Commentary –

Shameless Comings And Goings

By Chris Powell

In their going out and coming in, the departing and the new presidents were each shameless in their own way.

The old president, Bill Clinton, used the last hours of his tainted administration to gain himself a plea bargain for his brazen perjury and to issue a grab bag of 140 pardons and sentence commutations.

Maybe Clinton’s plea bargain, which requires a five-year suspension of his law license, put him in a forgiving mood. Some of his pardons were plausible, as for Patty Hearst, whose venture into crime was prompted by her kidnapping by terrorists in 1974, and as for Henry Cisneros, the former San Antonio mayor and Clinton secretary of housing and urban development who, like the president, got in trouble by lying about a girlfriend. But some of the pardons were not so plausible, as for a couple of characters who obstructed justice: Clinton’s former Whitewater partner, Susan McDougal, and Marc Rich, the billionaire fugitive commodities trader who was indicted for fraud and racketeering 17 years ago and fled to Switzerland to avoid prosecution.

Clinton called Rich’s case “unusual,” but the pardon fit right in with the Clinton administration’s ethics. For in the last two years the fraud defendant’s former wife, a songwriter, has raised more than $500,000 for the Democratic Party.

Clinton spent his last few months in office in furious pursuit of a legacy. His plea bargain and pardons may have to do.

The new president, George W. Bush, gave an inaugural address that was mercifully unlike Clinton. While Clinton, in love with the sound of his own voice, may be oratorically the closest thing to an American Castro, ready to harangue the country for hours at a time, Bush’s address was only a quarter-hour long and he spent most of that time reflecting on the national purpose and citizenship, though he couldn’t quite discard entirely his annoying smirk. If Clinton’s big problem was that he was overexposed both politically and personally, the country may welcome underexposure in Bush – not just because he is not as quick and articulate as his predecessor, but also because government does not need to be injected into quite so many things around the clock.

Bush called the country to “civility,” and certainly the country’s politics lately have had far too much bombast and ruthlessness. But as he has done since the election, the new president omitted any reference to a big cause of the special need for civility now: the means of his own coming to office, that being without a plurality of the popular vote.

At best Bush’s election happened through a fluke of the electoral mechanism, something the country has accommodated before and will do so again. But even on Inauguration Day some people continued to insist that Bush’s election was a matter of fraud in the counting of votes in Florida, or thievery by the US Supreme Court.

Such complaints may not be fully answerable by anything less than a political scientist or historian. Of course the rules that gave rise to the fluke of an election result have long been the rules, and Bush’s opponent in the election also would have accepted the presidency on any terms available. But even a defense of the republican form of government against plebiscitary government – indirect rather than direct election of the president – would leave a question of moral legitimacy, if not legal legitimacy, and this question deserved to be acknowledged in such circumstances.

“America, at its best,” the new president declared, “is also courageous.” But where on Inauguration Day was the courage to address the obvious and the troubling – that the winner trailed the loser by 500,000 votes? What kind of civility must pretend that an elephant is not in the parlor?

The tone and substance of Bush’s inaugural address gave hope of restoring some dignity to the presidency. At least he may have found a good writer and may know whose advice to take. Given Clinton’s tawdriness right down to the last minute, maybe that will be enough to make people forget that, to a great extent, Bush’s inaugural address, nice as it was, mostly missed the point.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)