Secrets of the Clinton Spectacle

A five-step program for surviving endless scandal.

Charles Paul Freund from the April 2000 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

Having co-opted such moral authority (while simultaneously allying himself with the likes of pornographer Larry Flynt), Clinton was able to turn his most threatening scandal into a confrontation with a Congress that he positioned as morally hypocritical. Because Clinton’s presidential persona emerges from a strategy of opposition, he actually thrived on those scandals that he was unable to shut down.

The Method President

It’s one thing to treat the presidency and the challenges to it as if they were competing story lines. It is another to create a convincing presidential counter-story. But it is particularly remarkable to be able to create the necessary and, in Clinton’s case, conflicting illusions of character involved, and to sustain them over a period of years. In fact, it is more than remarkable; it is disquieting.

Clinton’s central performance technique involves the creation of audience empathy. He tries to make you feel his pain. He has frequently succeeded by casting himself as the victim of others, as well as by translating his presidential decisions into emotional terms. Even his version of the bombing of the Sudanese factory, which is centered on his desire to spare the night watchman, is empathetic.

That he has engaged in non-stop performance is manifest from his occasional stumbles. The notorious imaginary tear at Ron Brown’s funeral is one such case. Another is his podium-pounding denial of any sexual relationship with Lewinsky. A particularly interesting example occurred early in the Lewinsky scandal, when he was asked by Wolf Blitzer of CNN during a rare press conference if he didn’t have some message to send to Monica Lewinsky. It was probably the most artful question Clinton has ever been asked. Clinton was at that time denying that there had ever been an "improper" relationship; indeed, there were suggestions in the press that she might be crazy. But he also needed to leave the nature of their claimed relationship ambiguous, so that he could react to whatever information eventually became public. Blitzer, by asking him to apostrophize to Lewinsky in front of everyone, was asking him to commit to some version of their relationship. Clinton’s response was extraordinary. "That’s good," he said with a smile, acknowledging both the nature of the game that he was playing with the press and the public, and that, for the moment, he had been trapped. He refused to comment further.

Clinton’s most successful performance of victimhood draped in the rhetoric of empathy saved his presidency. The opportunity was handed to him by House Republicans with a far less sophisticated sense of public spectacle than Clinton’s. Indeed, Clinton appears to have recognized the chance for the turning point that it would become. It was the televising of his four-hour appearance before the grand jury.

In the days before his deposition was made public, Clinton’s presidency was disintegrating. Many people thought that the grand jury tape, which reportedly displayed the president enraged and out of control, might finish him. Clinton, however, made no protest about showing the tape. He quietly acknowledged that he had no say in its disposition. He and his attack-dog aides seemed resigned to his apparent and imminent destruction. Whether or not his aides spread false stories about the tape’s content to influence audience reaction is not known, though the reports of the tape’s content were in fact misleading. Far from displaying the president out of control, the tape is Clinton’s performance masterpiece, his "Checkers" speech. It embodies his entire performance strategy of victimhood, invited empathy, and the enactment of sincerity.

Clinton knew going into the deposition that it would be taped; he had reason to expect that the tape might well be made public. Although Clinton says outrageous things during the interrogation–his infamous definition of "is," for example–it is the performance that mattered.

For hours, he is grilled by a series of off-camera prosecutors who delve ever deeper into his sexual intimacies. Clinton, meanwhile, bears it all with the demeanor of a calm, patient Everyman. Though the judicial intent of the questioning was to demonstrate that Clinton had lied under oath, the dramatic effect was one of violation. Many viewers identified with Clinton and recoiled. The post-tape onus was on Clinton’s inquisitors. Though the House was to impeach Clinton anyway, the growing mantra from that point forward was "move on."

And move on the president has, in a neverending search for his place in History. Somebody should tell him that a special place has been reserved just for him.

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