If He Must, Do It With Flair
By Lance Morrow
Don't ask an American citizen to try to imagine what he would do if confronted by the squalid and surreal choice facing his President: stonewall or confess. One person--one only--made the disgusting mess: Bill Clinton. Let him find his own way out.
But since the confessionalist camp advises truth telling rather than continued lying (though truth telling of a manipulative kind), I think that option deserves deeper exploration. The confessionalists have not made their case with sufficient imagination, envisioning only one way for Clinton to confess--staring at a camera in the Oval Office, reading a TelePrompTer. The dramaturgy is flat. Even Richard Nixon in his 1952 Checkers speech--the prototype of aggressive self-defense through televised "confession"--used poor Pat as a studio prop and, of course, conjured up the adorable, absent dog.
There are all kinds of interesting ways to confess. Long ago, Jimmy Carter startled America by admitting, in a Playboy interview, to "lust in my heart"--not a confession at all, really, but coy, juvenile exhibitionism. Playboy would not be a good forum for Clinton. Jimmy Swaggart wept and chewed the furniture on the soundstage of his TV ministry. Without the gnashing of teeth, Clinton might at least entertain the idea of a group format. He is good at the Oprah-type give-and-take. If confession becomes inevitable, best to take control of the drama and stage-manage it to your advantage. Errancy and repentance and redemption have become one of our most exciting forms of public theater. Catharsis by celebrity: intimate hells of divorces, drugs and bulimias metamorphose before our eyes into miracles of recovery. Trauma turns into Camelot.
There is something to be said for Clinton's playing the race and religion card, in a modified Swaggart mode. Risky, but consider: Clinton appears on TV flanked by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Billy Graham, the reverends arranged like pastoral bookends in full supportive body English. Clinton, voice husky, sincere, speaks to the camera about the weekend of soul searching he has just spent with Jesse and Billy; speaks about his brother's drug addiction and about (here goes) his own long troublesome addiction, which is sex; subtly blames his childhood, the alcoholic home; implies the sins are venial anyway, nothing to do with his marriage and love of his loyal wife (squeezes her hand; close-up of Chelsea); apologizes to women he may have offended over the years; fights back tears; asks forgiveness; points to Administration's accomplishments; vows to go back to work for American people; thanks Americans; asks them to pray for him.
Not bad. But would Clinton want to plead not guilty by reason of addiction? Doubtful: it concedes too much. Which leaves this scenario: Bill and Hillary Clinton sit down with Barbara Walters in the White House family quarters. Barbara is empowered to hear confessions and grant absolution--the priestess of high colonics for the troubled celebrity mind. Her sacramental touch, her extreme unctuousness, is the very thing to preside over the tonal subtleties of this encounter--the faux intimacy, the clucking censure, the wet sympathy. Clinton and Walters might make beautiful music together, a harmony of ineffable falsenesses.
The Baba and Bubba format takes the focus away from semen stains and oral sex. Walters would be constrained by being in the presence of the valiant and wronged wife, and being in the couple's house, the White House, no less. Instead, after some dignified deflection (the old "there has been trouble in our marriage; we're working it out"), the interview would come to focus on the marriage itself. The public is sick of Monica and all that anyway; the real remaining mystery is Hillary: What's her true feeling about all this? How does she stand it? Saintliness? Some Faustian bargain?
Much hand holding. When Hillary is seen to forgive Bill, in Barbara's presence, why then, 7 trillion viewers (the largest audience in history) not only forgive Clinton en masse but also dare any politician to mention the word impeachment.
The moment, a perfect distillation of a surreal time, is Clinton's greatest performance and his greatest triumph. He has done it again!
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