Mark Schmitt

Why Cheney Can't Leave

I put myself on the record, months ago, arguing that the fix was in on Dick Cheney, and that the moment his numbers truly needed a boost, Bush -- rather like George Steinbrenner announcing that Manager Dick Howser, having won 103 games in 1981, was stepping down to pursue "once-in-a-lifetime real estate opportunities in Florida" -- would announce that Cheney was voluntarily leaving the ticket and would fill the slot with whoever helps him where he needs help at that point. At the time, I thought Senator Bill Frist was being groomed for that slot, credited with such marvelous achievements of caring government as the Medicare prescription drug bill!

(By the way, that aside in the previous paragraph represents just about the limit of my ability to slip baseball references into my writing. I'll leave that to George Will.)

I think I might have been wrong about Cheney. First, I hadn't thought about this at the time, but I suspect there's some truth to the idea that the Bushes do not want some young new GOP face to emerge who would overshadow Jeb Bush in 2008, either as successor or challenger, so Cheney remains a useful placeholder.

Second, who is there now who could replace Cheney? Probably not Frist -- his leadership does not tell a good story, and if the charge against Edwards is inexperience, Frist's only been in public service four years longer, and rose faster. As for Giuliani, Pataki, Ridge, and others: The party simply does not have the option of picking anyone who wavers from the orthodoxy on abortion and gay rights. Do you want to be the one to introduce an ethnic mayor of New York who after his divorce lived with a gay couple to a Madison Square Garden packed with delegates selected through Rove's nurture-the-base process? (OK, you probably do, but that's a different motivation.) As for anyone in the administration: Rice, Powell, Thompson, Ridge again -- every one of them, if nominated, would put a specific debate about their own role in Iraq or the other debacles at the center of the campaign. There's not a single person in this administration who has anything better than a mixed record, although I don't know about the Secretary of Agriculture. Governors? Apparently the sainted Bill Owens of Colorado has been found wanting, due to an ugly divorce and the exposure of the financial house of cards that is his state. And just as Dean emerged in the primaries because there were no other credible Democratic governors, there aren't that many credible Republicans now. Schwarzenegger wouldn't do it, Rowland has quit, the midwestern governors are gone. Not a lot of options, and none well-known. Finally, McCain might still be the prize for either party, but I have no hesitation in speculating that, while McCain did give some actual thought to a hypothetical Kerry offer before preemptively and courteously turning it down, he would give no thought at all to a Bush offer. He would be unfree to speak his mind, and the ticket might lose anyway, taking his entire political career and reputation with it. Plus, Bush wouldn't do it.

And I also have come to think that there may be some truth to the idea that Cheney is the driving intelligence behind the entire Bush presidency. The insistence on being interviewed together by the 9/11 commission is one huge hint; the many instances in which Cheney seems to speak for the administration but with a tone and argument totally unrelated to Bush's, is another. The fact that Bush sometimes gets his message into line with Cheney's, rather than the other way around, speaks volumes. And if Cheney is driving the decisions, then the man who picked the vice president is unlikely to fire himself.

One could argue that Cheney could retain his influence with Bush without the title of Vice President, and that's probably true. But what he would not retain would be his ability to dominate internecine warfare, which is what it's all about. He would not be able to march over to the CIA and demand to read raw data if he was merely an advisor to the President. Or, imagine how difficult it must have been for Josh Bolten to ask Cheney to please confirm with the President his hasty order on Sept. 11 to shoot down a plane headed for Washington. Cheney-as-advisor could not give such orders, and the natural deference that "staff" must give to elected officials would not protect Cheney from the many enemies he has made within his own government.

There is also the fact that, except for Larry Lindsey and Paul O'Neill, and George Tenet, this administration cannot fire anyone. It is such a rigid, stay-on-message corporate culture that the information that someone has to go cannot penetrate to the top.

I am beginning to think that behind all the bluster, George W. Bush is a frightened, confused individual, totally unable to understand the magnitude of the decisions he got talked into making, and dealing with it by becoming paralyzed, letting the individuals who represent power centers within his administration, such as Rove, Powell, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rice run off entirelly on their own. Those who are able to manage the president's message, such as Cheney, are at a bureacratic advntage. But politically, this White House is a sitting duck, and as a matter of psychology, I think the Final Days of this crowd will make for amazing reading.

You Long-Haired Freaks Should Just Be Happy You Still Get to Call Yourself Americans!

In a previous post about the Bush campaign ads, I mentioned what to me has and most people I know has always been a basic rule of thumb: that you never use Hitler as an analogy, or use the words "Nazi," "Fascist," "Apartheid" or "Holocaust" casually. It cheapens the reality of these tragedies to use them loosely, and also inevitably torpedoes by overstatement whatever argument you are making.

But what about Mussolini? I've been interested in the apparently unrecorded comments from the American Constitution Society convention at which Federal Judge Guido Calabresi compared Bush to Il Duce, although principally on the question of the basis of his election. ( ?The king of Italy had the right to put Mussolini in, though he had not won an election, and make him prime minister.....When somebody has come in that way, they sometimes have tried not to exercise much power. In this case, like Mussolini, [Bush] has exercised extraordinary power.") I find this fascinating not just because it is a good point but because: 1. I remember being told that the Calabresi family was the real-life model for the Finzi-Continis, which may not be exactly true, but they were similarly assimilated, Northern Italian Jews, so they are entitled to talk about Musollini; 2. Judge Calabresi's nephew, Stephen Calabresi, also spoke at the conference, but as one of the token conservatives, a founder of the Federalist Society (a long time ago, I was somewhat friendly with Steve Calabrese, a smart and very decent person, although I have learned from Michael Froomkin's blog that he was also one of the authors of the legal doctrine of the "unitary executive" that supports the contention in the torture memos that the president's powers are limitless when he assumes the role of Commander-in-Chief); 3. It really is the comparison that fits Bush, and doesn't seem quite so out-of-bounds. Mussolini was not so much pure evil as an opportunist and a dunce, easily used. Like Bush, the paradox is that he was by every measure incompetent and overmatched, yet still claimed a reputation for competence and efficiency, entirely unjustified. (And in both cases, now unmasked.) I don't know that much about Mussolini; I invite my mother, who knows much more, to contribute in the comments section on whether Mussolini analogies are out of bounds or not.

While trying to find a citation for the Calabresi quotes, I did find an amazing few paragraphs from The Weekly Standard. Joel Engel summarized Mussolini's career, and then concluded:

YOU CAN FILE THE LESSONS of Mussolini's rise under "H" for Hegel, the idea that extreme movements always beget extreme counter forces. It was the far left, by relentlessly chipping away at the foundations of Italian life, that gave birth and power to the far right--as it did a decade on when Hitler rode nearly the same path under similar circumstances.

This is what seems most pertinent today, as "activist" groups like Moveon.org and demagogues like Michael Moore and angry men like Al Gore and George Soros rail so irrationally against both the president (comparing him to Hitler and Mussolini in a variety of contexts) and the structures of daily American life, including the legally adjudicated Supreme Court decision that ultimately decided the 43rd presidency in advance of a tedious recount that would've yielded the same outcome.

As it turns out, Judge Calabresi's intemperate comparison was indeed useful, though with an irony he didn't intend. Either this November or in four years, George W. Bush is going to be turned out of office; even the judge agrees with that. Someday, though, a populace provoked by the left's constant fire-breathing may look for a dragon slayer who won't go quite so easily.

In other words, if you all don't shut up and keep quiet about Bush, we're going to stick you with someone a lot worse! You liberal freaks should just appreciate that you have any civil liberties left at all!

This is sheer lunacy, deeply disturbing, and it did not appear in some random blog, but bearing the full imprimatur of Messrs. Kristol, Brooks and Bennett. This is, I assume, the unstated part of the "Coalition of the Wild-Eyed" argument coming from the Bush campaign.

That '70s campaign

Earlier today, while writing about the Edwards selection, I needed to check whether Senator Lloyd Bentsen had actually run for president in 1976 or just talked about it. It didn't answer my question, but I stumbled across the site 4president.org I didn't look at its material on the 2004 election, but going back to 1960, they have a bumpersticker, and the text of the basic campaign brochure of every candidate for president, even those who ran in only a few primaries. A very useful resource. Just for a great reminder of just how different the mid-1970s was, check out just these bumper stickers, for the font alone:

plus, a bonus: free subscription to The Note for anyone who can honestly say you knew that Robert C. Byrd had once run for president. You are a true geek!

Club for Growth, where is thy sting?

The most persuasive challenge that I have heard to my argument that President Kerry will have to form a working coalition with moderate and independent Republicans in order to govern has been that the Republicans are less at liberty to make that deal than Kerry is. Their own party's factions will eat them alive if they cooperate with a Democrat on taxes and the budget, and more particularly, the Club for Growth will bankroll a serious primary challenge to any Republican who deviates from their nihilistic orthodoxy. This will push all Republicans hard to the right.

E.J. Dionne reflected that argument in his column (interestingly, the column just after the one that foresaw a Democratic sweep comparable a reverse of the Republican gain in 1994), arguing that Bush and Kerry will have an equally hard time governing. He cites Rep. Jim Leach, an Iowa moderate, as arguing that " incumbents worry mostly about primary challenges from ideological hard-liners. 'There is no more underrepresented group in America today than moderates in both parties'" (This is not true of Leach himself, whose toughest challenge came in 2002 from a Democrat, Dr. Julie Thomas.)

But Dionne seemed to change course when quoting another Midwest moderate:

One effect of a Kerry victory might be to bring out into the open Republican divisions that are already beginning to surface. Former representative Steve Gunderson, a Wisconsin Republican, speaks of "a coming civil war in the party" spurred by the efforts of conservatives to purge moderates from its ranks. This civil war over social issues is compounded by new divisions over deficits and the use of tax cuts not only to "promote growth" -- there is, says Gunderson, "nothing wrong with that" -- but also to "shut down the legitimate role of government."

Both Leach and Gunderson are obviously referring to the Club for Growth, which encouraged and financed Rep. Pat Toomey's primary challenge to Arlen Specter as well as other primaries. I think the last sentence would have been slightly more accurate if it had said "This longstanding civil war over social issues has been inflamed by the arrival of conservative funders who are willing to bankroll the social conservatives in exchange for their support of tax cuts to shut down the legitimate role of government." The Deal by which the social conservatives and economic royalists each agree to repress their misgivings about the Bush/DeLay agenda finds its apotheosis in the Club for Growth.

The civil war Gunderson sees is not between the social conservatives and the economic conservatives, as might be expected, but between people like him and Leach, who don't fully embrace either the social agenda (incidentally, Gunderson was the first not-quite-out-of-the closet-but-not-really-in Republican member of Congress) or the economic extremism on one side, and the Bush/DeLay/Club-for-Growth crowd that brings both extremes together in unholy alliance, on the other.

But the scenario we're considering here assumes Bush's defeat. If the election result is decisive, and Democrats make some gains in both houses of Congress, doesn't "the deal" go down with it?? The deal was based on Bush and Bush alone; no Republican since Reagan has ever made it work, and Reagan moderated both parties in the deal rather than indulging them. The fierce sectarianism of the Club for Growth, while it may be a spur to the right in the context of complete Republican hegemony takes on a very different character when it becomes a warring faction in a divided opposition. It causes harm today, but a party with as much arrogance and technical advantages as Rove's GOP has some room for error. Once that arrogance is pierced, every warring faction is purely destructive.

The Club's primary challenge to Specter had its desired effect. It made Specter a reliable vote on every budget question and almost every judicial nomination, for most of the period when his vote wouldAnd there are several other reasons why I suspect that the Club for Growth and the threat of a primary challenge won't have much of the effect of forcing moderate Republicans to the right:

First, there is no enforcement mechanism comparable to a telephone call from the president. Remember how Senator George Voinovich in 2003 pranced around for a while insisting that he would never vote for a tax bill that added more than $350 billion to the debt? And then, within minutes after the conference committee produced a half-page summary of the final bill, he agreed to vote for it even though it met that promise only in the most transparently phony way? The Club for Growth had run ads comparing him to Jacques Chirac. And the White House put incredible pressure on him. Which one of those pressures is likely to have had the greater effect on him? Voinovich didn't cave to the ads (he's likely to believe that the people of his state know him to be no Appeasing Frenchie) but it is extremely difficult for any elected official to resist the entreaties of a president and a the party leader, if they make dissent seem equivalent to excommunication from the party. The ads and threats from the Club for Growth, if not reinforced by the President, will amount to very little.

Second, the elected officials know perfectly well that their opponents within their own party are driven by social issues, not taxes, although it is taxes that drives the financing of their opposition. So, for example, the heart of Toomey's primary challenge to Specter rested on anti-abortion voters, who have always been uncomfortable with Specter's pro-choice position and probably make up a majority within the Republican electorate in the state. But while candidates can change their positions on taxes, it's not easy or desirable to change on social issues. Pro-choice politicians stay pro-choice. The more politics is cast into terms of moral absolutes, the more locked-in politicians will be, and the less room to pressure and move them there will be. So a moderate Republican facing a primary challenge from a Club for Growth opponent is likely to know that the only way to really appease the beast is on social issues, which they will not want to adjust.

Third, many moderate Republicans -- especially if they do build effective bridges to Kerry and have something to show for it -- can establish themselves solidly as beloved bipartisan figures in their states or districts, making them essentially untouchable in a primary as well. The Arizona hard-right hates John McCain and would love to run a primary challenge against him, but they can't, because of his larger-than-life stature in the state. The same is true of Olympia Snowe in Maine, Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island and several others. One reason Specter was vulnerable to a primary challenge is that he is not a beloved figure in the state (for good reason), and is also vulnerable in the general election. Aggressive primary challenges from the Club for Growth against moderates might not push them to the right, but rather push them to establish deeper bipartisan roots.

Finally, while most of the time, politicians are reflections of the pressures and opportunities around them, rather than their "real" beliefs or character, there are certainly times when politicians stand firm for what they believe, even at risk of their own reelection. That's often been true of moderate Republicans, and those who are concerned about the deficit and the long-term fiscal situation are likely to be willing to take some tough votes on raising taxes if it's part of a plan that will work.

A final aside: I was thinking about the Club for Growth and comparing it to the wars over the Democratic Leadership Council and its opponents that flared during the late 1990s, and which many consider exceptionally destructive. (I remember being at a big "what is the liberal agenda?" dinner in late 2000 when someone finally banged down their silverware and said, "Can we try for one minute to remember that we're trying to beat conservative Republicans, not the DLC!") In some ways this was destructive, or distracting, but as far as I can recall, the DLC never bankrolled a primary challenge of an incumbent liberal member of Congress. Nor did liberals bankroll challenges to conservative Democrats, unless they had gone completely off the reservation. (I guess there are some exceptions from the 1970s when liberals took out aging incumbent Democrats, but I don't know how ideological those campaigns were.) My memory could be wrong about this, but generally, liberal and conservative Democrats have come from different regions and had a live and let live attitude toward each other, while nonetheless battling over the national vision of the party. If you think that was destructive, then the Club for Growth attacks will be vastly more destructive to the teetering Republican coalition.

Only one experience counts

I don't think I have to say much about the Vice Presidential selection. Anyone reading this regularly knows that I was an Edwards supporter in the primaries (before and after a brief infatuation with the General), and thought he or Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida were the best picks to be Kerry's running mate.

There's been some comment elsewhere about CNN's rather hostile tone in its coverage of the Edwards choice. I only watched for about ten minutes this morning, long enough to make me furious too. Jeff Greenfield and Jeff Toobin agreed that Edwards had "probably less experience on the national stage than any vice presidential nominee in a long time. Even Dan Quayle had more national experience." (Rough quote) and Greenfield got more specific: "In fact, it's the least experience since Spiro Agnew, who was the first-term governor of Maryland when Nixon chose him. And we know how that turned out."

Well, Agnew did win two elections with Nixon, and the reason that it didn't turn out well was that in his short time as governor of Maryland, he took a career's worth of bribes. Had he been more experienced, he would have been no less of a crook. And Nixon picked the unknown Agnew specifically because he couldn't stand sharing the stage with his intra-party rivals, Rockefeller or Scranton, who got more respect from the press and the establishment. Kerry did the very opposite, embracing a former rival who overshadows him in certain ways.

Also, I think that when it comes to running for President or Vice President, there's only one kind of experience that counts: Running for President or Vice President. It's not like anything you've ever done before. You might have been elected to Congress a dozen times, but you're still not prepared to run for president, which is more than just a larger version of running for Congress. By that standard, the only VP nominees who've had experience truly "on the national stage" are Edwards, Jack Kemp in 1996, Gore in 92, and George H.W. Bush in 1980. (Lloyd Bentsen, the 1988 Democratic nominee, had run a brief campaign 12 years earlier.) Like Gore, Edwards understands the physical and mental stamina that a campaign takes, the constant shifting of context, and the pace of attack and response.

Kerry deserves a lot of credit for picking Edwards, knowing that there will be crowds that will be more excited to see Edwards than him, that there will be a lingering attitude of wishing Edwards were the nominee. But this has the feel of a winning ticket.

Mad scientists and bad political ads

While its incompetence in all matters foreign and domestic at last seems well-understood, the Bush team still seems to retain some reputation for political brilliance. This has seemed to me a bubble waiting to be burst --a political consultant convinced of his own genius is always dangerous. And Karl Rove really is beginning to seem a kind of mad scientist, enraged by his inabillity to reproduce his experiment, frantically throwing in more of the chemicals that worked before, until it all blows up. (Yes, I did see Spiderman 2.)

I just looked at all of the last few Bush ads, and they are really evidence of what happens to a political campaign when it is driven by smug arrogance and sense of historical inevitability, and lacks a candidate who can step in and take control, as Kerry did last fall. These ads may well be the worst political ads of all time. That's entirely apart from the question of their truthfulness or civility. And I don't just mean the ad that inserts images of Hitler in between those of other Democrats criticizing Bush, although I'll get to that. These ads all aggressively fail the most basic test of any political ad: What do you hear when you're watching it out of the corner of an eye, doing dishes, talking on the phone, trying to stop one kid from taking the other one's Power Rangers, etc. I look at the "Yakuza" ad that way and all I hear is "Kerry had a plan to fight terrorism [blah, blah, some Japanese thing I never heard of, blah blah], "plan to fight crime [blah, blah]". OK, sounds good, Kerry's against terrorism and crime. I watch the ad called "Patriot Act" like that, and the only thing I notice is the middle frames: "Wire Taps" [Clang!] "Subpoena powers" [Clang!] "Surveillance" [Clang!] Bad things, scary mean government. But the point of the ad is supposed to be that those are good things, and Kerry is against them, except he sort of isn't ... Getting the point of this ad requires a logic even more nuanced than Kerry's own position, which begins to seem quite reasonable.

The otherwise banal ad called "Pessimism," ends with the narrator, in a treacly, grandpa-knows-best tone reminding us "One thing's sure: Pessimism never created a job." Listen for yourself: it sounds condescending and offensive to my ears and probably would to anyone who's had some anxiety about their economic circumstances over the past few years, which means everybody except the top 5%. The idea of optimism is a powerful political tool -- it was John Edwards' original theme -- but this ad gets the tone all wrong. It keeps saying the words "optimism" and "pessimism" instead of showing it. And it's far too exuberant in its images of people skipping down the street to spend their new home equity loan for the current national mood, which is certainly not yet "Morning in America."

Finally, there's the Hitler ad, which has been commented on at length. Although this was not broadcast but e-mailed to 6 million supporters, it remained on the Bush site for quite a while and also got plenty of the free media which it was designed to provoke. I have been enjoying browsing through the political ads of the last 50 years online through the American Museum of the Moving Image, and haven't found anything this bizarre yet. It's not clear what the point is -- that the liberals are so crazy that they compare Bush to Hitler, which doesn't make sense as an explanation because the ad doesn't say that and they had to be browbeaten into adding an explanatory comment that might help a viewer who didn't know about the phony MoveOn ad story. Or, more likely to be the underlying message of the ad is that Bush opponents Kerry, Dean, Gore and Michael Moore are similar to Hitler in that they are all wild-eyed extremists, although from different extremes, while Bush represents the responsible middle: "steady leadership," the ad says. But if that's the point, why on earth would you use an image of Hitler? Hitler stands apart, he doesn't fit neatly into a political argument. Michael Moore looks a little crazy raging against Bush to boos at the Oscars, but that has nothing to with Hitler at Nurenberg, and bringing Hitler into it torpedoes whatever argument you were trying to make. That's why it was a lousy entry into the MoveOn.org contest that the images are taken from, and is no more effective when repurposed.

But what really strikes me about this ad, and the others, is that Bush seems to believe he can now present himself as the calm, centrist, steady point right in between the wild-eyed left and right. (Perhaps only Hitler puts enough weight on the other side to make Bush seem calm and centrist.) He must realize that he made a choice at some point in his presidency to put large forces into play. He didn't have to cast politcal arguments into grand battles between the forces of light and the forces of dark. He didn't have to stake everything on radical tax shifting and foreign policy insanity. The central argument of E. J. Dionne's superb new book, Stand Up, Fight Back, (although I have also heard it referred to as "E.J. Unleashed) is that Bush had two chances to govern in a way that would have unified the electorate and assured him support, if begrudging, across a broad swathe of the electorate -- after the Supreme Court made him president and after Sept. 11 -- and both he aggressively rejected. I think that's it in a nutshell, and probably how history will see this second one-term Bush presidency. But part of the problem is that Bush doesn't seem to have any idea that he has done this. He's just picking up where he left off in the 2000 campaign. But you have to recognize that when you stake your supporters to the cause of stopping gay marriage, when you stake the economy to a gamble on surviving massive deficits, when you stake your reputation as an international leader on a "you break it, you own it" invasion of a country, thoroughly unprepared for either the predicted or unpredictable consequences, you just have to hope that all those dice roll in your favor. If they do, you win "big time." If not, you lose. Bush has no option in his reelection message but to try to reinforce and justify the choice he's made to go the extremes. Thus the policy incompetence cannot be separated from the political incompetence.

Hertzberg gets the Kempton Treatment

I was fortunate yesterday to get a slightly-early copy of a new book: Hendrik Hertzberg's Politics: Observations & Arguments, 1966-2004. My immediate reaction was that this 650-page collection seemed almost like a counterpart to the retrospective of columns and articles by Murray Kempton published about a decade ago, Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events, right down to the introduction and jacket blurb from David Remnick of the New Yorker. (My memory tricked me here: Remnick wrote a blurb, but not the introduction to the 1996 Kempton collection, although he did write an introduction to the more recent Modern Library reissue of Kempton's Part of Our Time, his book on the 1930s.) But that seems bizarre: The Kempton collection appeared when the author was in his late 70s, and Hertzberg is not only young, he seems even younger. It is astonishing to think that his career goes back to 1966, as editor of the National Student Association magazine, especially for a lot of readers who only became acquainted with Hertzberg's work when he returned to the New Yorker and began writing the lead political piece in Talk of the Town most weeks. Other than the New York Times op-ed page, or perhaps a Time or Newsweek column, that's probably the most widely read political slot there is.

The comparison with Kempton goes further, though, because you can't name another weekly writer about politics whose work retains any interest even two months after it's written. Kempton's mind-altering syntax, his obsessive moral complexity, his dedication to leaving poignant questions in the air rather than tying down every loose rope, make even short columns from 50 years ago, about politicians or labor leaders you've never heard of, as fresh as the Iliad. I admire David Broder, but the only reason to read a Broder column from the 1988 presidential primaries, for example, would be for seriously wonky research purposes. (Which is not to say that such writers can't write great books with lasting value, just that their weekly output does no more than it is intended to do, which is to enlighten the readers in that week.) I suppose some people think George Will is such a writer, since they buy his collected columns, but to me, regardless of whether I agree with him, his columns seem reliably faux-erudite and formulaic. I haven't read mch the Hertzberg collection yet, but he is such a writer and I'm looking forward to it.

(It should go without saying, by the way, that if you are reading this, and you have never read anything by Murray Kempton, you must. I was fortunate enough to live in New York during his last flourishing, as a columnist for New York Newsday, which published from 1985 to 1995 and is probably the only paper I ever loved. I sometimes try to reproduce that experience of tabloid fun mixed with serious insight by reading the New York Post and the Financial Times, and nothing else, but it's not quite the same.)

As soon as I got the Hertzberg book, I l flipped pages looking for a piece that he had written in the New Republic in June 1987, which I vaguely remembered as a profound thought about politics and culture. I recalled it as a long essay -- to be more specific, I can picture myself reading it standing on the uptown #1 train at the end of a day shortly before I moved to Washington -- but in fact the key insight is in just a paragraph, really a single sentence, in a column reacting to the newspaper-photo evidence of adultery that abruptly ended Gary Hart's front-running campaign for the 1988 Democratic nomination:

The gross violation of the privacy of Gary Hart, Lee Hart, and their children is part of a general degradation of the public sphere and a general weakening of the distinction between the public and the private realms of life in the United States. This is a social phenomenon with many sources -- the Reagan Administration's deligitimation of public action, the human potential movement's hostility toward "hypocrisy" and exaltation of "authenticity," and the feminists' dictum that the personal is the political, to name three. But none of this justifies the Miami Herald and the Washington Post any more than the correlation between poverty and crime justifies mugging.

There are so many heavy ideas in that sentence, some of which are perhaps infuriating, an insight so complicated that if David Brooks had it, he would parlay it into a three-book contract. (What a smooth cheap shot, coming out of nowhere!) But the idea that stuck with me, and that has seemed hugely relevant through all the Clinton melodrama and into the Bush era, is that there is a symbiotic relationship between the weakening of the boundaries of private life, and the denigrating of the public sphere. The more we made the private public, the more we would erode the idea of the public sphere as a separate one with its own moral obligations. The more the boundary is smudged, the more private virtues substitute for public duties, and private vices are allowed to distort and twist the public debate about health care or taxation, the more illegitimate and merely a matter of individual preference will the larger moral choices we make as a society seem.

This is obviously a helpful insight into Bill Clinton, especially coming at the moment when he seems to have almost given up, and allowed so many of his television interviews to be devoted more to his private shame than his public record, rather than holding firm as he did in 1998. But it is also key to the understanding of George W. Bush's bizarre glorification of private morality. "I will restore honor and integrity to the White House" meant absolutely nothing more than that he would refrain from screwing the interns, for which we are expected to give thanks. Meanwhile, to take only the most obvious of a hundred examples, Bush is entirely comfortable gleefully denying gays and lesbians the right to form loving legal partnerships, safe in the certainty that he himself is "a good man," "not a hater," and not "against" homosexuals as people. The only reason that the press and public buys for one minute the idea that Bush's private decency -- which for these purposes we will not question -- somehow substitutes for or offsets his public endorsement of cruelty is that they made private behavior and attitude the ultimate measure of fitness to serve in public office.

Hertzberg's point also suggests why it is not sufficient simply to show that Newt Gingrich cheats on multiple wives with progressively younger women, that Bill Bennett spends his evenings in his underwear pumping hundred-dollar coins into slot machines installed in his VIP suite, that Dick Cheney says fuck. All true, and these are all creepy characters. But exposing them does nothing to restore the idea that we have a public sector in which we as a society have an obligation to ensure that people have the means to make a living, that some goods belong to all of us and cannot be parceled out to owners. By making "hypocrisy" the principle standard of morality, it reinforces the idea that private acts and attitudes prevail over public deeds, especially for politicians. Perhaps I'm reading too much into a sentence, but it is amazing that Hertzberg understood in 1987 exactly where we were headed.