LEAVE ME OUT OF THE HILLARY HUNT
Samuel Francis says that he's an American right-winger who wants no part of the persecution of Mrs Clinton WINSTON CHURCHILL, that great American Conservative, once defined a fanatic as a chap who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. To judge from the way many of my conserva- tive comrades in America gabble and grouse about the endless Whitewater scandal, fanatics may be what we're deal- ing with.
The American Right had been writing about, investigating, speculating on and denouncing the Clinton administration, the Clinton household and the Clinton family for Whitewater crimes and misdemeanours high and low for the last three years. After working itself into a lather of breathless moral outrage and lip-smacking anticipa- tion, it attained a state of positive euphoria when Hillary Clinton was haled to testify before a grand jury.
The subpoena served upon her is proba- bly the most serious official blow to the credibility of the first family yet delivered. The prospect of Mrs Clinton, long believed to be the real power in her husband's White House, being brought as low as a Watergate felon simply enraptures her ene- mies on the Right.
The Whitewater business is indeed beginning to resemble the Watergate trav- esty that swallowed the Nixon administra- tion more than 20 years ago. But the resemblances are really rather superficial. Various episodes in or closely related to Whitewater — like the mysterious disap- pearance and reappearance of key legal documents in the living quarters of the White House (the immediate focus of the grand jury's interrogation of the First Lady), or the still cryptic circumstances of the death of White House aide Vince Fos- ter — have already entered folklore. But they have done so only in the same way as the 'single bullet' of the Kennedy assassina- tion or the '18-minute gap' in one of the Watergate tapes.
But folklore is perhaps as far as White- water will ever go, and it may never become more than a favourite ghost story of the Right, to be whispered around its political campfires for decades to come. The scandal is simply too complicated to occupy the same niche in our national legends as Watergate, which started out as a simple burglary of the kind that every home-owner understands, and eventually swelled to encompass the White House, parts of the CIA and a cast of improbable and unlikeable heavies that Ian Fleming could not have invented without blushing.
At the centre of Whitewater lie alleged financial and political shenanigans so abstruse that few but bankers and lawyers readily understand or care about them, and for the most part the shenanigans took place not during the Clinton presidency but while the President was governor of Arkansas — a poor and obscure state that, until Mr Clin- ton's election, was famous mainly for its spicy barbecue and the militarily enforced desegregation of its schools in 1957.
And therefore, despite conservatives' unshakeable persuasion that Whitewater is their secret weapon for 1996 — the razor hidden in the Republican shoe — the scan- dal still has not assumed sufficient flesh to walk by itself into American voting booths. Given the abstruseness, antiquity and sheer obscurity of Whitewater, it is unlikely to become an issue of substance in this year's presidential election, no matter how many subpoenas Mrs Clinton answers.
But you can't convince conservatives of that. Particularly since Mr Foster's corpse was discovered in a federal park several miles from his White House office, they've chattered of little else, and as early as the winter of 1994. I recall one stalwart of the Right insisting to me that the President would have to resign by the summer. Con- vinced that Mr Clinton's 1992 victory in a three-way race with George Bush and Ross Perot was merely a sport of history, conser- vatives cannot believe that all Americans do not share their disgust at and lack of respect for the chief executive, whom they immediately dubbed 'Slick Willy' and 'Boy Clinton'. Nor do conservatives, for all their habit of swaddling themselves as the true guardians of civilisation, refrain from indulging in tastelessness whenever the irrepressible subject of the Clintons comes up. Rush Limbaugh, now the most cele- brated voice of the Right in the United States, did not hesitate to whack Chelsea Clinton as the 'White House dog', just as Socks is the 'White House cat'. The plain- ness of the unfortunate Chelsea is hardly a fit topic for political controversy, and, even if it were, much could be made of Mr Lim- baugh's own porcine girth.
For that matter, accusations of lying seem to trip far too easily from the tongues and pens of American Tories these days. The New York Times columnist William Safire was not the first to paste the label of mendacity on Mrs Clinton when he called her a 'congenital liar' in a recent piece, but he is probably the most distinguished jour- nalist to hurl the charge. It is all very well for the conservative press to smirk that its own heroes — Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, et al — have been served in the same manner by their enemies on the Left.
So they were, often wrongly and some- times ruinously; but the simple ethical pre- cept of childhood that two wrongs don't make a right ought to apply, and those who raise (or lower) the guardianship of civility to a political creed ought to be the first to practice civility as well as insist it be prac- tised by others. One important reason why Whitewater is unlikely to move voters this year is that the constant tasteless chortling of right-wingers about the scandal exposes their hot pursuit of the quarry as being merely politically driven.
Yet the vulgarity of the Right's delight in burrowing away at the moral integrity of their political adversary is not the worst consequence of its Whitewater obsession. The worst part of it is that, at a time when the United States should be undergoing some deep political and intel- lectual introspection on the subject of its domestic and global future, conservatives are preoccupied with the personalities, characters, and police-blotter trivia of the scandal.
For all the policy-wonkery of the Repub- licans' Contract with America', and for all the speechifying of the umpteen different Republican presidential candidates and non-candidates this year, there still has been no serious debate over post-Cold War foreign policy, the extent to which the country should commit itself to such adven- tures as nation-building in Somalia and peace-keeping in Bosnia, or the enduring value of such trade pacts as Nafta and the World Trade Organisation.
Immigration, brought to a boil by disas- trous congressional reforms of the last decade and by a genuine grassroots reform movement in California in the campaign for Proposition 187 in 1994, is still ignored by most of the Republican Right, its leadership and their chums in the conservative press. The popular resur- rection of states-rights federalism as a corrective to the swollen federal leviathan is given lip service by most Republicans, but few seem to grasp its deeper implica- tions or display much interest in how it might be restored.
No, no, we must find out who killed Vince Foster; we must dig up the missing documents; we must listen to ladies of doubtful virtue recount outlandish tales of erotic encounters with the roué in the Oval Office. Time for all that issue stuff later, don't you see? We've got him and Hillary this time for sure, and why would anyone want to change the subject?
The author writes for Chronicles: a Maga- zine of American Culture.
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