The Untouchables
Wash Post
Feb 23, 1999 Richard Cohen
The Untouchables
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, February 23, 1999; Page A19
Back in 1993, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) coined the phrase "defining deviancy down."
Since then, everyone has used it for his own purposes, as I will for mine. I refer to the recent story that
back in Arkansas some 20 years ago, Bill Clinton raped a woman named Juanita Broaddrick. The story
was reported by the Wall Street Journal on Friday, The Washington Post on Saturday and, by Sunday,
had sunk without a trace. It is one thing to define deviancy down. It's another thing to obliterate it entirely.
This, apparently, is what Bill Clinton has managed to do. I am not, mind you, passing judgment on the
veracity of the rape charge, although Broaddrick's story has many compelling details and was sound
enough to the editors of two important newspapers. I am simply observing that there is something about
the Clintons -- both the president and Hillary Rodham Clinton -- that is more than merely unprecedented
or controversial. None of the rules of political gravity apply to them. They just float above everything.
Take the rape charge. It is that -- get it? I feel I have to emphasize it: The president of the United States is
accused of raping a woman back when he was attorney general of Arkansas. An account of this alleged
rape ran on Page 1 of The Washington Post. Get it? Page One! The Washington Post! Do you want to
know what happened next? Nothing.
No. That's not entirely true. Both Newsweek and Time ran cover stories on Hillary Clinton and whether
she would run for the Senate from New York state. Time's main piece never reported the rape charge,
although a separate article did, and Newsweek gave it only a glancing mention. As for the Sunday talks, it
seemed they all did Hillary and the Senate race. Was the purported rape mentioned? Not that I can tell
from the morning papers. The matter apparently never comes up. It is, as I suggested before, staggering.
Here is a president who has been like no other. If I told you three years ago -- even two years ago -- that
the president was having sex in the Oval Office with a young intern, you would not have believed me. In
fact, I would not have believed it myself. The rumors, I thought, were the work of his worst enemies --
crazies, mentally unstable. And yet, look where we are now.
If I told you that the woman had kept a sex-stained dress, you would have called me deranged, a
perverted pundit. No one does that. Indeed, when I first heard of the dress, I rejected it as the body does
someone else's organ, and then, after reports of it initially faded, I thought I must have dreamed it. But
then it came back -- and so did reports about Yasser Arafat kept waiting, and chats with congressmen
while Clinton was . . . You can look any of this up. But you could not make any of this up.
On a given day, I feel sorry for William Bennett, the indignantly affluent moralist. He finds just about
everything immoral, and yet, poor man, he must live in a society that finds nothing immoral. How can it be,
he must wonder, that with every outrage, Clinton rises higher and higher in the polls? The rape charge
ought to put Clinton about where Roosevelt was for ending the Great Depression and beating the Axis
powers. Hello? Any other victims out there?
With the Clintons, the preposterous becomes pedestrian. Now Mrs. Clinton seems about to run for the
Senate from New York, a state where she has never lived and where the entire Democratic Party, in the
style of the Gambino family, has told other candidates to forget about running. The job's been filled. At
first reports of this, I scoffed -- until a Clinton intimate upbraided me and said a Senate race was under
active consideration.
How could this be? The first lady will still be the first lady. How will she campaign? Where will she live?
Will she and her husband, the alleged rapist, campaign together? If she wins, will Tipper Gore sink into a
depression? I mean, imagine waiting eight years to become first lady and the former first lady not only
doesn't leave town but becomes a senator from the Empire State -- the former first lady, the current
senator, the someday president. A White House in exile. Where would you rather go for dinner?
The Clintons play by no rules. They have vanquished outrage. They are compulsively compelling, an
entertainment, an addiction and -- about this no one will argue -- the peddlers of false bromides. It takes
more than a village. It takes chutzpah.
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