FREE ESSAY ON DEATH OF OUTRAGE

DEATH OF OUTRAGE

Eric Glave 266 Words
ECO 2013
"Death of Outrage"
By William J. Bennet
William J. Bennett, secretary of education and chair of the National Endowment for the
Humanities under President Reagan captured the public imagination with the best-selling
Book of Virtues, a compendium of other people's writing that had something to teach about
morality. In his new book, Bennett advances his own credo of right and wrong, and it is
far less compelling. It is a slim book with a correspondingly slim premise: that the
American public's failure to be outraged at President Clinton's lies about his private
life is evidence of our moral and intellectual disarmament. 
The book has six brief chapters with the grandiose titles Sex (first of course),
Character, Politics, Law, Judgment - and Ken Starr. Each chapter presents an italicized
Defense of President Clinton followed by Bennett's refutation of that defense. Claiming
to exercise sound reasoning, Bennett sets himself up as the arbiter of morality and
American ideals. The result reads like a partisan screed. 
Bennett is outraged because so many Americans are not outraged at the president, even if
they believe that the allegations of sexual and criminal wrongdoing are true. Combining
the words sexual and criminal is at the heart of Bennett's thesis - and his linguistic
sleight of hand. Many people do not endorse the criminalization of consensual sex.
Bennett may not like this, but that does not make him any more morals than they do. One
might argue, in fact, that it evinces a higher moral sense to distinguish between
covering up crimes and a situation in which the only crime is the cover-up. Bennett
repeatedly refers to crimes, felony crimes, criminal conduct,
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criminal allegations, criminal wrongdoing, criminal conspiracy, and criminal cover-up -
accusation by accretion and repetition rather than reason. 
Ah, words words. Bennett's language reveals a pervasive double standard. Defenses of
Clinton are the words of hired guns, spinners and partisans. He attributes the arguments
he refutes to Clinton defenders, Clinton loyalists, Clinton apologists, and feminists.
(We do not read of Starr defenders, loyalists or apologists, or of Clinton attackers,
haters or enemies.) All these label great, but the word apologist is particularly
underhanded: It reframes explanations and defenses as apologies, implying unspecified
misdeeds. 
In Starr, Bennett sees only clumsiness, missteps, lapses of political judgment and a
certain tone-deafness. Ignoring criticism of Starr from a wide variety of sources,
including former special prosecutors and independent counsels from both parties, he
blames Starr's low popularity on a well-orchestrated and relentless smear campaign - even
as he dismisses Hillary Clinton's reference to a vast right-wing conspiracy against her
husband as fantastic.
Bennett's substitution of implication for reasoning is particularly evident in an
appendix that juxtaposes statements made about Watergate with statements made about the
current scandals: for example, quotes by both Nixon and Clinton that they would like to
get on with the job of running the country. These juxtapositions imply that the substance
of the scandals is comparable. But the most revealing comparison with Watergate actually
comes early in the book: Bennett suggests a thought experiment which describes moves that
actually occurred in Watergate as if they had covered up a sexual liaison - actions such
as breaking into a psychiatrist's office in search of information to discredit a witness,
pressuring the IRS to investigate reporters, and establishing a slush fund to pay hush
money. Bennett's purpose is to 
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ask, If we are willing to forgive Clinton's lying to cover up a sexual affair, would we
excuse any misbehavior on those grounds? But the section actually has the effect of
dramatizing how much more egregious the events of Watergate were.
There are other instances in which Bennett's examples support the opposite of what he
supposes. He writes, Interpreting the actions of a president solely through a legal prism
habituates Americans to think like lawyers instead of citizens . . .. The letter of the
law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. But in this spirit,
legal terms like obstruction of justice and suborning of perjury conjure up, in most
people's minds, matters far more weighty than engaging in and trying to cover up illicit
sex. In rejecting this legal prism, many Americans are thinking like citizens rather than
lawyers. 
Faulty, slippery slope arguments abound. For example, after quoting citizens who said, of
Clinton's sexual behavior, Who are we to judge? Bennett writes, Without being
'judgmental,' Americans would never have put an end to slavery, outlawed child labor,
emancipated women, or ushered in the civil rights movement. But the distinction between
private acts like having sex and public offenses like slavery, child labor, and
forbidding women and blacks to vote is precisely the distinction many Americans are
making - and it is a highly moral one.
Bennett displays contempt for average Americans, calling us fools because we do not view
the president the same way he does. Rather than seeking to understand the moral
underpinnings of positions others take, he dismisses them as debased, lacking in
morality. The people may be the wiser ones when they refuse to reduce complex notions of
character and morality to personal sexual conduct. How about the morality of a country as
wealthy as the United States being the only modern industrialized society that does not
provide universal 
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health-care coverage to all its citizens? Or the morality of the ever widening gap
between rich and poor? In this light, when voters say they care more about the economy or
health care than about Monica Lewinsky, they are not just expressing petty self-interest;
they are also taking moral stances. 
To my mind and perhaps to the minds of those Bennett deplores, the real moral question is
not: Did he or didn't he have sex/ lie about it/ apologize for it, but How have we all
participated in and been sullied by a political, legal and journalistic system that has
focused public attention on the president's private life rather than the many problems
facing the country and the world? Many who refuse to support the president's impeachment
do not defend his sexual behavior. They just say that this behavior should not be the
object of an expensive investigation and media coverage. Bennett's diatribe is unfair
because it is unbalanced. He blames only Clinton, and rejects or ignores any roles played
by others. 
The public is not incapable of outrage; they simply have different objects for it than
Bennett would like them to. There is plenty of outrage at Linda Tripp's betrayal of
friendship when she (illegally) taped conversations with Monica Lewinsky and turned them
over to lawyers deposing Clinton, leading to his denials that constitute the much-touted
lying under oath, but this does not count as morality for Bennett; instead, it irritates
him. Why all the venom directed at Ms. Tripp? he asks. Many also feel outrage at the
pouring of public funds into an independent counsel investigation that moved far afield
from the Whitewater events it was initially charged with investigating. 
When allegations against the president reached a crescendo, so did his approval ratings.
Bennett sees this as indifference, which he bemoans, as an abandonment of longstanding 
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American ideals. But the approval ratings didn't just stay the same; they shot up. This
is not a sign of indifference. It is a backlash, an expression of outrage against what I
call the argument culture - relentless attacks on figures like the president by political
opponents and the press. There are many who agree with Bennett that no president should
be above the law, but also feel that a president should not be pursued with laws that
would not be applied to other citizens. Such sentiments uphold the longstanding American
ideal of fairness. 
Bennett sees the public giving license not only to Mr. Clinton's corruption but possibly
to our own as well. But jumping on the bandwagon of denunciation gives license to future
overzealous prosecutors, civil litigants, and political opponents to try to destroy
leaders they dislike by launching assaults on their private lives and character rather
than debating them on the issues. 
According to critics don't look for President Clinton's picture in The Book of Virtues;
best-selling author and former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett considers Bill
Clinton uniquely unvirtuous. In the wake of the White House intern sex scandal, Bennett
accuses Clinton of crimes at least as serious as those committed by Richard Nixon during
the Watergate imbroglio. Rising above anti-Clinton polemics, The Death or Outrage urges
the American public--which initially displayed not much more than a collective shrug--to
take issue with the president's private and public conduct. Clinton should be judged by
more than the state of the economy, implores Bennett. The commander in chief sets the
moral tone of the nation; a reckless personal life and repeated lying from the bully
pulpit call for a heavy sanction. The American people should demand nothing less, says
the onetime federal drug czar. In each chapter, Bennett lays out the rhetorical defenses
made on Clinton's behalf (the case against him is only about 
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sex, harsh judgmentalism has no place in modern society, independent counsel Kenneth
Starr is a partisan prosecutor, etc.) and picks them apart. He may not convince
everybody, but this is an effective conservative brief against Bill Clinton
Today we see little public outrage about Bill Clinton's misconduct. With enormous skill,
the president and his advisors have constructed a defensive wall built of bricks left
over from Watergate: diversion, half-truth, equivocation, and sophistry. It is a wall
that has remained unbreached. Until now. 
In The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals, former cabinet
secretary and best-selling author William J. Bennett dismantles the president's defenses,
brick by evasive brick, and analyzes the meaning of the Clinton scandals: why they
matter, what the public reaction to them means, and the social and political damage they
have already inflicted on America. For, despite Bill Clinton's position in public opinion
polls, the most persuasive public arguments made by the president's supporter's wither
under t