Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (25 page)

Which is exactly what they proceeded to do. Here was a case—and the pattern would repeat itself often in the coming years—where conservatives mistook their own opinions for the views of the vast majority of the country. And the impeachment period heightened the tendency of conservatives to talk mostly to themselves. This is not a habit unique to conservatives, of course, but it was an especially devastating inclination on a matter that a majority of the country viewed with some distaste.

It’s striking that throughout 1998,
Clinton’s approval rating in the Gallup poll stayed high, ranging from 59 percent (toward the beginning of the year) to an astonishing 73 percent at the end of the year,
after
the House had voted to impeach him. It’s
worth remembering what the traditional poll question asks; if voters approve or disapprove of how an incumbent “is handling his job as president?” Americans were responding to how Clinton was doing as
president
, and they were happy with his stewardship of
public
affairs. Most were also uncomfortable that his private life, however flawed, would be blown up into a national crisis.

Conservatives could not understand how the country could take such a relaxed view of the matter. It seemed to many on the right that the sixties really had corroded the country’s moral sense. The more conservatives talked to each other, the more outraged they were—and as the polls rolled in, they were increasingly unhappy with the American people. Wasn’t it the liberals who always spoke of the evils of sexual harassment, of powerful men taking advantage of young women? Wasn’t the hypocrisy here perfectly obvious? Conservatives went back and forth, at times emphasizing Clinton’s personal immorality, at others insisting the scandal wasn’t about sex at all but about
public
acts of perjury and obstruction. They did have to grapple with the fact that the lawsuit in which these charges came up was a civil matter about private behavior, pushed along and financed by conservatives hoping to take Clinton down. No matter, the conservatives insisted: It was not they who had the relationship with an intern and lied about. Even if a trap was set for Clinton, his own actions led him into it.

The most extended expression of
the conservatives’ frustration was William Bennett’s book
The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals,
published at the end of 1998. Bennett, who served as education secretary under George H. W. Bush, had assembled
The Book of Virtues
six years earlier,
a popular collection of traditional stories teaching moral lessons. He thus established himself as the premier conservative moralist. He used his standing not only to condemn Clinton but also to express frustration over the failure of so many Americans to be—his title was significant—as outraged as he was. His brisk dismissal of Clinton’s defenders (and, indeed, the way he characterized their arguments) spoke to the chasm between perceptions and attitudes on the right and those of much of the country. Bennett is worth quoting at some length because he so perfectly summarized how conservatives felt at the time:

It
is said that private character has virtually no impact on governing character; that what matters above all is a healthy economy; that moral authority is defined solely by how well a president deals with public policy matters; that America needs to become more European (read: more “sophisticated”) in its attitude toward sex; that lies about sex, even under oath, don’t really matter; that we shouldn’t be “judgmental”; that it is inappropriate to make preliminary judgments about the president’s conduct because he hasn’t been found guilty in a court of law; and so forth. If these arguments take root in American soil—if they become the coin of the public realm—we will have validated them, and we will come to rue the day we did. These arguments define us down; they assume a lower common denominator of behavior and leadership than we Americans ought to accept. And if we do accept it, we will have committed an unthinking act of moral and intellectual disarmament. In the realm of American ideals and the great tradition of public debate, the high ground will have been lost. And when we need to rely again on this high ground—as surely we will need to—we will find it drained of its compelling moral power. In that sense, then, the arguments invoked by Bill Clinton and his defenders represent an assault on American ideals, even if you assume the president did nothing improper.

But most Americans simply did not see the Clinton episode as rising to the level of the grand, world-historical event that Bennett described. Their reaction was neither “an assault on American ideals” nor “an unthinking act of moral and intellectual disarmament.” Sexual transgressions among the powerful were not a novelty, and the fact they were covered up came as no surprise. The majority of Americans saw Clinton’s behavior as tawdry but also commonplace. It wasn’t that most Americans were indifferent to his personal behavior, let alone that they sanctioned it. Most were, in fact, appalled at what Clinton had done—many for moral reasons, almost all for his sheer irresponsibility. The popular word among Democrats who were
defending
Clinton against impeachment was that his behavior was “reprehensible.”

The fact that most Americans turned hard against those who would remove him from office did not mean that they suspended judgment. It reflected a kind of moral realism linked with what can only be called a deeply
conservative
instinct: private life is called “private” for a reason, and Americans did not want private behavior to become a dominant public issue. Most Americans were well aware that many other politicians, in both parties, had led far from exemplary family lives, no matter how often they invoked “family values.” (This fact would boomerang on some Republican politicians later.) They sensed hypocrisy and came to see the scandal as more about politics than about sexual irresponsibility—or obstruction of justice, or perjury. The tangled web among conservative funders and right-wing journalists (and among Tripp and Goldberg and Starr) fed suspicions that Hillary Clinton was on to something when she spoke of “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” On the whole, the majority just wished the whole thing had never come up.

In a sense, then, Clinton was rewarded for his initial (and untruthful) denial. The more time Americans were given to reflect and the longer they watched the behavior of Clinton’s opponents, the more they were inclined to support his remaining in office.

The perception gap, not only between conservatives and liberals but also between the right and the rest of the country, was widened by the rise of new conservative media, and it was during the Clinton scandal that conservative radio and television became major growth industries. Rush Limbaugh began national syndication in 1988 and the conservatives’ disdain for Clinton had already been a boon to his business. A decade later, the Lewinsky scandal would enhance Limbaugh’s reach and influence, and he spawned many imitators. Over time, many local radio stations would prosper by turning over nearly all of their broadcast day to conservative talk.

Even more important was the boost the scandal gave to Fox News. Fox was a relative novelty then. It went on the air in October 1996 and at its launch reached only 10 million households.
By 2000, after the boost it received during the impeachment controversy, it was available in 56 million homes. It became a mark of loyalty to the conservative cause to tune in to Fox, and it was in this period that CNN began to lose ground to Roger Ailes’s upstart network.

The Clinton-Lewinsky saga also indirectly laid the groundwork for the rise of liberal cable television. MSNBC, then a neutral news source formed in an alliance between NBC and Microsoft, brought in Keith Olbermann, a
popular sports journalist, to host a program in its 8–9 p.m. time slot. Known as
The Big Show,
a name he brought over from ESPN, the program became a go-to place during the Clinton scandal. But Olbermann said the whole episode depressed him, and he left MSNBC in 1998 to return to sports (ironically, in light of subsequent events, to Fox Sports Net). He returned to MSNBC at the end of March 2003 and his
Countdown
program, over time, came to reflect his appalled response to those who had pushed for Clinton’s impeachment. Later, Olbermann would strike a nerve among liberals as he became increasingly outspoken against both Fox News and George W. Bush. One of his popular regular guests was the liberal radio host Rachel Maddow, and she was eventually given a program of her own in the 9 p.m. slot. The network realized it had found a niche and moved toward progressive programming across much of its schedule. (It was to take some steps back from its liberal role in 2015.) Olbermann left the network in 2011, but he had created the template for its success during the Bush and early Obama years. All of this began during the impeachment mess.

The summer of 1998 was, in one sense, a set of victories for Ken Starr as he closed in on Clinton and put one key Clinton staffer after another before his federal grand jury. At the end of July, Starr worked out an immunity agreement with Lewinsky and her family. The next day, Clinton agreed to testify voluntarily before the grand jury.

Yet that summer also damaged the prosecutor and his cause. In June, for example, the respected journalist Steven Brill alleged that Starr had been leaking information to the media, and reported that Starr had admitted to the leaks.
Starr called Brill “reckless” and “irresponsible” and said he had misinterpreted their interview. The notion of an out-of-control investigation was planted deeper when CNN reported that three FBI agents had given evidence of a plan to wire Lewinsky’s conversations, which refuted Starr’s public denials of such a plan.

In a sense, both Clinton and Starr lost that summer. Clinton was finally forced by the evidence Starr had assembled to admit he had lied. On August 17, he testified before the grand jury and that night gave
a five-minute address to the nation. “I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate,” he said, speaking from the Map Room in the White
House. “In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.”

He also acknowledged he had lied, without using that word. “I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression,” he said. “I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that.”

Yet even as he sealed Starr’s victory, he went on offense against his enemies, including the special prosecutor. “I intend to reclaim my family life for my family,” he said. “It’s nobody’s business but ours. Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.”

As it turned out, this second line of argument had the greater staying power, even if it seemed petulant that evening. By September—and with the midterm elections approaching—congressional Democrats had coalesced around a strategy of calling for Clinton to be censured by Congress. It was a clever form of “triangulation” by those who had once been triangulated against. Censure allowed Democrats to offer strong condemnations of Clinton’s behavior even as they also denounced Republicans for putting the country through an impeachment process it did not want. The Democrats had found a middle ground that matched where a majority in the country stood.

Gingrich saw none of this coming. He confidently predicted major and possibly sweeping gains for his party that November. “If everything breaks against us, my guess is we’ll be about plus 10 [seats],” he told the
Atlanta Journal
shortly before Election Day. “If everything breaks for us, [it] will be much closer to plus 40.”
Gingrich himself, the historian Steven Gillon reported, had been worried about a backlash against Republicans on impeachment and even complained toward the end of the campaign that it was the media that had a “maniacal fixation” with the Lewinsky scandal. But the Republicans’ congressional campaign arm launched a tough ad campaign, “responding,” as Gillon wrote, “to pressure from conservatives, who felt the party failed to lay down clear ideological markers for the public.”

“Unable to get ideological traction on standard Republican issues,” Gillon added, “conservatives believed the party needed to make Clinton’s character and behavior the central issue.” The anti-Clinton ads did not get a wide run, but Democrats leaped on them and the media saw them as a sign of Republican
weakness.
“Gingrich looked to Monica as his deliverance from having to come up with a new Republican agenda,” wrote
Time
magazine’s Margaret Carlson.

But the ads mattered less than the fact that Clinton’s enemies kept impeachment in the news throughout the fall campaign. It was another instructive example of how what the conservative Republicans were hearing from their core supporters badly misled them about the temper of the nation as a whole. The presumption on the right was that the more Americans were exposed to Clinton’s outlandish and even criminal behavior, the more they would rally to the cause of removing him from office. Instead, the piling on produced a backlash.

Ken Starr delivered his 445-page report on September 9 and it was released two days later. “It revealed, in graphic detail,” wrote Gillon, “that over a fourteen-month period beginning in November, 1965, Clinton had nine sexual encounters with Lewinsky, and fifteen phone-sex conversations, and then lied about it to his aides, to his country, and under oath.” Starr seemed to realize that some readers might pull back in horror over the report’s purple language and that they would find the extraordinary amount of storytelling about sex offensive.
The report itself was thus defensive in insisting that “the details are crucial to an informed evaluation of the testimony, the credibility of witnesses, and the reliability of other evidence. Many of the details reveal highly personal information; many are sexually explicit. This is unfortunate, but it is essential.”

But many Americans were dismayed that a government investigation of a president of the United States could be so focused on the toting up of such tawdry facts. They concluded that Starr could have proved Clinton perjured himself without competing with Jackie Collins or Jacqueline Susann. The Starr Report had the effect of making exactly the opposite case from the one conservatives wanted to put forward. They argued that the episode was about perjury and obstruction of justice, not sex. The Starr Report unintentionally sent the signal that it was really all about the sex.