Standoff, page 8
And safe. Another citizen said, “Actually, over the years, I think the notoriety of that story probably did allow Kennesaw to enjoy a real, almost-crime-free atmosphere.” Don’t people in Kennesaw worry about gun safety? I was told, “You can keep it loaded, and you can still put a lock on it because you might trust your own children but you can’t always trust their friends.” Kennesaw’s gun law made a statement: this is not Atlanta. “It was, more or less, we were going to keep the crime of Atlanta away from our door,” a resident explained.
If Kennesaw has a lifestyle, you could describe it in one word: faith. As the mayor at the time told me, “We have a very churchgoing base. We’re in the Bible Belt.” Churches are everywhere in Kennesaw. They’re a big part of life. “The churches have given people a sense of community,” a Republican activist said. “It’s a gathering place of people who feel the right way about life in the country. This is a very patriotic area.”
In 2003 the Kennesaw City Council passed a resolution supporting the official recognition of God in government. It was sponsored by the mayor in solidarity with Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court. Moore had refused to comply with a federal court order to remove a granite monument of the Ten Commandments from the state judicial building. “We’re not talking about religion,” the mayor said. “We’re talking about God. Don’t tell me I can’t talk about it. You can talk about who you want. That’s fine if that’s what you want to do. But don’t tell me I can’t. Don’t suck me into your unbelief.”
Compare that with the parallel universe of Bethesda, Maryland, where Al Gore got 64 percent of the vote in 2000. In 2016 Hillary Clinton carried Montgomery County, Maryland, which includes Bethesda, with 76 percent of the vote.
Bethesda is deepest blue America. It’s just outside Washington, DC. Bethesdans seem to feel more connected to Washington than Kennesaw residents do to Atlanta, according to a longtime civic activist. “It is a good place to raise children because of our proximity to Washington, DC, and all the monuments and museums and learning opportunities there,” she explained.
Bethesdans certainly have a different view of government. “I have lived here for twenty-five years,” one resident told me. “I have never heard people complain about the taxes. And our taxes are high.” They also have a different view of guns. “The gun issue here is whether we should hire sharpshooters to try to cull the deer herds,” a civic leader explained. “There are people who don’t want guns used by sharpshooters even in controlled situations. We don’t want guns doing anything.”
Religion has a different meaning in Bethesda than it does in Kennesaw. Less a matter of faith, more a matter of justice. “It manifests itself in ways that you would see in the attitudes toward poor people, toward people without medical insurance, toward social issues,” I was told. “It’s a social justice orientation toward religion.”
Bethesdans have a deep and abiding faith in one thing: education. “You are in a place where most everybody has a college degree,” columnist David Brooks, who lived in Bethesda, observed. Bethesda, site of the US National Institutes of Health, is one of the best educated communities in the United States in terms of residents with graduate degrees. Education informs everything, including politics.
Bethesda is a highly involved community with no shortage of experts. On everything. A Bethesda resident said, “There will be an initiative to do something, and, invariably, the world’s leading expert on that subject lives here and has an opinion.” Bethesdans have an obsessive interest in education. “The schools are wonderful,” one resident said. “People are prepared to pay whatever it costs to have their schools first-rate. People move here because of the schools.”
If education is the local faith, its central doctrine is meritocracy. People who live in Bethesda feel they have earned their success. “Because this is an area where meritocracy has brought success to parents, they believe in education,” the resident noted. “They know what it’s done for them.”
When did faith in meritocracy emerge? The sixties, of course. Brooks explained, “What the sixties were all about was a rise in the meritocratic class: a class of newly educated people who wanted to displace the old establishment, which was a Protestant WASP establishment. Bill Clinton was part of that meritocratic class. He embodied it in every respect—culturally and in his own background and attitudes. George W. Bush, on the other hand, was part of that old class.” Nobody epitomized the triumph of meritocracy more than Barack Obama.
What we are seeing is the cultural conflicts of the 1960s increasingly politicized. Two Americas, red and blue. The country split nearly evenly. And bitterly. Kennesaw values versus Bethesda values. People in Kennesaw worry about their children getting into heaven. People in Bethesda worry about their children getting into Yale.
A Case Study of the Values Divide
The values divide reached peak intensity in 1998 over the issue of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. The impeachment debate dramatized and personalized the division, although the trauma was much more intense for voters on the right than on the left. Following a year of frustration and outrage over the public’s reaction to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, conservatives were ready to declare defeat in the culture war.
After all, President Clinton didn’t just lie under oath. He lied bald-faced to the American people when he said in January 1998, “I want you to listen to me. I’m not going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” Seven months later, he finally told the truth: he did have what most people would consider sexual relations with her. Depending on the legal definition of “sexual relations,” of course.
Throughout the controversy, most Americans believed the president was at least guilty of lying under oath. But by two to one, the public consistently opposed impeaching and convicting him. Why? Because the more evidence they saw—The Starr Report, the president’s videotaped testimony—the more they became convinced that this was just about sex. A private matter.
The electorate consistently endorsed the view that “Bill Clinton’s personal life doesn’t matter as long as he does a good job of running the country.” Americans respect the boundary between public and private lives. They resented it when, in their view, the independent counsel, the press, and the Congress crossed that line. Especially when Republicans attacking Clinton’s character could be portrayed as hypocrites. Running on the character issue is a high-risk proposition. The voters may be looking for character in their leaders, but they are not looking for character police.
What clinched the president’s victory was the insane decision by House Republican leaders to release prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s lurid report and the president’s videotaped testimony, thinking the scandalous details were sure to finish him off. What they did instead was confirm the suspicion that this was “just about sex” and therefore nobody’s business. Not the independent counsel’s business. Not the Congress’s business. And not the press’s business. It was a colossal political blunder, and it ended up forcing House Speaker Newt Gingrich out of office.
When The Starr Report was released in September 1998, it spelled out all the salacious details of President Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky. The juiciest parts (the cigars, the stained blue dress) were reprinted in newspapers all over the country. I decided to call my eightysomething-year-old mother in Virginia to ask her what she made of it all.
My mother said that, since I was in the press, people were asking her about the Clinton scandal. So she decided she had better find out more about it. Excerpts of The Starr Report had been printed in her local newspaper a few days before. She told me that she locked the door, pulled down the shades, and read what was reported in the paper.
“What do you think?” I asked.
My mother remained silent for a moment. Then she said, “You want to know what I think?”
“Of course,” I said. “That’s why I’m calling you.”
“Well, here’s what I think,” she said in a lowered voice. “I think . . . men are dogs.”
That’s when I realized the president was going to survive.
Public opinion is supposed to be fickle. But on the impeachment issue, the American public appeared to have rock-solid convictions. Did people want to see President Clinton convicted and removed from office? By two to one, the answer was always no. It was that way before the president was impeached and after the president was impeached. One-third of Americans wanted him out. Twice as many wanted him to stay.11
The polls drove Republicans crazy. Every time one came out, Republicans claimed that the poll takers were not interviewing them, or that Republicans didn’t trust polls and were not talking to the interviewers. That was nonsense, of course. Republicans were included in the polling. They were the persistent one-third of the country who wanted Clinton removed from office.
Why, then, did the House of Representatives defy public opinion and vote to impeach the president? The answer is partisanship. When the issue came to a vote in the House of Representatives in December 1998, only 36 percent of Americans favored impeachment, according to a Gallup poll. Among Republicans, however, the number was twice as high: 72 percent.
At the same time, the polls showed consistently that the public believed President Clinton was guilty of lying under oath. So why didn’t the American people want to convict him? That, too, drove Republicans crazy. The reason was that the only penalty available was the political equivalent of the death penalty, and most Americans didn’t think the Lewinsky scandal was a capital case. It was consensual sex. Not murder. Nevertheless, the public did want to see the president punished in some way for what he did, if only because he’d embarrassed the country.
In the end, the public got more or less what it wanted. President Clinton stayed in office. But he had to live with a kind of disgrace. Impeachment has gone down on Clinton’s permanent record. He is one of only two presidents to be impeached, even if he, like Andrew Johnson before him, managed to stay in office. Was there any remote similarity between the impeachment of Clinton in 1998 and that of Johnson 130 years earlier? Actually, there was.
This country went through a terrible Civil War in the 1860s. The bitter division of that war, North versus South, infected partisan politics for decades afterward. Andrew Johnson’s impeachment was a direct product of those hatreds.
Johnson was a Union Democrat from Tennessee and the only southern senator to retain his seat in the US Senate after his state seceded. President Abraham Lincoln put Johnson on the ticket in 1864 as a gesture to unify the country. Six weeks after his second inauguration in 1865, Lincoln was assassinated and Johnson became president. The Radical Republicans who controlled Congress were vehemently anti-Southern and deeply resented Johnson’s conciliatory policy toward the conquered South.
In a straight party-line vote, the House of Representatives impeached President Johnson on bogus charges of violating congressional prerogatives. Johnson was charged with illegally removing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton from office without Senate approval, in violation of the Tenure of Office Act (which was eventually repealed). After a three-month trial in 1867, the Senate came one vote shy of convicting the president and removing him from office. Johnson’s impeachment was an act of pure political revenge.
A century later, in the 1960s, the United States went through a cultural civil war. At the heart of the conflict were the tens of thousands of Americans killed in Vietnam. The bitter divisions created by that war and the other conflicts of the 1960s—not North versus South but liberal versus conservative—have poisoned American politics for more than fifty years. The effort to impeach Clinton was a direct product of those hatreds.
The puzzle throughout Clinton’s presidency was why he was hated by so many Americans. After all, Clinton fashioned himself a New Democrat who led his party back to the center. Nevertheless, liberals were powerfully loyal to Clinton—as loyal as conservatives were to Ronald Reagan during the Iran-contra scandal of the mid-1980s. Why? It was not because of his policies. Clinton was a hero to liberals because of his values. They were the values of the sixties. Tolerance of alternative lifestyles (gays in the military). A deep commitment to the African American struggle for equality. Support for women’s rights, including abortion rights.
Clinton haters hated the president because they hated the sixties, which they believed corrupted American culture with an ethic of self-indulgence. (See any book by conservative commentator and broadcaster Bill Bennett.) Clinton was the first president to come out of the elite liberal culture of the sixties. Conservatives began by reviling Clinton the draft dodger. Eventually they reviled Clinton the sex fiend. (See The Starr report.)
During the impeachment hearings in 1998, I interviewed conservative activists in suburban Chicago (the congressional district then represented by Republican representative Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee). One activist referred to Clinton contemptuously as “the first rock star president.” Another said, “A president is with us today who is a child of the sixties. He is the adolescent in chief.”
The culture wars also explain the astonishing outpouring of support for Clinton among African Americans, feminists, and Hollywood liberals, despite the president’s faithlessness to many liberal causes.
I visited inner-city Detroit, the congressional district formerly represented by John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment hearings. I was puzzled by the fact that many African Americans I spoke to—radio talk-show hosts, ministers, community leaders—told me they thought the campaign to impeach President Clinton was driven by racial backlash.
An African American minister said, “On the grass-roots level, many blacks think impeachment is really about them.”
“About blacks? Really?” I asked. “What’s race got to do with it?”
He explained, “When you talk to people in barber shops and bus terminals, they think the president’s enemies are after him because he likes black people. His enemies are our enemies.”
Clinton’s liberal values helped him keep the support of his political base. But the thing that saved the president was not his liberalism, which was often challenged. It was his populism. To many Americans, Clinton was “one of us,” a leader with whom ordinary people could identify. His strengths were “our strengths.” And that may be why so many Americans were willing to forgive him. They saw his weaknesses as “our weaknesses.”
One more thing contributed to the president’s survival: the economy, stupid. In a January 1999 Gallup poll, just before the Senate voted on whether to convict Clinton, more than 70 percent of Americans said the US economy was the best it had ever been in their lifetime. That was a phenomenal figure. The people who said things were great opposed convicting the president by three to one. They were okay, so he was okay.
Voters conveyed that message very clearly in the 1998 midterm election, when, for the first time in sixty-four years, a sitting president’s party gained House seats in a midterm. In the exit poll that year, 82 percent of voters thought the nation’s economy was in excellent or good shape. Those who thought the economy was in excellent shape voted 77 percent Democratic in the House election. Those who said it was in good shape voted 50 percent Democratic. Democratic support dropped to 29 percent among the small number who thought things were bad.12
President Clinton and the Democrats were saved by middle-class voters, who, under Clinton, began to feel economically secure and even prosperous. They were the people who, just a few years earlier, had been victims of the middle-class squeeze. They had trouble buying a home, educating their children, saving for retirement. They lived under the constant threat of downsizing and unaffordable health care. They were the angry voters of 1992, and that year, many of them gravitated to Ross Perot.
In 1998 they were making it. Their jobs and health care were more secure. They were among the eighty million Americans invested in the stock market. They could breathe easier about the future. They could even afford a few luxuries, like vacations, dining out, and a $3 cup of coffee. Most important, they credited Clinton. They understood him, just as he understood them. Clinton was their president. After Republicans defined the midterm election as a referendum on impeachment, those “new rich” voters came out in large numbers to protect their president.
No issue in recent years has so clearly demonstrated the populist character of American democracy. As noted in chapter 1, once the polls started coming out, conservatives were helpless to defy the will of the people. If there had been no polls, President Clinton never could have survived.
FIVE
The Great Reversal
“Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.”
With that bloodless, analytical sentence from his second inaugural address on January 21, 2013, President Obama set off a firestorm of protest among conservatives. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called the speech “unabashedly far-left-of-center.” House Speaker John Boehner said the president’s mission was to “annihilate the Republican Party.”
Obama was framing a response to the Reagan Revolution. The rallying cry of that revolution, delivered in President Reagan’s 1981 inaugural address, was: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” That was the reigning principle of American politics for thirty-two years after 1980. Even President Clinton affirmed it when he said in 1996, “The era of big government is over.”
President Obama was issuing a ringing defense of the essential functions of government. He had just defeated a Republican ticket that tried to sell smaller government. The Republican message in 2012 was shaped by the Tea Party, which challenged the most consensual functions of government, such as securing the safety net. The president dared to call for collective action. The term “collective action” gives Republicans a nosebleed. It sounds like collectivism.
