Tuesday, December 15, 1998

Let’s just end this whole sorry mess

By Ellen Goodman

BOSTON — At this point, I have no more taste for defending Bill Clinton than I have for last year's Christmas fruitcake. In fact, all the offerings on this toxic buffet of characters — Clinton, Starr and those side dishes Monica and Linda — are indigestible.

But if you will forgive another culinary expression, this is nuts. We aren’t talking disapproval anymore. We aren't talking shame, disgust. We’re talking impeachment. We're talking about removing the president of the United States, lock, stock and United Van Lines from the White House.

Since the House Judiciary Committee voted out its articles of impeachment, the argument over the president's misbehavior seems to have polarized into two frozen tundras of moral opinion that reappear in every congressional sound bite. They're echoed in the endless man-in-the-mall interviews with which the media try to rouse readers from their Christmas stupor.

On a pre-holiday family visit to Maine, I found that two-pole opinion offered up in the Portland Press Herald with all the succinctness for which Mainers are famous.

Man One speaking for impeachment: "Whether the offense was sex or stealing jelly beans doesn’t matter. The leader of our country broke the law."

Man Two, speaking against impeachment: "He didn't do anything worth being impeached over. Of all the people who have cheated on their wives, I don’t know one who didn’t lie about it."

This is the nutshell version of this public seminar on Ethics and Impeachment. I must say, it reminds me of those dilemmas in Ethics 101 by which we are supposed to judge moral development. Remember the story of Heinz, the man whose wife was dying for lack of medicine or the funds to buy it?

Children are asked to decide whether it's OK for Heinz to steal the drugs. On the one hand, it's wrong to break the law; on the other, it's wrong to let the woman die.

This is not a perfect analogy since Clinton fudged/broke the law to save himself, not a dying wife. But it echoes the rigid choices — yes or no, up or down, impeach or don’t impeach — now set before a Congress that has taken censure off the table.

What I remember most about the Heinz dilemma is the response of an 11-year-old little girl named Amy, as described in Carol Gilligan's book, In a Different Voice. Amy had a different take on this problem. She didn’t think Heinz should steal the drugs because if he did he might end up in jail — and what would happen next time his wife needed the pills? Nor did Amy think she should die.

This 11-year-old refused to choose from column A or column B. She thought they should "talk it out," get a loan or find another way out of the dilemma. Traditional moralists thought Amy was "illogical." But the truth was that she took the long, wide moral view — six steps down the road, up a side road and back to the main road. Amy stepped outside the multiple-choice questionnaire.

This is not just a boy-girl thing. It's an inside- and outside-the-box thing. And this is where the impeachment debate is now: between the "insiders" and the "outsiders."

I know a whole lot of folks who are most comfortable in a system that is as inflexible as mandatory sentencing. The fear of an individualized legal system or worse yet, a world of situational ethics, is what makes the Bill Bennetts outraged at the death of outrage.

Indeed, every situation does not deserve its own ethics. But this is not every situation. This is not any other situation. This is the president of the United States who has lied about sex. This is a country that may otherwise spend much of the last year of the millennium talking about rights and thongs.

The entire government may grind to a halt while the Senate sits in judgment about the difference between fudging and lying and perjury. About sex.

As for political ethics? Everywhere we look members of Congress assure us they are voting on their own conscience and nothing but their conscience. How come those individual consciences just happen to divide into Republican Consciences and Democratic Consciences?

It’s almost Christmas, and somewhere there's got to be a handful of Republican wise men and women to join the "outsiders." We have one way out of the impeachment box: Censure.

Open the box, censure the guy, condemn his behavior, stand him up and embarrass him. And then let's just plain finally end the whole sorry mess.

Ellen Goodman's column regularly runs on Tuesdays and Fridays.

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