Pietygate: School for Scandal

By Charles Krauthammer

If it takes a Hinckley to change the insanity laws and a De Lorean to curtail sting operations, then the case of Geraldine Ferraro may turn out to be a first step back from the piety-in-government excursion Americans have been on since Watergate. One day Ms. Ferraro's vice-presidential candidacy, perhaps her political career, hangs in the balance; the next day, after a tough and gutsy public performance--a Checkers for the '80s--she is back in gear, leaving us all to wonder if we hadn't lost our heads for just a moment.

Had we? Ask yourself what exactly she was supposed to have done that had Washington wondering if she could survive on the ticket--and one conservative columnist wryly advising Democrats to start warming up Sargent Shriver in the bullpen?

Not that Geraldine Ferraro is Caesar's wife. There was the illegal campaign loan, the murky Centre Street deal, the questionable exemption from disclosing her husband's finances. But she insists that she thought the loan was legal, that she did not know about the deal, and that no wife could satisfy the disclosure law who did not have a good-government partition in her refrigerator.

As articles of impeachment, the list is not very impressive. In fact, what most placed her in political jeopardy was not anything she did but something she said she would not do--namely, release her husband's tax returns. It was this affront to post-Watergate morality, by which anything left private is taken as presumptive evidence of wrongdoing, that turned the flap into a furor.

Finally, to save herself, she relented and produced a mountain of detail that yielded barely a mound of substance. To what end? What were we looking for? What are we looking for when we ask politicians to so bare themselves publicly? If we insist that public life be reserved for those whose personal history is pristine, we are not going to get paragons of virtue running our affairs. We will get the very rich, who contract out the messy things in life; the very dull, who have nothing to hide and nothing to show; and the very devious, expert at covering their tracks and ambitious enough to risk their discovery. This is not to say that our current politics does not attract such characters, only that it still manages to attract others as well. A few more Ferrarogates and that pool will be dry.

We demand leaders who are not mere stewards of the public interest but models of role, fashion and now ethics. We have made of our politicians celebrities. And like rock stars and quarterbacks, they are to be celebrated, imitated and known. Above all, known.

In some way, candidates like Ferraro unwittingly invite this kind of treatment. She did not get to where she is by dint of a cause, ideology or even issue. Ferraro got to where she is because of who she is: daughter of poor immigrants, teacher, lawyer, mother, prosecutor--political assets she is not shy to exploit. She claims these to be the source of her values, and it was these values and those sources that she displayed so prominently in her acceptance speech in San Francisco. They are, in fact, the only discernible theme of her campaign so far. If you run on your person, it is somewhat disingenuous to be surprised when the world then wants to know, in accountant's detail, exactly what kind of person you really are. The personality candidate, at once so well suited to this age of celebrity, is equally vulnerable to its voracious appetites. Still, there are limits. The purpose of the disclosure law that Ferraro was suspected of bending is to prevent conflict of interest. There is no evidence that has occurred. Yet the disclosures made and (at first) refused almost destroyed Ferraro. The ethics laws so enthusiastically enacted post-Watergate, so confidently entrusted with protecting the public weal, can also undermine it. And not surprisingly, since they are based on an illusory faith in the redemptive power of institutional arrangements. Owing to their history, Americans suffer from this touching superstition more than most people. After all, the founding fathers did practically invent the separation of powers to prevent the accumulation of tyrannical power. That lucky stroke has predisposed Americans to believe that if they could only find the right law, the right oversight committee, the right disclosure form, they could compensate institutionally for other failings of the human heart. And produce ethics in Government, for example.

It may now be time to close the gate. Ten years is a long time for any political fashion, and it is exactly ten years since the resignation of Richard Nixon. In that decade we have had Watergate, Koreagate, Lancegate, Billygate and now Ferrarogate, with Meesegate and Debategate on temporary hold. The chronology yields a list in roughly descending order of importance. We have come a long way. From a President resigning for, among other things, organizing a squad of "plumbers" specializing in break-ins, to a vice-presidential candidate arraigned before the bar of the media to answer questions, among others, about her husband's father's buildings' tenants. American political scandal is in sad decline.

Yet too many people still have a stake in its revival: a Watergate-starved generation of investigative reporters who must make do with imitation enemies lists (USIA), imitation graft (Japanese watches) and now imitation laundering (the Centre Street swap); a public so hungry it will accept fiction, if fact is in short supply (Washington politics has been honored with its own seamy TV soap opera); and some vengeful pols, mostly Republicans who suffered for years through the aftermath of Watergate and delight in the chance to do a little Woodward-Bernsteining themselves, now that they smell a smoking Democratic gun.

In the national interest, therefore, why not radical reform? A truce. Sweep the disclosure forms into the White House shredder. Declare, `a la Senator George Aiken, the Battle of Watergate won, withdraw the troops and proclaim a general amnesty. After all, we do it for draft dodgers and deserters after a war. We could even do it the way it is done in banana republics: on the President's birthday.

Expect few takers. A modest version of this idea was broached with a conservative commentator who had gone through the Watergate affair in the White House. "I'll trade you one Ferraro for one Meese and a future draft choice, and then we call off the whole ethics-in-government thing completely."

"Sure," he answered with a smile. "After the election."

--By Charles Krauthammer