Clinton Without a Coda

Clinton Without a Coda
Only a moment of reckoning will bring closure.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, February 22, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST

Bill Clinton's ex-presidency has achieved a sort of altered state in which an obligatory part of talking about him now involves marveling over how much we are all still talking about him. Time magazine's cover story this week on "The Incredible Shrinking Ex-President" starts with the question: "How can we miss you if you never go away?" Newsweek's extensive cover piece on the ex-president chimes in that "the Age of Clinton just won't end."

Why don't we let the guy simply pocket his flatware and fade away? Why not leave him in peace to haunt the doughnut shops of Harlem and peddle himself on the big-bucks lecture circuit, while the rest of us--as President Bush has suggested--just "move on"?

We can't. Not yet. There's a deep reason that Mr. Clinton, for all his shrinkage, keeps playing as the Greatest Show on Earth. The need to dwell upon him goes well beyond the thrill of the scandals still rolling in, abundant as breakers on "Baywatch." Sure, those help keep the Clintons bobbing around in the news. But at bottom, Bill's undead hold on public attention has less to do with law and politics than with art--and by art I don't mean simply the craft collection Hillary commandeered from the White House to bedeck Bill's presidential library in Arkansas.

The trajectory of Bill Clinton is entering the orbit of aesthetics, by which I mean the age-old rules of drama that Aristotle was at some pains to elaborate back in the fourth century B.C. The human urge for order in the universe demands that a plot--once it gets rolling--arrive at some conclusion satisfying enough that we can all experience a decent measure of catharsis, exhale and go home. There must be a change of condition. There must be a moment of turning and recognition, or deeper understanding, leading to a resolution; the completion of an action that these days goes under the label of "closure."

In other words, if a scoundrel becomes president and abuses his office, plot requires that he end up exposed, understood and, in some reasonable measure, punished for it. How many of us have sat through the Clinton presidency, watching one scam after another unfold like scenes in a grifter movie, and wondered when we would finally get to that aesthetically vital moment of comeuppance? Even Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for all their vastly greater charm, finally bit the dust, in Bolivia, and without that the movie version would have been one big dud.

In Mr. Clinton's case, though, what an elusive thing any real resolution has proved to be. Never mind the trouncing the Democrats took in the 1994 congressional elections following the messy debut of his first term. Even impeachment in 1998 didn't stop him. He brassed it out. He took credit for anything good and blamed everyone else for his own misdeeds. He rolled right along to his plea bargain for lying under oath, his Marc Rich pardon, Furnituregate, Officegate, Artgate, Rogergate. And he still proposes to get away with it all, expounding in the New York Times last Sunday on the classic con-man's theme that he did it all for us, and stating that he was right to pardon Marc Rich and takes "full responsibility." One can only wonder what, in Mr. Clinton's long hall of mirrors, the meaning of "responsibility" is.

But the natural result, as long as Bill manages to duck any genuine responsibility for his own flimflam, is that we can't stop paying attention. We are all still stuck in our theater seats, bound by our own instinct for order, waiting for this drama to reach some decent resolution.

To whatever extent President Clinton was larger than life, it was not because he had a grand vision to share, or profound principles he stood by, or because he was a figure of deep integrity doing battle with destiny. He didn't, he hadn't, he wasn't. But he was--and is--an archetype we all recognize. He is the scoundrel who is sure he can fight or charm his way out of any fix, the medicine man who gets run out of one town and sets up shop in the next, the self-anointed savior who says he feels our pain but shows a sociopath's lack of conscience.

More than anything else, it is Mr. Clinton's lack of conscience that in this national drama needs dealing with. His pattern of behavior is more destructive than that of someone who breaks the rules but truly repents, which provides resolution of some reasonable kind. What he keeps presenting, with his conviction he can do no wrong, is behavior jarring and destructive to the most decent and graceful aspects of human sensibilities. No matter how carefully you write the laws of any society, much still depends on intangible bonds of trust and some shared notion of what is right--of what is really means, and what responsibility really entails. Scrap that, and we are all looking into an abyss where the only controlling authority is what you can get away with.

With the ending of his presidency, Mr. Clinton reached a natural moment for even his blindest supporters to get wise. He has less power to threaten, distract or seduce. The moment is at hand to finally get this plot wrapped up, if we can. Mr. Clinton is not going to do this for us; most likely his own former supporters will have to do a lot more stepping in to play the role of the conscience he does not have.

The question now is how much, and in what forms, Mr. Clinton should pay--whether by way of embarrassment, rejection or actual legal prosecution. Aesthetically, for America to truly move on, the answer is that the show won't be over until we can honestly feel enough justice has been done so that the plot has completed its necessary turn, and our own instincts for order no longer compel us to keep talking about him.

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."