[Translated from Landplage November 1998]
Clinton’s domestic rivals pursue “impeachment” as bitterly as little as they have anything to hold against his politics; there is occasionally – as with the massive retaliatory strikes against Bin Laden’s terrorist group -- boisterous applause even from the Republican ranks. And yet they consider the person of Clinton intolerable. Apart from the fact that for a decent Republican the world is only all right if a stalwart representative of the Grand Old Party commands the leadership of the world power, Bill Clinton always appeared to these minds as a unique affront. How can someone with such “un-American activities” in his biography as refusing military service in Viet Nam, and thus his patriotic duty, instead smoking marijuana and drifting in the peace movement, today raise the moral force to govern the superpower as president and shining model of the nation?
By setting the independent counsel Kenneth Starr against Clinton the Republicans advanced an important step: He got the President to publicly deny the reproach of a sex affair under oath; the question of an impeachment proceeding is thereby on the table. The only thing that can bring the most powerful man in the world discredit seems to be oral sex with an intern and the related white lie.
The fact that the small indiscretion of the American President and his “white lies” goes from the status of a men’s joke to high-official political event is because it effects an item which is nowhere so valuable as in a democracy: the trust of the people in his rule.
“The lie in political office shakes at the foundation of the community, not only its laws, but also since it is also based on trust … the private lie drops back to the individual, the public to the state, which he embodies.” (Sp 8,9.)
If it should belong to the foundation of a community that people and state meet just about trust, then is expressed with the fact clearly that such a community does not want to negotiate about his purposes and purposes.
If it should belong to the foundation of a community that the people and the state converge over trust, then that clearly expresses that this type of community does not want to negotiate about its goals and purposes. Everything is already fixed, evidently. Therefore this bond of trust also remains a very one-sided thing. This shows the second “foundation” of this community, the “laws” which ensure with force the observance of all the arrangements that are set on the political agenda for the politician entrusted with the exercise of rule.
What nobody talks about in such a trusting community are, first of all, its basic concerns in the world and the methods of their implementation. That counts in the form of government in which public and representative participation is written in capital letters, as the politics presumes. Why there “must” be rule and in which sense it “must” be exercised is not up for discussion, but is considered a self-evident fact from which any number of “tasks” results for the current politics. Those who feel destined to exercise rule must especially prove themselves for the established offices. How they master the allegedly given tasks and their special necessities is also not up for debate; people carry the “burden of the office,” or as it is said today, “do their job” completely by themselves and their conscience. The people should trust in the fact that they make “it” good -- whatever this always consists of.
The only thing that is not predetermined is who may take these offices and make politics. This is the real field of the democratic public. They are responsible for electing such people since they only act in politics as the “affected persons”; on them the task is incumbent to supply the high officials with a majority and categorically authorize the high-officials to rule with their trust.
The principle according to which democrats give their trust by voting thereby already stands firm. When an undoubted, established state interest in politics gives the “tasks,” people must want someone who can do this successfully. The country needs “good” politicians and the people’s political interests are completely ready to form an opinion about who this should be from a wide variety of offers.
This makes the question of the “ability” and “suitability” of the politician, and thus his quality of character, all determinant and continuous phenomena for the democratic public. In politics one speaks only in the form of the character of the person who executes it. This applies even if the current business of politics fills the newspapers; that is always argued over in the form of the individuals who their accomplishment is incumbent on: it is good what he does, he makes it good, he gets enough agreement or possibly he loses his authority – these are the fundamental criteria. Thus every political question is transferred into a personnel question: Everything is made a voucher for the good or bad character of the politician.
Where the politician is questioned not about his purposes, but about his individuality, it cannot be missed at all that political standpoints are not the real interest of the formation of political trust. As if mature citizens would have a notion that one must already know someone very well in order to have something akin to trust in him, they turn away their political interest from politics in order to find within the human-private sphere of the politician a clue -- well-known from one’s own life -- to what extent he is a good and decent person and promises therefore reliability as leader of the nation and also the ability to carry out “its cause” cleverly.
That makes people like Clinton a professional self-representation artist who is recommended for public office precisely because of the ostentatiously showcased integrity of their private morality. According to all the rules of the art and under the willing assistance of the media, the light of a trust in the person in the politician is developed there in order to pull the trust and the votes of the citizens towards himself. Of course, the political self-representation as well as the moral power of judgment of the people orients itself during the constant qualification test of “its” politicians by the valid standards of behavior and custom, and in the “Monica affair” the relevant family values play just as outstanding a role as the virtue of honesty and respect for the law, against which the American president -- the state ideal personified! – has now offended.
Thus in democratic culture the view from the keyhole of rule is immanent. The absurdity that the most ridiculous private matters of minor importance win such a towering importance as signifiers for forming opinions about the reliability of the political personnel is democratic everyday life. The most disparate criteria – from the military record of a president to oral sex -- become compatible with the pervasive personnel question. Still the least private trash thereby becomes -- as long as any connection occurs to the civic fantasy concerning the leadership strength and moral integrity of the person concerned – an object of the highest interest for the formation of an opinion = trust. This makes the small private sins of Bill Clinton a state affair.
It is given that hypocrisy becomes an essential part of political self-representation with the need for “trust procurement” just like the necessity to vigorously deny everything that does not fit “the picture.” To that extent, Clinton’s efforts to deny all news of “inadmissible relations” with the White House intern correspond to his image of respect for, and the respect-deserving, dignity of his office; bad luck only that the contrary could be proved and thus perjury, interference with witnesses, obstruction of justice, etc. The Republicans’ efforts over many years to bring discredit to the President with such questions about his trustworthiness for Americans, so that the next election puts a decent Republican in the White House again, have found with the provoked legally usable crimes of the President a dramatic intensification: No longer only moral laxity, but some serious breaches of the law are accused of the highest representative of rights and law.
These prospects transfer the affair, however, not only into the sober spheres of the administration of justice, but intensify at the same time the public controversy over the honor of the president. Even the top man of the USA does not get off loosely from the course of law: An impeachment can be introduced with a simple majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives, but can be brought successfully only with a two-thirds majority in the Senate, thus only with the agreement of some of the Democrats. The crucial question remains whether the Republicans can successfully torpedo the nation’s trust in their President. This provokes the Opinion Leader to tremendous manipulation efforts so that “the battle for public opinion” is led in the meantime so mercilessly that in Washington there is everywhere talk of a “mood for blood” and a “witch-hunt”.
In order to convince the Americans, and with them the democratic representatives required for impeachment, that the highest man in the state was placed there in error, his adversaries try to “degrade” him until he stands in public only as a “desire-obsessed joke”. The politics of the Republicans therefore know no mercy: The publication of the of Clinton’s testimony before the Grand Jury follows in dramatic increase the broadcast of the video which shows to the political expertise of the Americans a president wriggling before the highly embarrassing questions of the Grand jury. The republican majority decides no later than two days in the House of Representatives to publish more mountains of documents with piquant material and, finally, the confidential tape recordings of the women’s gossip between Monica Lewinsky and her friend are offered for American opinion formation. Such reports from the “oral Office” up to the exact details describing the misuse of Clinton’s cigars is therefore so “embarrassing” because it would open a glaring contradiction to the official dignity of the office and would expose the self-representation of the “dignitary” as hypocrisy. Exactly right in order to reveal Clinton’s ridiculousness.
pursues the double strategy of passing the buck in the trust question back to the republicans and at the same time developing trust again in Clinton: before the moral power of judgment of the Americans, the subtle problem is opened whether the power- and scandal-obsessed Republicans with their “puritanical pornographic” investigator do not soil the dignity of the White House with their public humiliating of the president than the discrete pleasures of the president. The counter of the democrats that the republicans would launch their “lascivious reproaches” not because of their affectation of national responsibility for the cleanliness of the White House or because of the protection of “full right to information” for the public, but only for purely egoistic reasons of power acquisition, opens a contrary morality for the assignment of trust by the people.
Secure in the confidence that the trust of the Americans can land anyway only with one of the two competing parties, that damage to the other consequently automatically precipitates devotion to one’s own, the democrats show how well they also understand the art of character assassination campaigns. Even infidelities from thirty years ago by grey-haired Republicans are taken out of the poison cabinet in order to relativize Clinton’s misdemeanors. Political opinion formation in the land of freedom and democracy has generally accepted nowadays the character of “mudslinging” (sp).
The rehabilitation strategy of the president, like the character defamation campaign of his opponents, keeps strictly to the identification of his person with his office: If Clinton refers to the quality of his administration, to his internationally recognized strong leadership, to his world-political successes, which not even the Republicans deny him, and to his popularity with the people, he reminds of the fact that trust in a president has other points of reference than his erotic behavior. However, he does not do this to thereby qualify the independent meaning of the private, moral sphere. Self-representation in this sphere is also and remains his means.
An essential part of his defense is therefore the re-establishment of trust as a repentant and purified sinner. For this purpose Clinton has supplemented his behavior as a responsible and sovereign statesman with remorseful admissions of guilt and ostentatious prayers and confessions to two freshly signed-on clerics in the “tele-confessional booth of the nation:”
“'Slick Willy has thought up some tricks. He now makes his regret public and wants to meet weekly with two ministers for prayers.” (Sp)
That such exercises are at least as enormously hypocritical as his ostentatious hand holding with the First Lady by no means counteracts the purpose of this trust offensive by no means: Also a mercilessly affected remorse signals that the President wants to bend himself to the dignity of his office and the moral requirements of his people.
Even the compassion begging question of the president, whether or not he too -- at least if he uses the romance of an evening telephone call with an obstructionist senator to let Ms. Lewinsky blow him – may not maintain a sort of a private life beyond the political competition with himself, his saxophone, pets, the intern, Chelsea, Hilary and God, does not miss its effect. Indeed, he himself does not even believe in the image that his officially celebrated private life - without intern – spread as an important means of his trust advertisement every single day over all television channels and at the same time can expect respect from the public for a completely private life -- with intern -- but as an appeal to the human-all too-human aspect of the power of moral judgment of his Americans already succeeds with it. A lot of Americans, but in addition French intellectuals and heaps of Nobel Prize Laureates, make themselves there theoretically common with “their” Clinton, get compassion with their commander in chief and demand the protection of his (!) private sphere.
Reaching the verdict is thus not by any means as predictable in all its turns as easy as the republicans had imagined. Anyhow, the opinion makers of this party wrongly calculated the political-moral sensorium of the Americans -- for the time being. Their calculation, to release the publication of the video tape recordings, was responded to with a large Yuck! by the country, and proved a sheer non-starter. What should reveal the President’s ridiculousness has given him precipitously rising sympathy. Also this is not because of the fact that American voters suddenly controlled the distinction of politics and other trash; on the contrary.
Now, where Clinton the person stands for character, the absurdity of the personalization of politics reaches its high point: now this democratically mature people sets the entire American politics only in relation with the “Monica affair” of Clinton. The Clinton administration, up to its employment instructions in the Middle East, are perceived only under the criterion whether “their” frivolous president does his “job” properly. So a majority of Americans comes to the conclusion that Clinton with the completion of his official duties should be disturbed neither by the skills of a Monica Lewinsky nor still from those of a Kenneth Starr. Thus one is ready to morally weigh the politician Clinton against the individual Clinton, to issue good censorship to him for his functioning as a president and to “forgive” him his somewhat strange sexual behavior with the pertinent lies. So most Americans force themselves to extend the license to their President -– idealistically -– to govern. Some even reach to actively help the most powerful President in the world, paint posters like “Save the presidency, jail Kenneth Porno Starr” and with it stand in the wind and weather in front of the White House. Everything that their favorite sets on the agenda of world politics is found to be ok, by the way, self-evidently.