- I didn’t do it - the system did.
The system has replaced the butler in these modern whodunits. The system did it; it’s thought to be that simple. You can believe that the structure of campaign laws and practices this term usually refers to needs a real overhaul, however, and not accept that its flawed existence justifies the gluttonies and corruptions we have been reading about or makes them only trivial symptoms, hardly worth troubling our pretty little heads about, of a Much Larger Problem. In another day and another context, people used to misuse the valid notion of ““root causes’’ of crime precisely this way. It was one thing, I always thought, to seek to understand and do something about those root causes, and another altogether to suggest that until you did, it was virtually pointless to get all hot and bothered about the holdup in progress.
To the extent that the system is thought of as a huge, intricate machine with a will and a purpose of its own and, accordingly, responsibility for its fiendish handiwork, this is what it is charged with doing: it has made certain things illegal for people running for office to do; and, as if this were not bad enough, it has not made other things illegal, so they can do them.
As a matter of fact, I think that the laws involved are sorely in need of revision on this score. But I don’t for a minute think that the politicians who have been exploiting them for all they’re worth are their victims. Every past reform (of which the current much denounced system was one) has been figured out, gamed and corrupted by the people it was meant to call to order, and this one is no exception. Candidates and parties have been tirelessly inventive in thinking of new ways to circumvent it, especially in terms of using their public offices as bait to catch money, and some of what has been revealed about their practices has reeked to high heaven. Furthermore, despite their protestations of commitment to reform, both parties have come up with endless ways of blocking it. They should stop blaming the system and adapt Pogo’s wisdom instead: We have met the system and he is us.
- There’s nothing wrong with it because you already knew about it.
““Nothing new’’ has for a long time been, to me, one of the particularly baffling pronouncements that are often voiced in these affairs. People speak the words as if they believe themselves thereby to be disposing of all the political, legal and moral questions that may have been raised by some especially malodorous deed - ““There’s nothing new there.’’ It is an expression of boredom and contempt, and in the current campaign-financing hearings it is having its best run yet that I can remember.
The Clinton White House has clearly been keenly aware of the potential usefulness of this non sequitur response as a way of defusing the impact of various charges. It not only saw to it that new, embarrassing evidence of some of its own misdeeds was revealed shortly in advance of the committee’s opening session, but some White House sources bragged of the tactical brilliance of this maneuver. And well they might have. For two things immediately happened: the rule of unreason came into play - that is, the revelations were relegated to the trash basket as old news before the committee could get around to them - and the administration was, of all things, congratulated in the press for its cunning.
This strange new version of the statute of limitations seems to hold that if a dereliction has been public knowledge for 72 hours, anyone pursuing it is beating a dead horse, wallowing, refusing to put the past ““behind us’’ and all in all up to no good. This will be held to be true even if no steps whatever have been taken to investigate the charge, let alone impose an appropriate penalty if it is true. I feel sorry for those wrongdoers in the past who were born too soon to get the good of this novel theory, but those are the breaks.
What all this really says, of course, is that when we are not denouncing hearings such as these for being pure show business, we are lamenting their shortcomings precisely as show business, demanding more show business, not less. I already knew that, we say, give me something else. It is the same insistence on sensation, as distinct from pursuit of the truth of the charges, that is reflected in the unending complaints that the allegations are too complicated. Some Democrats on the committee have really been pushing this one, although they know as well as anyone else that that is because schemes to elude the spirit and the letter of the campaign-financing laws and not be seen to be doing so are themselves by nature very complicated. But this disingenuous complaint has also enjoyed a certain resonance with the public and with parts of the press. This is getting too complicated . . . where are the dancing bears?
If we ask for showbiz, there are plenty of politicians who will be happy to oblige. It gets them off the hook. Taken together, the old ““everybody does it’’ dodge (which falsely implies that nobody did anything worse than anyone else), the ““blame the system’’ dodge and ““nothing new here’’ dodge, not to mention the riff on ““complication,’’ are all ways of ensuring that no one is held to account. People in politics have gotten almost as good at beating the rap as beating the system.
