Why Whitewater Matters

By Charles Krauthammer

At the heart of the Clinton presidency lies an oddity. Bill Clinton has been plagued by questions of character and trustworthiness throughout his career. He earned the nickname Slick Willie long before he ran for the White House. The man who "didn't inhale" is a man the public does not trust. His slickness is such a given that in a column defending the President, Michael Kinsley quite casually, indeed parenthetically, concedes that Clinton all but lied about Gennifer Flowers.

And yet this is a presidency that makes a public fetish of its virtuousness. The Clintons really do believe that they are doing God's work on health care, welfare, national service, etc., and that those who oppose them do so for the most venal, usually pecuniary, motives. They really do believe theirs is the politics of virtue. Hillary Clinton spent so much time championing the politics of virtue that she earned a cover photograph in the New York Times Magazine last year showing her dressed in purest white, with the accompanying article headlined SAINT HILLARY.

It is this contradiction between the claim to saintliness and the evidence of slickness that gives the Whitewater affair such drama and urgency. We would not be half so interested in the personal failings and shady dealings of a First Family that did not so insistently engage in arrogant, high-handed moralism.

Take health care. The Clintons did not just offer their plan as a needed reform of an old and inefficient system. They had to portray the existing system as the workings of "price gouging, cost shifting" and "profiteering" bogeymen -- the greedy insurers, drug makers and doctors from whose malevolent grasp the Clintons and their bureaucrats would free us.

Take taxes. When the President proposed his tax increase on the rich, he did not just present it as a necessary measure for reducing the deficit. He presented it as just desserts -- fitting retribution -- for those who had made it in the '80s. Clinton would avenge the little guy on those who cashed in on the Decade of Greed. Now it turns out the President and his wife spent much of the decade trying to cash in themselves, albeit ineptly (hence the $69,000 loss -- alleged and unclaimed on their income tax returns -- on Whitewater).

Take their response to Whitewater itself. Hillary Clinton calls routine inquiries into her cozy dealings with a sleazy Arkansas savings and loan a "well organized" and "well financed" campaign by those with "a different political agenda" and "financial" motives. Stands to reason. Who could oppose an apostle of political virtue but those who, for the most selfish of reasons, wish to stop her good works? The President angrily declares that "the American people can worry about something else" than his wife's "moral compass." The Clintons do not just deny wrongdoing in Whitewater. They take offense at the very suggestion.

Offense comes easily to the self-righteous. And this is an Administration bursting with self-righteousness. The conceit of Clinton's politics is that he and his wife have come with the virtue -- "idealism," it was called then -- of the '60s to redeem us from the "corrupt do-nothing values of the 1980s."

The '80s figure prominently in their demonology. They ran against it with great zeal in 1992. It was "a gilded age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess," of "S&L crooks ((who)) stole billions of dollars in other people's money." And it was very Republican: "For 12 years of this Reagan-Bush era, the Republicans have let S&L crooks and self-serving CEOs try to build an economy out of paper and perks . . . It's the Republican way: every man for himself, and get it while you can."

And what was the Clinton way at the time? In 1985 Hillary Clinton took a $2,000-a-month retainer to represent Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, owned by the Clintons' Whitewater partner James McDougal. She represented Madison before a regulator appointed by her own husband. She won authorization for an unusual stock offering on behalf of an institution whose viability, according to a confidential federal examination, was threatened by "unsafe and unsound" business practices. (It later collapsed at a cost to taxpayers of $47 million.) After first representing Madison S&L, Hillary Clinton's Rose Law Firm then closed out the '80s getting fat on contracts from government agencies pursuing Madison and other S&Ls in an attempt to recover monies they had looted earlier in the decade. The Clintons then launched into the '90s running against S&Ls and the '80s greed they represented.

And succeeding, until Whitewater. This is why Whitewater matters. It is a tangled web of, for now, obscure dealings involving political favors, real estate speculation and conflicts of interest -- with a dead man, Vince Foster, lying enigmatically at the center. It is important less for its possible criminal violations than for the light it sheds on the ethical norms, the greed and ambition, of our moral betters in the White House.

In the 1992 campaign we learned about the Bill Clinton of the '60s and '70s and decided that, whatever his character flaws, he would do as President. Now we are learning about the Clintons of the '80s. One can begin to understand the desperation with which the Clintons, having defined themselves as the antithesis of the '80s, seek to relegate that once so serviceable decade to what the President now calls "the dark ages."