Why Whitewater Matters

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."