaign pledge to allow `no net loss.` ” The administration`s easing its regulations, he warned, ”could lead to the loss of millions of acres of wetlands in Arkansas and the nation.” He attacked Vice President Dan Quayle and the Council on Competitiveness for trying to compromise the definition of wetlands. Bill Clinton`s foursquare stand on this issue was enough to make duck-hunters, fishermen and
environmentalists in general stand and cheer; his words could have come from the Sierra Club.
As any veteran Clinton-watcher should have known, they were only words. The other leg of the all-too-familiar straddle now has surfaced. Turns out that in October of 1990, Bill Clinton was writing John Sununu, George Bush`s chief of staff at the time, complaining that the administration`s definition of wetlands applied to entirely too much of Arkansas-and offering to help
”develop a compromise.” Sure enough, the administration did develop a compromise, and Slick Willie has been campaigning against it mightily ever since.
Commenting on this revelation, a spokesman for the American Farm Bureau Federation said it looked as though Bill Clinton was trying ”to have it all ways.” Which will surprise no one familiar with the habits of Politico Slickus. It`s not that the species has a bad character, only that it has so little.
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How Bill Clinton has changed. He started his presidential campaign as the moderates` choice. After Bob Kerrey dropped out, followed soon enough by Tom Harkin, Slick Willie became the liberals` only realistic alternative to the recently departed Paul Tsongas, who`s as far to the right on economic issues as he is to the left on social ones. This allowed Bill Clinton to accuse his rival of favoring corporate America over ordinary citizens. Which is just what Gov. Clinton`s tax policies have amounted to in Arkansas: tax breaks for big corporations, and sales taxes for those without millions to invest. But as a presidential candidate, he says that won`t work, that it`s unfair and un-American. Now he tells us.
What Bill Clinton thinks, or says he thinks, about an issue may depend on when and where you catch him in his career trajectory, and what constituency he`s courting at the moment. The one sure thing about his policy du jour is that it will be designed to maintain his ”political viability within the system.” The phrase is from a letter he wrote as a 23-year-old Rhodes Scholar, and in that regard he hasn`t changed a bit. Moderate or liberal, trickle-down conservative or wild-eyed populist, in Arkansas or out, he is faithful in his fashion. Bill Clinton`s lode star has always been his own political advancement. Such an ambition saves a man from tragedy because it saves him from significance.
In Howard Nemerov`s verse play about the Witch of Endor, a minister to poor King Saul, having watched the king learn his fate from the witch, asks to be told his, too. Shall he fight with the Israelites on the morrow, or join the Philistines in victory? The witch explains that it scarcely matters:
I think
Men of your sort, though they have lives and deaths,
Never have fates. Maybe because they have
Their cleverness instead, their light, dry minds
Which blow in the wind of fortune back and forth,
They can have many meanings, no one meaning.
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