Piecework

His reluctant intervention in Haiti was an example of the process. Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, and Sam Nunn worked out a deal that would allow American troops to go into Haiti without shooting. The junta of Raoul Cédras would give up power on October 15. The deposed president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, would return to power and serve out the term to which he was elected in the only free election in that nation’s agonized history. For a few hours, most sane people thought this was a rational solution to a miserable situation. At least American soldiers wouldn’t have to go in shooting. And some of them wouldn’t have to die.

But before anybody could know how this would work out, the attacks started. The Republicans, who cheered for intervention in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf, suddenly developed the white wings of doves. Bob Dole sounded like George McGovern, stating that Haiti was not worth a single American life. The radio chatterers unleashed ferocious barrages, attacking Clinton for ducking Vietnam and now putting Americans in harm’s way, dismissing Aristide as an anti-American Marxist nutcase. Joe Klein in News-week called the intervention “a bizarre Caribbean adventure” while also stating that Clinton “did the right thing” and sneering at Carter as “the Prince of Peace.” Michael Kramer in Time wrote that “Bill Clinton at war has the disquieting countenance of Bill Clinton at peace; few principles seem inviolate; indiscipline and incoherence are the norm; careful planning falls to last-minute improvisation; steadfastness is only a tactic.”

Journalists are not cheerleaders, of course; they must maintain an adversarial stance with politicians. But the vehemence of the attacks on Clinton seems more a reflex than thought and analysis. A line has developed on Clinton, and to swerve from it entails risks, most of them social and professional. Few people like to face the question, “Are you fucking kidding?” My objection here isn’t with the facts or the implications of disaster but with the venomous tone.

In modern times, that slashing, lacerating use of language came into the discourse with Vietnam. It was first employed against Lyndon Johnson (I used plenty of it myself), then Richard Nixon, justified by the endless slaughter of the war and then by Watergate. Irony was lost, along with a sense of shared tragedy. What mattered was the casting of anathemas. The Left used the tone first, then the Right picked it up; now it comes easily to almost everybody. The tone is sometimes apocalyptic and always judgmental, and its essential component is the sneer.

These days, most members of the Washington press corps wear a self-absorbed sneer. They sneer at any expression of idealism. They sneer at gaffes, mistakes, idiosyncrasies. They sneer at the “invisibility” of national-security adviser Anthony Lake but sneer at others for being publicity hounds. They sneer at weakness. They sneer at those who work too hard, and they sneer at those who work too little. They fill columns with moralizing about Clinton and then attack others for moralizing. The assumption is that everyone has a dirty little secret, and one’s duty is to sniff it out.

Lost in this rancorous process is any regard for the great American art of compromise. Clinton, a professional politician, obviously believes in it and is sneered at for being an incessant placater of his opponents. Give us the whole loaf or nothing, comes the intolerant call. Make me feel better. Make me happy. Make life perfect. If you don’t, then give us term limits. Get rid of the professional pols and give us amateurs. Oliver North. Ross Perot. Don’t tell me the world is complicated.

Pericles couldn’t govern that polity. What chance can Clinton have? Domestically, he’s indicted for being too liberal or too conservative, too soft or too callous, too indifferent to public opinion or too desirous of consensus. In foreign affairs, his most poisonous critics remain in thrall to Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood worldview, the Big Dumb Ox theory of foreign engagement, using naked power to get your way.

After all, if a president won’t smash his domestic opponents, if he won’t kill foreigners with icy dispatch, how can he deal with the blacks and the Mexicans and the immigrants and the feminists and the Cubans and the poor and the rich and the disabled and the por-nographers and the liberals and the guys with the hyphens in their names? How can he be a leader? How can he be a man?