Yet every decade or so, these forgettable bores do the world a service, and so it was last Friday, when they voted to acquit William Jefferson Clinton, president of the United States, of the two charges that had been preferred against him in December by the House of Representatives. Across the nation, you could almost hear a sigh of relief that a year’s tiresome embarrassment had been brought to an end.
Not that America was gripped by the only impeachment trial of a man elected president in the nation’s history. And there was–is–good reason for that. Long before Monica Lewinsky flashed her thong underwear at Bill Clinton, the presidency had been diminished. Not as much by Clinton, though he certainly did his bit, as by events. The modern presidency was founded on 60 years of crisis that started with the stock-market crash of 1929 and ended with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Through all that period, America was confronted with challenges that demanded not only a man of energy in the White House, but someone whom the rest of the country could identify as its embodiment. Those days are gone; just as was the case between the Civil War and the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, national politics no longer defines a mood. The spirit of the age is set less by the public sector than by the private one, less by Washington than by Silicon Valley, Seattle and Hollywood. This does not mean that politics–the charged contest of competing public ideas–has vanished from the American stage. Political debate has, rather, been relocated back into state and local communities. In the American political tradition, outside times of crisis, that is precisely where such debate belongs. All of this explains why Americans have been so detached from the proceedings in Washington. To put it shortly: inside the United States, Bill Clinton doesn’t matter enough for people to spend time worrying about him.
It’s outside America that the long nightmare has had real significance. And, arguably, it is in the world outside America where interest in Clinton’s story has been maintained long after it lost its resonance at home. To give away a trade secret, of NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL’S top 10 best-selling magazines in Europe last year, no less than seven had the scandal on the cover. That reflects a rational judgment. At home, the American president may be turning into a mildly interesting ceremonial figure. To the world at large, the president is almost godlike, leading a nation with a unique combination of economic, military, political and cultural power. He cannot be ignored; his fortunes matter; his fate is shared by billions.
It is for that reason that the Clinton scandal may, in the end, be profoundly damaging. For a year America has seemed sex-obsessed, parochial, mean-spirited, led by a dishonest philanderer, governed by a set of procedures that make sensible compromise impossible–in fact, silly. There are no heroes in this story. (No heroes: but Monica Lewinsky, who has shown much grace under pressure, may yet turn out to be its heroine.) Not Clinton, a man of indecent indiscipline and cloying, lip-chewing apology; not Kenneth Starr, Clinton’s nemesis, who if he ever had a sense of proportion and fairness, lost it long ago; not, please God, the Republican members of the House of Representatives, those hypocritical Uriah Heeps who gave ““white male’’ a bad name; not the media, whose members, in the race to be first in a news cycle that restarts every hour, brought a breathless, tacky tone to much of their coverage.
Why should this matter? Because America is not just a tawdry mess. It is also the world’s leading democracy, the best defender of free minds and free markets (and hence prosperity) anywhere. It is committed to equality under the law, a principle that alone provides a structure for a naturally chaotic world. America’s values are important values. They are not values uniquely held in the United States–only arrogant, ignorant Americans think that theirs is the sole law-abiding, prosperous, democratic society in the world. But without sustained American support, those crucial values become endangered, as they were between the Treaty of Versailles and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In much of the world, the United States is now a laughingstock, a subject of smutty jokes and snickering. Up to a point, that is fine; it’s no sin to laugh at Bill Clinton, Ken Starr and the Drudge Report. But it is profoundly dangerous to laugh at democracy, the rule of law and freedom of the press, and insofar as Clinton, Starr and the rest have enabled such an easy elision to be made, they have done the world a great disservice. And there, perhaps, is the lesson of this miserable year: timeless values should not be confused with those who temporarily claim to speak in their name.
Now: can we all get a life?
