Bill Clinton has managed to compile a record on individual rights that is breathtaking in both the breadth and depth of its awfulness.
Three months into his tenure as the solicitor general of the United States, Drew S. Days III, acting in a sober, lawyerly fashion, made one of those decisions with political implications that sober, lawyerly minds tend to miss. It was the summer of 1993. Days, a liberal but far from libertine law professor on leave from Yale, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a child pornography case called Knox v. United States. In the case, a Penn State grad student had been convicted for possessing videotapes that showed aspiring teenage models striking fashion poses. The girls were wearing bathing suits or undergarments, but the person behind the camera had surreptitiously zoomed in on their chests and crotches. A federal appeals court had held that the tape was "sexually explicit," and therefore illegal under federal child anti-pornography law.
Knox had appealed to the Supreme Court during the Bush administration, which, bolstered by the loud braying of the religious right and anti-porn activists, took the position that the ruling should be upheld. Then Days arrived. He argued that the lower court's reading of the law was "impermissibly broad" - Congress had never intended to criminalize pictures of clothed minors engaged in nonsexual activities. To be "sexually explicit," Days argued, the tapes had to show the girls naked, behaving "lasciviously," and he urged the Supremes to send the case back to the lower court to be reconsidered under this narrower standard.
The High Court agreed - and everybody else went ballistic. From conservatives came the charge that the Clinton administration was soft on porn. From the floor of the Senate came a resolution, passed by a vote of 100 to 0, condemning Days's brief. Wilting under the heat, Bill Clinton quickly caved, sending a rebuke to the attorney general, Janet Reno, that denounced Days's reading of the law. A few months later, when a seat came open on the Supreme Court, the solicitor general, whose name had been on every White House short list, was never seriously mentioned for the job.
For Days, the Knox case was a searing encounter with the politics of porn. But it wasn't his only encounter. Three years later, as he prepared to leave the government and return to his perch at Yale, Days found himself facing the decision of whether to appeal the case of the Communications Decency Act - that set of provisions designed to "deal" with the "threat" of smut on the Net which was passed in February by the Republican Congress, signed into law by the Democratic president, and then rejected emphatically by a panel of three federal judges (two of them Bush appointees) in a Philadelphia court in June. Days's decision to appeal shocked no one, but it did have the remarkable effect of making him the only solicitor in memory to be flayed, in the space of one term, as a friend to both the pornographer and the censor.
Not long after Days split the capital, I asked him flatly whether his decision on the CDA was motivated mainly by politics - by a desire to avoid, for himself and his boss in the White House, a repeat of the backlash that followed his brief in Knox. Days conceded that Knox had etched in his brain "how incendiary the issue of children and pornography is - how it's almost impossible to discuss in a reasoned way." He went on to argue quite convincingly that sending the CDA to the Supreme Court was an easy call; that, when Congress and the president enact a law, the solicitor general's job isn't to decide if he likes the law, or even if he thinks it's constitutional, but to defend it and let the Supreme Court rule; and that this is especially true in evolving areas of jurisprudence such as online free speech, where there is precious little precedent on the books.
But if the controversy over Knox doesn't explain Days's decision to appeal the CDA, it speaks volumes about the Clinton administration's decision to let the wretched thing become law in the first place and about the president's persistent endorsement of it after the Philadelphia court rendered its thundering judgment. For in Knox, Clinton was confronted with a bald conflict between the ambiguities of law and the politics of fear, and not only did he throw in with fear, he was perfectly willing to throw his own solicitor general over the side in the process. Knox shaped the White House's calculations about the CDA in a very real way: Having been burned once by porn, there was no chance that Clinton was going to let as trivial a pursuit as defending the First Amendment set him up to get scorched again.
All of which leads to an inescapable conclusion. Throughout this year, many netizens have contended that Clinton's support for the CDA reflects a fundamental cluelessness about the etherworld. Others have argued that it reflects a blatant disregard for civil liberties in cyberspace. Considering the Knox flap, however, both views look far too generous. What Clinton's support for the CDA really reflects is a blatant disregard for civil liberties in general.
"So often we race in and start carping about their stands on the CDA or the Clipper Chip, but that misses the larger picture," says Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "When it comes to the power of the state in regulating large areas of personal choice and the creation of private space, what we have in this administration is a sort of benign Big Brother."
Actually, it's worse than that. During the past four years, the Clinton administration has managed to compile a record on individual rights and freedoms - from habeas corpus to gay marriage and from wiretapping to file-gathering - that is breathtaking in both the breadth and the depth of its awfulness. Indeed, so atrocious is Clinton's record, it can plausibly be argued that he is the worst civil liberties president since Richard Nixon.
Still, until recently, comments like Rotenberg's were rarely heard. The civil liberties community seemed gripped by a sort of conspiracy of murmurs: a steady hum of grumbles punctuated by isolated wails of betrayal. Like so many of their liberal brethren, civil libertarians spent the first two years of Clinton's term coping with the realization that he wasn't the hero they'd prayed for, and the second two years holding their tongues in fear of the ascendant Republican alternative.
Now, having suffered four long years of disappointment and having looked on as Clinton has rolled toward reelection in no small part by rolling over any stray rights that happen to be in his way, civil libertarians are finally speaking up. As a matter of fact, they are speaking the unspeakable. "It's not at all clear that a Dole White House would be worse," says Laura Murphy, director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union. "In some respects, like judicial appointments, it almost certainly would be. But the truth is that, in many important areas, the Clinton administration has been disastrous."
Once upon a time, the ACLU had lofty hopes for Clinton. In the weeks after his election, the group's lawyers toiled feverishly to compile a briefing book that would be waiting for him when he arrived in DC. Called Restoring Civil Liberties: A Blueprint for Action, it included a cover letter from the ACLU's executive director, Ira Glasser, which began, "Since 1980, civil liberties have been under a state of siege. Although every administration since the founding of the Republic has occasionally exceeded the limits imposed by the Bill of Rights, and some administrations have been decidedly unfriendly to civil liberties, it is fair to say that no administration was ever as systematically hostile to as broad a range of rights as were the last three.... There is much damage to repair."
In five sections spread over 175 pages, the "blueprint" surveyed the damage and laid out remedies. It covered First Amendment rights, civil rights, women's rights, due process rights, abortion rights, privacy rights, immigrants' rights, prisoners' rights, workers' rights, children's rights, and much, much more. "The whole thing was just infused with this incredible optimism that a lot of the excess of the previous 12 years was going to be corrected," recalls a lawyer who worked on the book. "Like, we were going to send this agenda down to the White House and boom, boom, boom, it was all going to happen. But then came the rude awakening."
To be fair, it must be said that on two subjects of central importance to civil libertarians, Clinton was - and continues to be - a vast improvement over his predecessors. The first is reproductive freedom, an issue on which Clinton made a fast splash when, on his second full day in office, he signed an executive order lifting the "gag rule" prohibiting abortion counseling at family planning clinics that receive federal funds. Since then, his pro-choice record has been steadfast.
For a Democrat, favoring abortion rights hardly requires an abundance of political courage; to do anything else would actually be the more dangerous course. Not so the second area where Clinton has taken a firm stand: civil rights, and especially affirmative action, on which the president has defended policies whose support among middle-class, middle-of-the-road white voters is not exactly robust. Yet these decisions contained their own elements of political calculation. And if you want to quibble, there is genuine argument to be had over whether affirmative action, as opposed to enforcing civil rights statutes, should be counted as a civil liberties issue at all.
On almost everything else, there were early signs of trouble. Often it was the little things, the things that didn't make headlines: the administration's decision not to file an amicus brief in the Colorado gay rights case when it reached the Supreme Court, say, or its decision to side with the Republicans in rejecting the United States Sentencing Commission's recommendations to equalize the guidelines dictating the jail time meted out for drug crimes. (Currently, it takes 100 times more powdered cocaine to draw the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence that awaits a person nailed for holding a mere 5 grams of crack - an arrangement that hammers poor blacks while treating rich whites with kid gloves.)
Often, though, it was the bigger things: a 1994 crime bill that created dozens of new death penalties, the three iterations of the Clipper Chip proposal, the Digital Telephony Act, the acceptance of "don't ask, don't tell" as opposed to a clear end to the ban on gays in the military.
Then came 1996. In the past nine months, Clinton has promulgated or endorsed a staggering array of constitutionally dubious measures. He has presided over an administration that has conducted wiretaps at a record-shattering pace. He has signed a law containing the most draconian restrictions on habeas corpus since Lincoln suspended the Great Writ during the Civil War - restrictions more severe than even Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist has called for. He has threatened to request the resignation of a federal judge who made a politically unpopular ruling in a drug case. He has promoted late-night curfews for kids in big cities. He has signed a law allowing the government to deport aliens as suspected terrorists without letting them see the evidence against them, and to bar aliens from entering the country on the basis of their presumed membership in a "terrorist" organization. He has failed to lobby against and then signed the CDA. He has lobbied for and then enacted the V-chip proposal. He has said he would sign the Defense of Marriage Act, which would allow one state to refuse to recognize gay marriages performed in another state where gay marriages are legal. He has supported the idea of random drug testing for welfare recipients and has signed a welfare bill that would deny assistance to anyone convicted of a drug felony. He has endorsed the concept of a "victims' rights" amendment to the Constitution. And he has been embroiled in a scandal - Filegate - in which White House aides and the FBI, whatever their motives, engaged in what FBI director Louis Freeh called "egregious violations of privacy," which under the Privacy Act of 1974 may also prove to have been illegal.
"That's quite a bill of particulars," Walter Dellinger sighed one morning this summer, when I paid him a call in his new office on the fifth floor of the Justice Department. On the heels of Days's departure, Dellinger had just become acting solicitor general, and despite the splendor of the place (the marble fireplace, the view stretching past the Capitol to the Court) in contrast to his own scruffy demeanor (the rumpled white linen suit, the Asics running shoes), he seemed comfortable with his new environs. What he seemed less comfortable with was defending Clinton on civil liberties.
Gamely, if predictably, Dellinger pointed to abortion rights and civil rights. He then noted that the president had successfully opposed a variety of Republican proposals to amend the Constitution: to allow prayer in public schools, to forbid desecration of the flag, to compel politicians to balance the federal books, to deny citizenship to the children of illegal aliens born in the US. Each of these ideas, Dellinger said, had been floated by the Republicans in Congress and pursued with varying degrees of energy, posing a "real danger" that Clinton had resisted with vigor.
True. But wasn't this the least of what one had been led to believe was the grand promise of Clintonism? It all sounded a bit feeble, and it was hard not to believe that Dellinger thought so, too. Back at the start of the administration, Dellinger, a constitutional law professor at Duke, had been called in to draft a clutch of pro-choice executive orders, including the one ending the gag rule, and had happily done so. A pal of his recalls, "The administration seemed ready to roll, and Walter was full of great enthusiasm and energy and great hope for what they might achieve."
Two years later, Dellinger had become an assistant attorney general, but the political climate had changed so drastically - in the White House as much as on Capitol Hill - that he had taken to telling friends that his main aim was "to end my tenure with the same Constitution as when I came in." Now here he was, trying futilely to explain why Clinton had gone along with gutting habeas corpus (despite the president's "deep misgivings" about doing so) and mulling over the prospect of appearing before the Supreme Court this fall to defend the CDA - a law that Dellinger must believe is screamingly unconstitutional.
On top of all that, with Clinton having thrown his weight behind a victims' rights amendment, even Dellinger's minimalist goal of returning home to North Carolina to teach an unaltered Constitution was in some jeopardy. "Those of us who have a very high threshold for amending the Constitution lost that debate - and that group, of course, includes me, and the president knows that," he said, before launching into a half-hearted, qualifier-laden attempt to put the best face on the situation. "But the president gave it full consideration and came to the conclusion that such an amendment would have very marginal constitutional effects."
How did it come to this? Has Clinton simply decided to put politics before principle? To abandon civil liberties - and, in effect, people like Dellinger - because there are no votes in it? Or is he, deep down, genuinely insensitive to concerns of this kind? Choose your poison.
Clinton's people, let it be noted, contend that the answer is none of the above. The president, they say, is laboring to strike a number of difficult balances: between rights and responsibilities, civil liberties and public safety, individual freedoms and community values. "There is no greater civil liberty," Clinton's top aide on crime, Rahm Emanuel, informed me, "than to protect our families and children."
In the first days after the fatal crash of TWA Flight 800, a political battle was being subtly revived, one that was understandably overlooked amid the human tragedy. "We went through the same thing after the Oklahoma City bombing," recalls Rotenberg. "In one breath they said 'terrorist incident,' and in the next they said 'legal authority to extend domestic wiretapping.' Will it happen again? Let's just say it'll change a lot of things if it does turn out to be a terrorist event."
A few days later, Clinton had indeed announced that he would go to Capitol Hill and request greater wiretapping authority - just as he had during the debate over the first terrorism bill last spring. That time, the administration had sought the ability to perform more wiretaps without a prior court order and to perform "roving" wiretaps that wouldn't be applied to one particular phone line, but to any phone line a suspect might be using - such as his or her cell phone. Congress had resisted the requests then, partly out of concern that the wiretap authority, though perhaps justified as a tool against terrorism, would ultimately and as easily be used for less urgent purposes. Set against the horror of the TWA crash, privacy concerns seemed suddenly less vital - but, significantly, not enough so to push a new law through immediately.
Clinton's desire for far-reaching eavesdropping authority is amply documented. In his first term, his administration was the most wiretap-friendly in history. In 1995, it set a record for the most crime-related wiretaps in a year (a record it is bound to break this year) and for the most "national security" wiretaps without establishing probable cause of a crime. For the first time, federal agents conducted more wiretaps than the police in the 50 states combined.
And the administration's infatuation with wiretapping is only the tip of a deep and nasty iceberg. Set it beside the Digital Telephony Act and Clippers I, II, and III - all designed to make the digital world even more prone to listening in than the analog one. And beside Filegate - in which the White House and FBI passed around the confidential records of hundreds of ex-government employees as if they were copies of The Washington Post. What you end up with is an administration that has been, in the words of the ACLU's main privacy specialist, Donald Haines, "systematically privacy-insensitive."
This is telling. For unlike crime or pornography or gay rights or drugs or welfare or the death penalty, privacy is not an issue where brute majoritarianism dictates that a cynical politician should side with the snoopers. Polls consistently find that people favor privacy rights in general and that they are specifically wary of invasions such as wiretapping. Moreover, most voters have no views at all on the issues that loom ever larger in the digital age, such as encryption and digital telephony. Clinton would pay a scant political price for coming down on the side of e-privacy. Indeed, on crypto, it would earn him kudos from the only constituency - other than the spooks and the Feds - that gives a damn: the high tech industry.
But that has not been Clinton's way. Instead, he has pursued what Haines describes as a "profoundly, ruthlessly pro-law enforcement agenda," much at the expense of individuals' rights to keep to themselves. Never has there been a Democratic president so chummy with an FBI director. Rarely has there been a Justice Department so politicized - so determined, in the words of one lawyer there, "to make the president look tough on crime and worry about everything else, including civil liberties, later." And none of this is anything new for Clinton. As governor of Arkansas, he was just as favorably predisposed to the requests of police to do wiretaps. (Neither did he make any attempt to reform the state's gay-specific anti-sodomy laws.)
The only thing that* has* changed, perhaps, is that Clinton has succeeded at long last in rousing the civil libertarians from their dreams of A Blueprint for Action. On civil liberties, "Clinton's presidency has been a surprising disappointment and a grievous one," *The New York Times'*s resident expert, Anthony Lewis, wrote recently. "Clinton has been anything but vigilant in protecting the Bill of Rights," The Washington Post's David Broder chimed in.
In fact, for some time now, civil libertarians have had to deal with the creeping suspicion that, in an election where Republicans want to cast Clinton as a social and cultural liberal, he is trying to inoculate himself against such attacks not only by taking actions that disregard civil liberties, but by taking actions that are actively anti-civil liberties. At the ACLU and other such groups, there is even a perception that the Clinton campaign is trying to provoke them into repudiating the president so that the contrast will sharpen his image as a centrist.
Such suspicions seem more than justified, if you listen closely to the election strategy outlined by Ann Lewis, a sharp, witty woman with a long liberal pedigree who serves as Clinton's deputy campaign manager.
"When you talk to political people, campaigns tend, with the passage of time, to get wrapped in this golden glow," she says. "You learn more from books than from conversations." So last year, when Lewis landed her job, she read up on the last few presidential races. What she gleaned from her trip to the library has since been written about at some length in the press and commented upon in the political community - namely, that in planning Clinton's reelection bid, his handlers would aim to emulate the campaign run by Ronald Reagan in 1984; the one they would avoid was that of George Bush in 1992. Yet if those were the models on offense, in planning a defense Lewis also knew to take a long, hard look at 1988, for she was convinced that it was the model the GOP had in mind to deploy against Clinton in 1996.
"The Republicans concluded as of 1988 that their principal advantage was that they had the upper hand on cultural and social issues, almost the patriotic issues," Lewis explained one July afternoon at Clinton-Gore headquarters. "Their advantage was their ability to make the Republican candidate emblematic of America and to make the Democratic candidate seem less than fully American." Bush and his guru, the late Lee Atwater, had done this by using a handful of symbolic (non-) issues, all of which touched on civil liberties - the death penalty, the pledge of allegiance, Willie Horton, and, of course, the ACLU - to portray Dukakis as a raving liberal. "The lesson of 1988," Lewis said, "is not to let the other side define you."
In 1992, Clinton's grasp of that lesson was total. Declaring himself "a different kind of Democrat" whose cultural values were in line with those of the broad American middle, he set out to demonstrate it in a manner so vivid - and so crass - it might have made Atwater blush. Not only did Clinton pick a fight with Jesse Jackson by dissing the rapper Sister Souljah, but, a few weeks before the New Hampshire primary, he went back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a brain-damaged black murderer named Rickey Ray Rector.
Civil libertarians were, and still are, appalled. But not so appalled that they didn't welcome Clinton, in those early months of the new administration, with open arms and a willfully perfect case of amnesia.
After 12 years of Republican administrations that barely spoke to the civ-lib lobby, let alone seriously weighed its advice, the ACLU and its allies were overcome with hope that Clinton's people would be more attentive. They were also intoxicated by the possibility that, at long last, they might once again be serious players in Washington's theater of power. With access and influence at stake, it was all too easy to put memories of Rickey Ray Rector aside and get down to business.
As Lewis had predicted, no sooner had Bob Dole nailed down the Republican nomination than his campaign manager, Scott Reed, began telling reporters that his boss intended to wage a 1988-style assault against Clinton. (It was almost anti-climactic to hear this, considering that Dole had modeled his 1996 primary campaign closely on Bush's '88 one.) In the general election, Reed said, Dole would buttress his bread-and-butter Republican message - tax cuts for all, wasteful spending for none - with a barrage of social/cultural attacks: on affirmative action, crime, gay marriage, and untraditional family values.
Significantly, in the attempt to paint Clinton as Dukakis II, one of Dole's first strokes was a string of speeches in the spring railing against the president's appointments to the federal judiciary. In 1988, Bush had turned the question of judicial philosophy into a matter of high politics by forever hammering at the fact that Dukakis was a "card-carrying member of the ACLU," an organization Bush vilified as being soft on crime, soft on porn, and outside the "mainstream" of American life. Now Dole was accusing Clinton's "liberal judges" (98 percent of whom he had inconveniently voted to confirm) of the very same sins.
It was against this backdrop that, one day in March, the ACLU's press person in Washington received a call from a reporter at U.S. News & World Report asking for a comment on the fact that "the White House is saying that it's moderate because it opposes the ACLU on this whole list of issues." Laura Murphy's reaction was instant: "I said, 'Oh no, we're back to card-carrying days and George Bush, only this time the Democrat is going after us.'" When the story appeared, a quote from the White House's Rahm Emanuel seemed to confirm Murphy's fears. "We protect victims first and make criminals pay for their crimes," Emanuel declared. "That may get us in the crosshairs of the ACLU, but those are our principles."
A few weeks later, in what has since become a mildly infamous incident, Murphy saw Emanuel at Ron Brown's funeral. "I went up to him and said, 'What are you doing?'" Murphy recalls. "I said, 'Lay off the ACLU. If you act right, you're going to get our people to vote for you, OK? But if you keep on attacking us, you're just going to piss our people off and get your ass kicked when there's no turnout in 1996.' And he said, 'Yeah, yeah, beat me, beat me - I love it when you beat up on me. Come on, say it publicly. It's good for us if you fight us.' I said, 'Rahm, it's flawed thinking. You guys need to stop trying to out-Republican the Republicans.' But he just blew me off."
For his part, Emanuel recalls saying no such thing to Murphy. He also insists that he sees no mileage in goading the ACLU into assailing Clinton - a claim which was undercut somewhat when another White House aide referred, unprompted, to the ACLU-baiting strategy as "the Rahm Emanuel theory of the universe."
Several of Clinton's political advisers, Emanuel included, will also make the point that, compared with some of the president's high-profile battles with other interest groups - the NRA, for instance, or the tobacco industry - the dustups with the ACLU amount to small political potatoes. "It's not exactly something that a lot of swing voters are paying attention to," Lewis says. But then, the ACLU isn't the only group feeling abused. In one example, Dole, at the urging of William Bennett, planned to play the gay-rights card in a serious way, and, while still Senate majority leader, introduced the Defense of Marriage Act. Without even modest hesitation, Clinton said he would sign the anti-gay marriage bill, which most legal scholars regard as flagrantly at odds with the Constitution's "full faith and credit" clause. For many gay and lesbian activists, the right to wed has always been a second-tier issue. Yet, given their active (and generous) support for Clinton in 1992, his decision made for a stinging rebuke. As Evan Wolfson, director of the Marriage Project of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, memorably described it, "Looks like we're this year's Sister Souljah."
But it was on the battleground area of crime - where Dukakis had been so badly damaged, and Dole was so fully girded - that Clinton made his most gratuitous move as the anti-Dukakis. This fracas concerned Harold Baer, the liberal New York federal judge who had tossed a case against a cocaine dealer out of court on a search-and-seizure technicality. Republicans pounced. Seeking to defuse - or exploit - the situation, Clinton suggested, through his press secretary, that he might call on Baer to quit.
That was going a bit too far: Clinton instantly found himself being thrashed soundly from every possible quarter for having threatened the independence of the federal judiciary, and he beat a hasty retreat. (Baer, meanwhile, reversed his decision.)
Putting Baer aside, Clinton's handling of crime - once the most solid of Republican issues - has been both spectacularly adroit and constitutionally catastrophic. All year long, the president has trotted out a slew of publicity-seeking initiatives, such as a "one strike and you're out" rule for people who commit a violent crime or drug offense while living in public housing. In April, the GOP thought it had the president in a bind when the party attached to the first terrorism bill restrictions on the ability of prisoners, including those on death row, to file appeals - restrictions so severe that they greatly increase the chances that a defendant will be denied on appeal or even executed on the basis of a tainted trial; so severe, in fact, that they amount to turning habeas corpus into a right without a remedy. (It was a bill, said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that would have "confounded the Framers.")
Not a problem - Clinton signed it. Asked why their boss acquiesced in the hollowing of habeas corpus, Clinton's aides proffer the now-standard line about how he deeply regretted doing so, after which they say it would have been politically impossible in an election year to veto a terrorism bill - one passed on the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, no less. In truth, as the bill moved through Congress, Clinton never even tried to have the habeas provision changed. Never threatened a veto over the matter. Never even mentioned it. "There was no way we were gonna let Dole see even that much daylight," a White House aide says.
As the Republicans have been learning the hard way, history records no campaign strategy quite like this one. "What's different about these guys from other Democrats - from Dukakis, from Mondale, from Carter - is that they just don't care what the civil liberties types think," a senior Dole adviser says. "They're not concerned about the left, and that gives them the freedom to keep moving further and further to the right. Look at welfare. At the same time, Dole's out there trying to be more moderate, to not seem like a right-winger. It's a crazy goddamn dynamic. I can't tell you how many times in the last few months I've looked up and thought, Jesus, on these social issues, he's running to the right of us!"
That's the political analysis. The social one, the one Americans will have to live with, is much simpler: in Clinton's bold scheme we may finally have reached the apotheosis of our political system, for here we have a candidate willing not merely to pretend to be something he isn't, but to pretend to *be *his opponent - and finding himself amply rewarded for his efforts. On virtually every social/cultural issue, Clinton has done what was "necessary" and let civil liberties be damned - and Dole has been denied a foothold. When Dole reached for pornography, there was Clinton with the CDA. When Dole mentioned Hollywood, there was Clinton with the V-chip. Heading into the final leg of the campaign, all that Dole seemed to have at his disposal was his tax cut, his helmet-haired running mate, Jack Kemp, and, well, himself.
In some quarters, one hears about the importance of the low-frequency message the president's people are simultaneously sending - how, if Clinton gains a second term, he'll be free to treat civil liberties with respect, free to be true to his principles. The civil libertarians are still hanging on to this slim hope. You can even see it these days in their anger, which stems from their belief that, as a former teacher of constitutional law, Clinton "knows better."
We won't find out, of course, unless Clinton wins. Yet the notion that Clinton "knows better" rests on the assumption that the president possesses principles that are independent of political calculation - and on civil liberties, at least, there exists virtually no evidence to support that assumption. It is perfectly possible that a lifetime of shameless compromise has left Clinton incapable of even identifying a civil liberty, let alone fighting for one.
And what if he loses? Throughout this campaign, Bob Dole has been portrayed, with justification, as a man who would say anything - who would cozy up to a religious right he has always loathed, who would embrace a supply-side theory of economics he has always derided, who, as he admitted outright to Bob Woodward, would during the primary season advocate positions that he fundamentally opposed - all in order to get elected.
The irony is that, given the political forces in play today and the expediency that Dole and Clinton share as the touchstone of their politics, these two men who are so different in so many ways might well, on some of the most fundamental questions that presidents are ever asked to answer, hardly be different at all.
