Monstrous Hybrids

Understanding the Clinton campaign scandals

Virginia Postrel from the June 1997 issue

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For the Clinton administration, there is no line between government and business. Wealth is dispensed through connections, not created through inventiveness and trade. It's no surprise, then, that this corporatist policy bred corrupt politics.

Fund raising for political candidates has inherent problems when viewed through Jacobs's lens. Especially in a legal regime that prohibits large donations from idealistically driven people, fund raising easily becomes the use of force--or the threat of force, or a promise to avoid force, or an offer to apply it to the donor's enemies--to get trades. It's part protection racket, part bribery, a monstrous hybrid. The only defense against such corruption is rigid, unswerving ideological commitment: policy views so certain that they cannot be swayed by money and so clear and predictable that they do not invite people to try. Whether one can be so stubborn and get elected to political office, outside a few safe congressional districts, is not clear.

Certainly, William Jefferson Clinton has never been tempted to try. His primary commitment, the task to which he and his staff are dedicated, is to further his career. Aside from a generalized statism and a feeling that racism is bad, he doesn't really have much in the way of ideology; the specifics are always in flux, a situation that suggests they are for sale. Hence the steady stream of scandals, of guardian territory allegedly sold by commercial transaction: from small-time stuff in Arkansas to increasing indications that the Chinese government thought--perhaps correctly--that Clinton administration policy was for sale. It would, after all, hardly be surprising to find that an administration dedicated to "the intersection of foreign policy, government power and business deals" might make foreign policy itself a business deal.

Everything for Sale is the title of Robert Kuttner's latest book, an ill-informed attack on markets, economists, and everything associated with them. (See Susan Lee's review.) But it is not laissez-faire advocates who confuse the guardian and commercial realms, who rush to call subsidies "investment" and treat government as an extension of business. In fact, only those who would limit the world of guardians, who recognize its necessity but fear its power, can be trusted not to sell it to the highest bidder.