AL Gore’s selection of Joseph Lieberman is a political plea bargain, in which Gore had chosen to confess to the sexual misconduct committed during the Clinton-Gore presidency in order to have the administration’s myriad other acts of misconduct dropped from consideration by a jury comprising 100 million of his peers – the American electorate.
By acknowledging the gravity of Bill Clinton’s most repulsive crime against decency in the White House, Gore now wants Americans to forget all the other crimes against decency committed in the past 7½ years – the lies, dissimulations, distortions and violations of campaign-finance law, many of them committed by the vice president himself.
Those, too, are implicitly part of the indictment against the administration handed down at the GOP convention, when speaker after speaker drew blood by talking in vague terms about restoring dignity and honor to the Oval Office. That muted attack wasn’t just about cigars and Gap dresses. It also referred to the noxious gamesmanship that has brought the pejorative adjective “Clintonian” into the American political vocabulary.
And Clintonian hijinks of a non-sexual nature would, it appears, be practiced on a minute-by-minute basis in a Gore-Lieberman White House as well.
In the past two days, both Gore and Lieberman have said some amazingly Clintonian things. Asked by Larry King about his speech condeming Clinton during the Monica mess, Lieberman said: “That statement I made in the Lewinsky matter, as difficult as it was, was something I simply would not have done if I were vice president … Not only do you have a loyalty to the president, but you have a constitutional responsibility as the successor to the president not to separate from him publicly or create unprecedented problems in terms of the stability of the country.”
A constitutional responsibility? Where does it say in the Constitution that the vice president cannot speak publicly against the president? Nowhere. Here’s what the Constitution says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected … “
That’s all. And Lieberman, who was trained as a lawyer at Yale with the current slimeball in the Oval Office, knows it. What Lieberman is doing is implicity defending Gore for the vice president’s silence during the Lewinsky matter. But it won’t wash. Gore was either being cowardly or prudent – but either way, he wasn’t obeying a Constitutional directive.
That Clintonianism was echoed by Gore himself on Wednesday, in an effort to paper over his differences with Lieberman on school vouchers. “If I was the parent of a child who went to an inner city school that was failing,” Gore said, “I might be for vouchers too.”
Now, Gore himself did make that choice, for rather than sending his own children to the lousy D.C. public schools, he used wealthy-folks “vouchers” – his own money – to send them to ritzy private schools.
What he sounds like here is his boss – the man who, to save his failing presidency in 1995, said that “there are people … still mad at me because you think I raised your taxes too much. It might surprise you to know that I think I raised them too much, too.” It’s an effort to pretend there’s middle ground when there is no middle ground. Either you’re for vouchers or you’re not. If you think taxes are too high, cut ’em. But Clintonian logic allows you to say anything to get out of a jam.
The Lieberman plea bargain is another element of the devil’s bargain that tempts everybody who comes into contact with Bill Clinton – the bargain that says, “Just let yourself loose and enjoy the ride.” It’s distressing to see Lieberman slip so easily into temptation.
This good man, who made a point of quoting from the Old Testament on Tuesday, might take a moment to ponder the wise words of Mark in the New Testament: “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com
