Few Escape Washington Hypocricy

by Alexander Cockburn

We speak here of folk like Bob Borosage, a mover and shaker in Washington's liberal public interest sector, whose life mission has been to persuade the world of the validity of the proposition that the Democratic Party not only has a "soul" but this same "soul" is progressive in nature.

Bob Borosage-type liberals now offer Clinton as a man who has destroyed the possibility of radical advance. If it weren't for his sex drive, they charge, the U.S. Congress would now be seeing a tremendous and possibly triumphant struggle for "a progressive agenda."

This is only a slight twist on the myth they have been promoting for the past six years, to wit that there is a profound, radical impulse in the Democratic Party, even that Bill Clinton has been its secret leader, waiting only for the moment to spring into a telephone booth and emerge in the pink jumpsuit of radicalism.

You would have thought that after six years of watching Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party doing exactly what the bankers told them, this analysis would lack credibility. But no. They are now bleating that Clinton must resign to prevent further damage to the radical impulse noted above.

This is the line taken by Robert Kuttner, editor of the American Prospect and by David Corn, Washington correspondent for The Nation, whose high command has thus far admirably resisted such insane calls for Bill's resignation and taken a sensible attitude toward the whole scandal. Borosage now howls for Clinton's head.

So do Nation writers Marc Cooper, Micah Sifry and Doug Ireland. Now, this trio has never argued for any political merit in Clinton. Doug in particular has written energetic political denunciations of the Lively Lad from Little Rock for as long as the Lively Lad has been in public view. But now, they are taking the "radical impulse" nonsense seriously, to judge from a very odd statement in the Nation to the effect that Clinton has been "opportunistically eviscerating its (the Democratic Party's) core values and spreading the conservative worldview of his corporate donors." In contrast to Bill's moral and political disgraces, they offer, with a straight face, this vision of "a left" that, with Clinton driven from office, can somehow reconstitute itself inside and outside the Democratic Party.

How amazing that at the moment one sees in the American popular soul a swelling of emotion against puritan prosecutors, for privacy and sexual freedom, against hypocrisy and against the proddings and imprecations of the political and journalistic elites; at this same moment, these liberals set their faces against these splendidly subversive popular sentiments because, they say, "this president is no longer 'politically viable.'"

There's nothing more touching than progressives mounting the moral pulpit, and Cooper, Sifry and Ireland don't disappoint us: "Integrity and honesty have always been the sine qua non of progressive politics, and they are fundamental to rebuilding an electorally meaningful left." Then, their vocal cords swell to bursting point: "We demanded public honest and integrity from Lyndon Johnson and from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and when they failed to deliver it, we knew what to say. Bill Clinton should resign.'

Golly, We've never been fans of Bill Clinton, but we will say one thing for him: Thus far -- and he has a couple of years to go to prove me wrong -- he hasn't killed a couple of million people. LBJ and Nixon destroyed what was once called Indochina, and Ronald Reagan destroyed Central America. Bill had a couple of little adventures in Somalia and Iraq. The worst thing he ever did was refuse to characterize the Hutu massacres of Rwanda as genocide.

But really, only two halfway decent orgasms and a few fibs against Vietnam and Central America: It doesn't match up. And look at the words they use to evoke the ideals of the left: "integrity and honesty." In the old days, we talked about class struggle or determination to kill the bankers and seize power in the name of the people. What a falling away, to the language of anniversary toasts at a Rotary banquet!

As poll after poll has been showing, ordinary people have been registering their disgust at what Clinton has been forced to go through. All this is in marked contrast to the opinion-forming elites, sex skeletons crammed in their closets, who pace the ramparts of moral outrage on an hourly basis. Ordinary Americans feel it necessary to pay lip service to moral niceties, hence the low personal ratings they give to Bill. But the way they say what they really think is in the "job approval" ratings that jumped right after the release of the grand jury testimony, just as the Republican leaders' ratings dropped.

It's glorious to see Republicans like Rep. Henry Hyde, who have spent their lives invoking the feelings of the "heartland," of "Joe Six-pack," now proclaiming virtuously that they give not a fig for polls and follow only the dictates of their own conscience -- that same conscience which in Hyde's case issued no demur when he gazed upon the body of Cherie, a woman not his wife, and found it goodly and pleasing and well worth getting to know more closely in the privacy of a motel room. (This was Hyde's self-confessed "youthful" indiscretion perpetrated at the age of 41. I'm waiting for the day Strom Thurmond pleads guilty to a "youthful" indiscretion at the age of 82.)