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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