Impeachment chic

Far from Washington, Bill Clinton's glitterati defenders haven't been much help to the president, the public, or themselves

by Michael Crowley

As 1998 staggers to a close and America uneasily enters a year of millennial hysteria, perhaps it is fitting that we do so in the throes of madness. With the nation girding itself for a new century, we find ourselves guided by a political culture in which the publisher of Hustler magazine has briefly emerged as one of the most powerful figures in Washington, and some of the most venerable members of the United States Congress speak openly about nothing short of a "coup d'état" on the floor of the House.

Now on to the staid Senate and, God willing, a speedy end to this dementia. Fortunately, the Senate's 55 Republicans are unlikely to find 12 Democratic defectors to give them the 67 votes needed to depose Bill Clinton, making some kind of formal censure the likely -- and overdue -- outcome. If Clinton does survive, he will, of course, be bloodied and humbled. But the Republican Party could be on the verge of catastrophe. A recent New York Times poll found that the GOP is as unpopular as it's been since 1984, and the party appears to have few, if any, charismatic leaders prepared to move it past this debacle in 1999.

Given what the public thinks about impeachment, why do the Republicans press on in such self-destructive fashion? There is always the possibility that they're courageously acting on principle, although you don't have to be a cynic to dismiss that notion. Just look at the party-line votes on the House's articles of impeachment. More likely, the Republicans are infected with a monomaniacal sense of purpose, a zeal that justifies and perpetuates itself from week to week; they are a band of Ahabs in relentless pursuit of their perjurious whale.

But something else may help explain the GOP's willingness to keep fighting: the failure of America's cultural and intellectual leaders to play a meaningful role in the impeachment crisis. These elites have tried -- with rallies, with petitions, with scolding congressional testimony -- to turn the anti-impeachment fight into a new national movement: "Vietnam is almost the last moment I can think of until now when intellectuals, writers, and artists have really raised their voices in a chorus of protests," the novelist William Styron told the New York Times last week. But their efforts have fallen flat. As they try to resurrect the memories of great national debates over Vietnam and Watergate, the American glitterati have only highlighted their political impotence in a country where Republican philistinism reigns.

The Clinton scandal has always been partly a cultural battle, but in the waning weeks of 1998 that dimension of the crisis has become ever clearer. The impeachment drive has re-exposed the fault line, first established more than 30 years ago, between conservative GOP populists and the liberal establishment -- what the late Alabama segregationist George Wallace called "pointy-headed intellectuals" who "couldn't park a bicycle straight."

Today, know-nothing GOP reactionaries still deride the Manhattan-Cambridge-Hollywood crowd. Only now they wield immense power. Now they control the Congress. And having watched the left drag America down what they call a road of moral relativism and cultural decay, they are determined to get some payback. Impeachment is sweet revenge for the horrors wrought by the baby boomers. As the liberal New York Times columnist Frank Rich recently explained on Nightline, the scandal "transcends Bill Clinton, transcends Ken Starr . . . it's really about the hangover, the unfinished business of the 1960s." On the other end of the political spectrum, Patrick Buchanan -- that voice of the resentful right -- declared in a September op-ed piece that "Monicagate is a battlefield in the war for the soul of America, a war that is religious and cultural in character, as well as political . . . a struggle that goes beyond politics, pitting believers in an older moral order against the Woodstock Generation." To Buchanan and his fellow conservatives, taking out the pot-smoking, draft-dodging Clinton is essential to winning the cultural war.

The elites are peddling the right message: they aren't so much defending a dissembling sex addict as denouncing the politics of prosecution, condemning the creepy zeal of Ken Starr and the congressional Republicans. So it's too bad that their delivery has been such a flop. Rather than elevating the national debate, these voices have come to seem like just another sideshow in the Clintern circus.

Too often, the cultural leaders' fight against impeachment has devolved into self-parody. Take last week's "emergency speakout" at New York University, organized by a group of intellectuals that included Toni Morrison, Elie Wiesel, and E.L. Doctorow. Calling the House Republicans "sociopaths," Alec Baldwin argued that impeachment is an insurance- and tobacco-industry plot. Gloria Steinem likened impeachment to a bloodless assassination. Political scientist Philip Green compared Congress to the German parliament that installed Hitler. And, as Walter Shapiro reported in the online magazine Slate, retired Episcopal bishop Paul Moore waxed hysterical about the fate of Clinton-led peacemaking missions from Bosnia to Africa: "I think of the millions of people who will suffer and die because the Republicans want to get President Clinton for a personal sin." ("The overall tone," Shapiro wrote, "was borrowed from the halcyon days of the anti-war movement.") How can so many people with the right message be so tone-deaf in their delivery?

It was the same story the next night, when a Harvard anti-impeachment rally attended by the likes of Robert Reich, Wendy Kaminer, and Barney Frank wrapped up with a performance of "We Shall Overcome" that included Alan Dershowitz and Carly Simon. "If I had to come up with a group of people who would have less leverage with the moderate Republicans," Reich candidly told the Harvard Crimson, "I could not design a better group."

In fact, the elites may be hurting, not helping. What good did feminist godmother Betty Friedan and her followers do when they stormed the office of Bob Livingston, then the House Speaker-elect, for an impromptu confrontation last week? After Friedan railed to Livingston about the "bunch of dirty old white men" in Congress, even the White House had to distance itself from her rhetoric. Was it any surprise that a conservative like Livingston (who has since announced his stunning exit from Congress) was utterly unimpressed by Friedan's visit? What had she hoped to accomplish?

The president's faithful allies in Hollywood have rallied, too -- Jack Nicholson, Ted Danson, and Barbra Streisand vented their indignation at a pro-Clinton demonstration last week -- but the actors have done a better job of making themselves look bad than of making Clinton look good. Take Alec Baldwin's unhelpful appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, in which he shouted: "In other countries . . . we would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and we'd kill their wives and their children!" When Robert De Niro tried to contact moderate House Republicans before the impeachment vote last week, at least two of them didn't bother to return his calls.

And why would they? By the time De Niro started calling around, the House Republicans had grown tired of Clinton's celebrity defenders. That was evident when the two sides confronted one another face to face during the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment hearings. The Northeastern Ivy League demigods who testified on Clinton's behalf were greeted with contempt by committee Republicans, and the split between the New Left liberals and the George Wallace-style populists became manifest right before our eyes. When the historian Arthur J. Schlesinger delivered a lofty condemnation of impeachment before the judiciary committee last month, South Carolina Republican Bob Inglis told Schlesinger -- in a line that could have been delivered by Wallace, Pat Buchanan, or Richard Nixon -- that he'd testified with "a great deal of sophistication, but very little common sense."

And when Princeton University's Sean Wilentz warned committee Republicans on December 8 that "history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness," the Republicans collectively gagged; one GOP congressman told the historian his remarks had been "despicable." But it hasn't been Republicans alone rebuking the likes of Wilentz and Schlesinger. The New York Times slapped Wilentz for being "gratuitously patronizing," and an October rally held by leading historians even got under the skin of the liberal-ish Washington Post columnist David Broder: "This tenured trashing of Congress for meeting its responsibility says more about the state of the history profession than the law of the land. Class dismissed." Wilentz himself later admitted (in the New Yorker, of course) that his testimony had been "a colossal flop."

Indeed, with their dated political theater, their sanctimony, and their inflated rhetoric, the president's elite defenders have been one collective flop. In fairness, they face difficult obstacles. Confronted with presidential misdeeds that were too tawdry to defend, they mobilized only after the Starr report and the House Republicans gave them a reason to rally. And it's never easy to conduct public debate in an intellectually dormant America, where there's little patience for nuanced thought and where the media demand publicity stunts and overheated rhetoric.

But the high-profile liberals' antics may actually have intensified the GOP's anti-Clinton jihad. Responding to the Harvard legalisms of Alan Dershowitz at one House Judiciary Committee hearing, the right-wing Georgia representative Bob Barr summed up the GOP's attitude this way: "I think there are two Americas, and there is a real America out there." Ever since Clinton's 1992 election, Barr and his vindictive colleagues have believed they are fighting for that "real America," and the Clinton impeachment is their all-out offensive. The organized resistance of the Alec Baldwins, Toni Morrisons, Oliver Stones, and Arthur Schlesingers of the land only reinforces the Republicans' belief in their cause.

The GOP's cultural war may yet be its undoing: even after impeachment, polls uniformly show Bill Clinton with his highest job-approval rating ever. But if and when the radical right is ultimately judged the real loser in the impeachment debacle, it won't be the new practitioners of radical chic who deserve the credit.

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.