Living Under His Legacy

Living Under His Legacy
Despite Clinton's damage, be thankful for a trustworthy political system.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, November 23, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST

Thanksgiving deserves mention, and we'll get to that. But first, let's take a brief look at the message broadcast to American politicians by President Clinton's trip to Vietnam, and its bearing on the current process that we are still calling an election.

Mr. Clinton's real message had, unfortunately, a lot less to do with fallen soldiers and global amity than with yet another demonstration that if you quiet conscience and brass things out long enough, you can get away with quite a lot. It is only two years ago that Bill was impeached--the fruit of lying to the American people and betraying the trust, not to mention the dignity, of a great country he is sworn to serve. There was a time when an embarrassment on that scale might have led a president to resign. The mere prospect of it was enough to persuade Richard Nixon to step down.

But Mr. Clinton toughed it out, telling himself--as he has now been telling the press--that he was the victim, not the public he lied to. And once he got past the business of lying and stalling and putting America generally through a wringer for months while he fought to save his own hide, he has carried right on--reminding us often that his needs in life are somehow all in the higher interest of the republic. We even had an historic chance to learn all sorts of things we might otherwise never have known about the process of impeachment, just as the Florida re-re-rerecount has been playing in some circles as a convenient way to finally teach Americans a thing or two about civics.

Anyway, there trooping around Vietnam was the impeached Mr. Clinton, delighted to present himself as the sum of American greatness, engendering such headlines back home as the New York Times' "Clinton Basks in the Adulation of a City Once Called Saigon," and hailing his own visit as producing rewards "unprecedented in all of human history."

Small wonder, then, that from this sort of stuff Al Gore has drawn his own inferences--apparently concluding that the American system has been put there to let you do whatever you can get away with--and has embarked on a similar approach toward gaining the presidency.

Never mind that by every count so far, George W. Bush has won. Mr. Gore has seen his own mentor, Mr. Clinton, defend his own hideously damaged legitimacy via such tactics as disputing what the meaning of "is" is. Mr. Gore has every reason to figure that in what turned out to be a very close presidential race, he might as well go right on trying to target and redefine those vital Florida ballots until they become, well, whatever they need to be to elect Mr. Gore.

It's an attitude not far removed, actually, from a lesson drawn by another of Bill's associates--his wife, now U.S. senator-elect, Hillary Clinton. While her victory at the New York polls is not in question, what mainly got her to that point was a piece of the same attitude: that the system is something not so much to respect as to milk in whatever ways you can get away with.

Hillary's big insight as first lady was that the perks of her husband's job could conveniently translate into her own use of a presidential-level escort and a load of taxpayer-funded publicity (based on respect for the institution of the presidency) that came in handy on the Senate campaign trail. Perhaps there was nothing illegal in all this, but much like Mr. Gore's determination to work the system in every way possible--if it will get him what he wants--Mrs. Clinton has introduced a new variety of political opportunism to the courtesies and customs of the White House. It's an approach to politics that places like Russia have been struggling to shed.

Which brings me to Thanksgiving, and what we really celebrate today, apart from a short break in the re-re-recount. Yes, America has purple mountains and fuited plains, and they are well worth giving thanks for. But the same can be said about, say, Russia, or much of Africa. Not least, about Vietnam, which for its natural resources and beauty alone is also a deeply blessed nation--yet is made poor by bad government.

What makes the difference, what helps keep this country rich and free--and what really earns that adulation in which Mr. Clinton was recently basking in a city once called Saigon--is that America has a social contract brilliantly made to take into account the usual scope of human greed and depravity. And that, about as well as any mortal system can, it turns toward creative and productive works. A crucial part of all that is the shared sense our leaders can be trusted not to sap and twist and use a system that, whatever its explicit legal safeguards, must always depend in some part on simple trust.

When leaders abuse that kind of trust, push the system toward its limits and without shame cash in on its weaker points, they may well do damage--sometimes below the water-line--that may only later start to really be felt.

Bill Clinton and his disciples, such as Al and Hillary, may choose to believe that because he toughed it out, he and the nation have moved on from his abuse of the presidency. More likely, the unprecedented wrangling and lawyering of Mr. Gore over the vote count is just the first real sample of Mr. Clinton's true legacy.

We can take comfort that America is a polity with enough trust in its courts and politicians so that most citizens can turn comfortably today to their turkeys. On election night, just over two weeks ago--though it now seems about two years--I was talking with a partygoer who, bracing to accept a potential Gore victory, noted that there is much ruin in a great nation. True, but today I would be thankful for a little less.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."