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Chapter 19 Bill Clinton and the American Character Richard John Neuhaus That the country would be better off stuck with him rather than having removed him from office was, many thought, the clinching argument of Dale Bumpers, former Senator from Arkansas, during the Senate trial. “If you have difficulty because of an intense dislike of the President, and that’s understandable , rise above it,” Bumpers exhorted the Senators. “He is not the issue. He will be gone. You won’t. So don’t leave a precedent from which we may never recover and almost surely will regret....After all,he’s only got two years left.”1 That the impeached President was not the issue in an impeachment trial was among the more curious assertions in this curious affair. But it is true that the public contention was about more than Bill Clinton . For a year and a half we have been treated to seemingly endless discussion about what all this means for our constitutional order, our political culture, and, inevitably, “the American character.” In this reflection, it is the last question that is of particular interest. Until I came across an old video of the program, I had quite forgotten that at the beginning of January 1993, I had done an extended one-onone interview with Robert MacNeil of what was then the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour about the impending Clinton presidency. Asked by Mr. MacNeil what I expected, I answered: “I think what I expect, and maybe what I wish as well, is that he will continue on a trajectory [of] trying to move the Democratic Party into, if not the center, at least into conversational distance with most Americans. I think he has taken the lessons of the 1972 McGovern debacle very much to heart, and he could have a real opportunity , especially when he speaks of a new covenant with America, to engage in a new kind of political discourse.” It is hard to remember that a “new covenant” was a theme of Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Not many days later, I watched with friends the news 253 conference following his inauguration, at which he announced that he was rescinding the Reagan-Bush executive orders that placed pitifully modest restrictions on government support for abortion, and said the military should be open to gays. He was hardening the lines. In words that have been frequently quoted back to me since then, I remarked to friends, “Mark my words. We are watching a man stumbling through the rubble of a ruined presidency.” Nobody could know all the ways he would stumble, nor how sordid the rubble would be, but the impending ruin, I believe, was evident from the beginning. The Clinton news conference took place on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, the very day that tens of thousands were marching in the streets of Washington to give life a chance. There was nothing in Clinton’s words about his famous propensity for feeling their pain, nor even the slightest gesture of ambivalence about abortion. Completely absent was any reference to a “new covenant,” or reaching out to create a “national conversation ”about who we are and intend to be. For Clinton, it seemed, the thousands of marchers,and the majority of Americans who are morally troubled by abortion, did not exist. His commitment to “reproductive rights” was adamant. It is the only promise that he was to keep. Mendacity has been the chief mark of this presidency. His friends and political allies have said that he is a remarkably good liar. Obviously, that is not true. A good liar does not have a reputation for being a good liar. After meeting with Clinton early in the presidency, my colleague James Nuechterlein described him as “serially sincere.” Clinton seems to be persuaded , it is observed, that he really means whatever he is saying at the time. I don’t know if that is true. Did he believe what he was saying when, in January 1998, he told the American people he had never had sexual relations with Miss Lewinsky? Perhaps it is true that he did, depending on what the meaning of “is” is. But what does this tell us about “the character of the American people ”? After all, they elected him, and did so twice. Not by a majority, to be sure, but by enough to secure his claim to the office. The failure of the political process to remove him from office...

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