How Clinton's fancy ways have corrupted our politics too

by William Oddie
world and the old life into the past.
Mr Clinton's speech at the prayer breakfast was an accomplished bible-belt lay preacher's performance. What was needed from him, said the president was, first, genuine repentance. He had repented. What then?
The real corruption of the Clinton White House is that power — gaining it, deploying it, hanging on to it — has become a matter not of having principles and seeking to persuade the people that they matter, but of treating the voters as punters to be handled.
WHAT Is the difference between Sir Bernard Ingham, the bluff Yorkshireman who was Margaret Thatcher's Press secretary, and Alistair Campbell, who in theory performs the same function for Tony Blair? Define the difference between their functions , and you will have the beginnings of an answer to a question which needs to be asked about the scandal now gripping most of the Western world.
Alistair Campbell, of course, is a "spin doctor": his job, that is to say, is not to explain the government's policies so that the electorate understands them, but also to manipulate the way in which political debate proceeds and even when he can the way in which political truth is perceived.
He is one symptom among many of the way in which the legacy of Bill Clinton will continue to corrupt political discourse long after Clinton himself has been swept into oblivion. Clinton's influence over New Labour is very clear and openly acknowledged. But I am not making a party political point here: New Conservatism is increasingly infected by the same virus, and so too is much of the political life of the %stem world.
This, it seems to me. and not the President's strange sexual habits, is the real scandal, the one we need to worry about: but of course, the President's manipulation of the truth about Lewinsky is a classic example of the way in which his entire political life has been conducted.
There was an interesting moment last week during that famous White House prayer breakfast, an occasion which was itself, from beginning to end, a kind of apotheosis of the Clinton strategy for adjusting reality. It is a strategy we have seen before: down the years, it has repeatedly saved the come back kid from the consequences of various kinds of "inappropriate" behaviour.
The trick, quite simply, is to appeal to American religious (which means Christian) impulses. In the deep South, where Clinton comes from, churchgoing in some states is as high as 85 percent; but even in California, say, it is around 30 percent.
Americans understand all about sin and forgiveness: Christianity is the religion of the second chance. Not only that: America itself is founded on a secular culture of new beginnings, of puffing the old "Second," he continued, "what my Bible calls a 'broken spirit': an understanding that I must have God's help to be the person that I want to be..."
But the trouble is that behind all this was an agenda wholly inimical to any such thing as a broken spirit. For, what was the very next thing he said? Why, that he had given his lawyers instructions to mount a vigorous defence. ff that means anything, it means saying that he is not guilty of perjury. But he had only just finished apologising to Monica Lewinsky. This leads to the big question: if Miss Lewinsky was lying about their sexual relationship (and by extension about his perjury), what was he apologising about?
This brings me to that interesting moment at last week's prayer breakfast. "I agree," said the president, "with those who say that in my first statement after I testified I was not contrite enough. I don't think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned."
Well, maybe there shouldn't be a fancy way to say it: but every Catholic priest knows there are a hundred ways of making evasive confessions, and most of us have practised some of them at one time or another.
But there is a difference. The difference is that the president's "fancy ways" affect not merely his relationship with his God but the entire political culture of the Western world.
Ask yourself: why is he apologising so frequently and so histrionically? Is it because he has a "broken spirit"? I rather fancy not: the simple fact is that his public confessions are being made in order to hang on to
power. And this is the real corruption of the Clinton White House: that power —gaining it deploying it. hanging on to it — has become before all else a matter not of having principles and seeking to persuade the people that they matter, but of treating the voters as punters to be handled.
The technique is to discover what people seem to want, and then to generate a rhetoric which makes them feel they are going to get it. That is what is behind politics by focus group, a Clintonesque technique absorbed whole and undiluted into Blairism — along with the spin doctors , the rapid rebuttal units, the "war room" and all the rest. These are techniques which have now spread throughout the "civilised" world.
Thus does corruption spread through an entire culture, gradually polluting the wells of clean and decent political discourse.
Blair and Hague are entirely free, of course, of the satyriasis of their sinister political mentor. Nor is either of them an immoral politician.
But even good men can become corrupted by bad politics. How deeply have they both been seized with the real and underlying source of Clinton's corruption: the notion — one which perverts and in the end subtly dissolves all political morality — that gaining and holding on to power is an end in itself?