Chapter Three
“The Audience for This Is Huge”
Oklahoma City and the Wages of Transcendence
In chapters 1 and 2, I explored the implications of a proposition set forth in the introduction: In the midst of grounding contrastive appeals to advance particular political objectives, the center has long served as a viable topos for the rhetorical production of political transcendence. As it arranges pleas to move beyond faction, centrist rhetoric nevertheless insinuates divisions into public life in a struggle for assent and strategic advantage with other appeals. The broader significance of this claim about the rhetorical tension inherent in the center arises in resemblance to a similar tension found in democratic rhetoric more broadly: inclusions and exclusions, forms of insight and forms of blindness—they all intermingle when democratic imaginings take flight in the agon of political rhetoric.
Thus, as Russell Hanson and others have rightly pointed out, our “ideas about democracy and the practices implied by them [are] forged in and through political rhetoric.” As such, our working assumptions about the character and limits of democracy are not merely “ideas” at all, but situated acts of intervention into the world; they express a transcendent vision, ironically, as they promote “the desirability of particular political institutions or practices” over others.1 In the vector of the desire for one kind of politics over another, for one set of goals instead of another, divisions take form alongside reaffirmations of the possibility of democratic transcendence more broadly. Centrist rhetoric, I am arguing, epitomizes this rhetorical mélange well. As political actors hail a middle space apart from divisions of party, of race, and of class, they engage in discursive practices that chafe against the realization of the very consensuses they seek to forge.
Indeed, the higher refuge from the partisan implied by transcendence is also one from which to attack with purpose, from which to call to task those who will not themselves agree to “rise above” division. This pattern of urging transcendence while assailing those who seem to contravene transcendence recalls Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s homage to “the spirit of the center—the spirit of human decency, opposing the extremes of tyranny.”2 Contrasting what he called the “fighting faith” of the center to the “extremes” of left and right, Schlesinger used the center as a point of stability from which to defend democracy against threats, both domestic and international, defined by their intemperance, their devotion to ideology, and their inclination toward violence. Such threats were not only threats to particular policies or objectives, but to reason and democracy.
Did centrist rhetoric in lead up to Clinton’s election to the presidency perform a similar “fighting” function? In part, yes. The Cleveland DLC speech used the center not only to form the vision of a “new” politics, but to name an adversary in terms of its perilous power to divide and distort. If the “idle rhetoric that has paralyzed American politics” were to continue, Clinton warned, the American Dream could perish as politics grew increasingly irrelevant to people’s deepest needs and wishes.3 In the “Sister Souljah Moment,” the threat to democracy came from a different source—a “kind of hatred” based in growing racial animosity—whose power had ostensibly threatened the ideal of equality embraced by King himself, and therefore left the nation vulnerable to fragmentation and violence. Clinton configured divisions of race and culture that threatened a seemingly inclusive “mainstream,” that nevertheless established its grounding and strategic rationale via associations with whiteness.
In these cases the tension between the center’s putative stability and the centrifugal forces it is called upon to “hold” against affords Clinton a versatile template for rhetorical invention. The positing of divisions is made to invite more than simple compromise; it demands solutions that promise to redefine the very field upon which divisions emerge. Using centrist rhetoric, Clinton argued his case for the presidency not merely as the uniter of a divided people, in other words, but as one capable of transforming how the nation saw division itself. Alluding to great presidents of the past, Clinton told one interviewer that “our system has benefited from electing people who at moments of change were able to be . . . transforming leaders, who could get people to move beyond party and beyond the little boxes in which we normally think and vote and live.”4
The terms for the work of persuasion in this passage—Clinton promises to “get people to move beyond” things—are in line with a metaphoric of transcendence that yields a distinct sense of value. The center implied here makes it possible to step outside of configurations of “normal” political thought, action, and identity, while also containing and ordering this act. Association with a higher or more fundamental kind of order named simply “our system” makes this possible. The center is that stability that makes change possible, that grounds the democratic promise of a nation, and that, in turn, allows for its greatest leaders—Clinton cites Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, and Kennedy among his examples—to rise to the challenge of inspiring citizens to move beyond their parochial ways.
Of course, the leaders he cites each met fierce resistance on their way to becoming icons of unity. And each responded in kind. Each was not only denounced for his politics, that is, but was skilled at the art of denouncing, which raises a question in terms of the evolution of Clinton’s rhetoric of transcendence once he became president: how did Clinton use centrist rhetoric to deal with the flourishing of dissent and skepticism that beset him upon taking office? In particular, what about those on the right who came to dismiss Clinton’s plea to “move beyond” as little more than a ruse designed to conceal a liberal agenda, and who reacted with a fervor that would not abate, really, until he left office?
I begin with these questions as a point of entry into the primary concern of this chapter—explore how Clinton, in response to the terrorist attack in Oklahoma City in the spring of 1995, used centrist rhetoric to construct a defense of democratic order against attempts to undermine not only his presidency, but often the very legitimacy of government. Clinton’s response to the attack allowed him to seize a higher ground from which to stave off an emboldened Republican Party. He rebuilt a picture of himself in line with the centrist identity he had embraced as a candidate, but which the right had successfully dismantled almost immediately. Since this recomposition of his centrist ethos was one that began as a matter of necessity, I start by setting out the immediate rhetorical challenges Clinton faced as he assumed the presidency, for these challenges proved to overwhelm any security his election might have offered the Democrats’ Congressional Majority.
The Center Slips Away
Clinton’s inaugural address sought to define his election as a sign both of dramatic change and of the continuation of a never-ending process of national becoming in the face of perpetual challenge.5 The speech defines this cycle of change as both historical and eternal, a “mystery” that began with founding of the nation itself, but that occupies a time of its own. As Clinton asserted in the very first public words of his presidency:
Today we celebrate the mystery of American renewal. This ceremony is held in the depth of winter. But, by the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring. A spring reborn in the world’s oldest democracy, that brings forth the vision and courage to reinvent America. When our founders boldly declared America’s independence to the world and our purposes to the Almighty, they knew that America, to endure, would have to change. Not change for change’s sake, but change to preserve America’s ideals—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Though we march to the music of our time, our mission is timeless.6
An underlying permanence would give meaning to change, and vice versa. This tension defines a “mystery” of signature importance for the work of “reinvention.” As the celebrant of the inaugural ceremony, Clinton constitutes his audience, his election, his time, and himself in relation to this dual essence. Clinton honors not “change for change’s sake” but for the cause of nation’s political rebirth. In “the world’s oldest democracy,” to reaffirm the possibility of transformation is itself a proof of democratic stability. As Clinton says, “Today, we pledge an end to the era of deadlock and drift—a new season of American renewal has begun.” The “we” who pledges “an end” is one that returns to itself through the transcendence of stasis and inertia.
Clinton’s fall from his inaugural’s “joyful mountain top of celebration” was steep and abrupt, however. His claim at the time that voters had “raised [their] voices in an unmistakable chorus” reflected his impressive total of 370 electoral votes, but deflected another more relevant truth: Clinton had won barely 43 percent of popular vote. As Charles O. Jones put it, the president came to office with “no blank check, no clear and obvious mandate.”7 Clinton’s first months in office reflected this lack of clarity; they were characterized by growing uncertainty within his own party—especially among the New Democrats themselves—about the focus of the president’s agenda and his ability to advance it. Clinton’s early legislative accomplishments—NAFTA, the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Brady Bill, and so on—in the first half of his first term were impressive, to be sure. And yet, they were overshadowed by a series of negative developments and an administrative team that seemed routinely flummoxed. As one reporter put it in her analysis of the Clinton transition: “There was no real plan for what the administration would do after it got to Washington.”8 While this observation risks overstatement, the tumultuous first two years certainly reflected a lack of coordination on the part of the White House in shoring up support for Clinton’s agenda and image.
Besides facing trouble with new and ongoing scandals (e.g., the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit, the White House travel office firings, and continuing investigations into the Clintons’ past financial transactions) and with controversies surrounding some of his appointees, the president faced a set of more conventional failures. The administration mishandled its push to change military policy on gays at the start of his term, and then lost support for its economic stimulus plan, for its middle-class tax cut, and, finally, most damaging of all, for Clinton’s centerpiece health care reform plan.
These setbacks were amplified by an already well-organized opposition. Led by Republican House Whip—and future House Speaker—Newt Gingrich, and fueled by the ascendency of rightwing talk radio, the GOP confronted the president’s missteps at every turn, casting him as prisoner to the same liberal orthodoxy and “McGovernite” legacy he had campaigned against. Clinton thus headed into the 1994 midterm elections a much-weakened president with a vulnerable Congressional majority. To him, however, it was a case of mistaken identity:
I was being portrayed as a man who had abandoned down-home for uptown, a knee-jerk liberal whose mask of moderation had been removed . . . our lack of a clear message made otherwise minor issues look as if I was governing from the cultural and political left, not from the dynamic center, as I had promised.9
And so it was that in the first national election of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Democratic Party proved anything by revitalized. Rather, Democrats lost fifty-two seats in the House of Representatives and eight seats in the Senate, ceding control of both legislative bodies to the Republicans for the first time since 1952.
This defeat, which cascaded into state and local elections, was interpreted by the GOP and by many in the press as a clear repudiation of the president and, in many ways, as proof that, upon taking office, he had quickly turned away from the “dynamic center.” One headline at the time told of Clinton’s “forsaking of the center,” another of his need to return to the “center as he seeks a way to govern.”10 These examples point to a dominant story of the midterm elections, a story endorsed heartily by key members of the DLC leadership. Nine days after the election, for instance, DLC founder Al From spoke ominously about a poll the group had commissioned that showed Clinton’s standing in steep decline among independent voters: “For President Clinton, there is a pretty blunt message in this poll. It’s get with the program or you’ll have to pay the consequences.”11
Clinton appeared ready to answer these doubts when he chose to make his first major post-midterm election speech at the DLC’s tenth anniversary celebration in Washington. During the speech, he apologized for being misunderstood by “the people I ran to help,” saying in apparent reference to criticisms of his decision to address the ban on homosexuals in the military: “I think I was right when I opposed discrimination and intolerance, but a lot of folks thought I was just more concerned about minorities than the problems of the majority.”12
Through the early months of 1995, however, it seemed that Clinton could not do enough to satisfy critics. With attention shifting to the House Republicans’ plan to translate their “Contract with America” into law, Clinton was intent both on recapturing the media’s favor and on rebuilding his stature. Once Congress took a short Easter recess, staffers scheduled a press conference that was supposed to do both. Instead, it did neither. The president was reduced to having to answer a question about whether he could “make [his] voice heard” given the Republicans’ dominance over the terms of political debate. He answered:
The Constitution gives me relevance. The power of our ideas gives me relevance. . . . The President is relevant here, especially an activist President. And the fact that I am willing to work with the Republicans. The question is, are they willing to work with me? I have shown good faith. That’s how we got two of those bills in the Contract [with America] that I supported in 1992 signed into law. . . . I have shown good faith. The question is, what happens now?13
These are the words of a diminished president. Resigned to asserting, rather than enacting, his own relevance, Clinton presented himself to the world as a victim of the meanness of his opponents and as a spectator—speaking of himself in the third person—to his own presidency. His statement that the future depended on the question of “what happens now?” seemed like a casual question about a weather pattern that could not be altered or acted upon before it happened, but only dealt with after the fact. Ironically, if tragically, this statement proved prescient, when the question “what happens now?” was answered swiftly and terrifyingly just twelve hours after the press conference was over.
Relevance Reborn: The “Incredible Shrinking President” Finds Center Stage14
The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on the morning of April 19, 1995, shocked the nation with images of destruction and death, creating an unstable situation for an already-weakened president. Such instability, however, also created a rhetorical environment disposed to help Clinton address these weaknesses, in particular the sense that his presidency was flailing before a united, Republican Congress. In his White House memoir, Clinton speechwriter Michael Waldman argues that after the bombing Clinton was able to become, if only for a flash, a “reassuring figure rather than an unsettling one” and that “for many people, during those days, for the very first time, he truly became president.”15 This interpretation of the bombing of Oklahoma City as an event that afforded Clinton a chance to reinaugurate his presidency testifies to the power all presidents can draw from the reservoirs of national catastrophe, and to the unique opportunity presented by this tragedy to President Clinton on that April morning.
No longer merely a partisan trying to assert relevance in a debate with Republicans in Congress, Clinton became a leader trying to reassure and rally a nation in the face of attack. Indeed, in his remarks shortly after the blast, Clinton’s demeanor from the previous evening was gone.
He spoke not of waiting for others to work with him but of sending a “crisis management team” to Oklahoma City, not of sticky matters of law and policy, but of tasking “the world’s finest investigators to solve these murders.” In this aspect of his leadership role, Clinton was looking not for consensus with Republicans, but for a group of deadly assassins who would be offered no mercy: “These people are killers, and they must be treated as killers.” While this way of naming the perpetrators is hardly remarkable, it did allow Clinton to take on the role of protector from the start, someone who could speak with clarity and confidence of the matter at hand: “I will not allow the people of this country to be intimated by evil cowards,” he declared, adding the term “evil” himself to the remarks prepared by his staff.16 In a press conference with the Brazilian president the day after the bombing, he said, “What we need to do is to find out who did this and to punish them harshly,” and then, three days later in an interview on the 60 Minutes news program he specified exactly what “punish” meant and the role he had played in making the harshest of penalties for terrorism permissible under the law: “I certainly believe that they should be executed. And in the crime bill, which the Congress passed last year, we had an expansion of capital punishment for purposes such as this. If this is not a crime for which capital punishment is called [for], I don’t know what is.”17 Clinton, just months earlier defeated on the basis of his supposed location on the “cultural and political left,” was now publicly detailing his role in the “expansion of capital punishment” at a time when revenge was surely on the minds of many and the spotlight was squarely on the president.
Clinton’s prosecutorial toughness was counterpoised by a more tender rhetoric fashioned from his repeated emphasis on the nineteen children killed in the blast, which originated in a space directly beneath the Murrah Building’s daycare center. This rhetoric found a fertile context of reception in a mediascape in which the photo of a dying, bloodied infant cradled in the arms of a firefighter at the scene came to typify the consequences of the blast.18 From Clinton’s first public characterization of the bombing as “an attack on innocent children and defenseless citizens,” the White House used references to dead and frightened children to focus its response.
For instance, three days after the bombing the president converted his weekly radio address into a televised appearance with a group of children whose parents were federal employees. CBS News broke into its regularly scheduled children’s programming to air what Bob Schieffer called “a special message to the children and the parents of America about the terrible bombing in Oklahoma City.”19 The president opened his remarks by saying that he and the first lady had convened the group because “we are especially concerned about how the children of America are reacting to the terrible events.” He instructed parents to inform their children about a pledge that he had made: “Tell them I have promised every child, every parent, every person in America that when we catch the people who did this, we will make sure that they can never hurt another child again, ever.”20 The next day, en route to Oklahoma City to speak at a memorial service, the president and the first lady planted a dogwood tree on the South Lawn of the White House. At the service, Clinton would make a point to recount the story of planting the tree, which he said was “in honor of the children of Oklahoma.”21
The president thus vowed to vanquish the “evil cowards” and “killers” of Oklahoma City in light of a collective trauma to the entire nation epitomized by the death of innocent children. In doing so, Clinton managed to create an image that would serve him well in the months ahead: it became possible to see him not as a “shrinking” president, but as a leader uncompromising with America’s enemies and nurturing as the protector of its most vulnerable. In concert with these immediate and fleeting effects, Clinton’s words following the catastrophe also worked to reconstitute symbolically the target of McVeigh’s attack, the federal government, in similar ways. As a synecdoche for the all of the blast’s victims, “the children of Oklahoma” served to define the fallen in a way that most could connect with easily. In turn this move made possible a deepening in the possibility and quality of a broader identification of the victims with “the children of America,” a common symbol both of a nation’s vulnerability and of its hope for the future. When combined with common figures of national and familial identity, in other words, rhetoric about the victims could balance a stress on their status as workers targeted for their service to the state with a stress on their status as ordinary people, as “good parents as well as good workers.”22 It was in his celebrated eulogy at the “Time of Healing” prayer service at the Oklahoma State Fair Arena on April 23, four days after the attack, however, that Clinton mastered this strategy, adding to it new elements that would soon assume greater importance.
On Purgatorial Responsibility: “Remarks at a Memorial Service for the Bombing Victims in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, April 23, 1995”
Clinton began his speech by declaring not only that he was in Oklahoma City to “represent the American people,” but that he had also had come with the first lady as “parents, as husband and wife, as people who were your neighbors [in Arkansas] for some of the best years of our lives.” This mixture of national, familial, regional, and personal identifications with the victims, their families, and the survivors, sets the stage for a construal of the bombing as an attack not on a single entity—“federal government”—but on many social and communal entities all at once, each of which is inseparable from and simultaneous with the other. Government became not a barrier to freedom, but a site of community amidst a diversity of social identities. McVeigh’s attack on the Murrah Building was, Clinton said, a “terrible sin” which “took the lives of our American family.” Among such “family” members were those “who worked to help the elderly and the disabled, who worked to support our farmers and our veterans, who worked to enforce our laws and to protect us.” Here, government agencies literally secure the goods of community—government makes sure the vulnerable are protected, that the nation has enough food, and that laws of the people are maintained. Those who worked to help, support, and enforce “served us well, and we are grateful” for their work. And yet, as Clinton points out, those who served “were also neighbors and friends. You saw them at church or the PTA meetings, at the civic clubs, at the ballpark. You know them in ways that all the rest of America could not.” Central to the definition of the victims of the blast in Clinton’s speech is thus a set of positive, social and personal markers that becomes woven into their identity as federal employees. Clinton brings the dead into the present—“you know them”—by offering to his listeners a perspective that contrasts with the larger, anonymous “rest of America,” which knows them only as employees.
The veneration of the federal employees of Oklahoma City via a dispersal of their collective identity into various roles stressed that, as victims, they were part of a larger social world. This mirrored a complementary move in which the attackers, too, were folded into a larger structure of action and motivation. Clinton quickly began to repoliticize the event, in other words, treating a highly unusual and aberrant act committed by an individual, into the most vivid expression of a set of gathering “forces” that promised future calamity and whose signs could be seen everywhere. In this scheme, the bombing was the canary in the cold mine of a slowly building civic crisis. Defined as such in its causes, the event at Oklahoma City became, in its implications, the catalyst for a long overdue moment of political reckoning:
To all my fellow Americans beyond this hall, I say, one thing we owe those who have sacrificed is the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil. They are forces that threaten our common peace, our freedom, our way of life.
What justifies Clinton’s use of the phrase “those who have sacrificed” in a context such as this? To unite death and sacrifice with duty suggests a cause or purpose of some kind. But for what could so many “innocent children and defenseless citizens” have died? As the victims of “dark forces” that will remain even after the perpetrators are apprehended, they died to inspire a nation to assume a “duty” equated with its very survival, its “way of life.” Catching, trying, and executing McVeigh would not be enough to justify the “sacrifice” of the dead. As Clinton told an audience in Minneapolis the next day: “We must arrest, convict, and punish the people who committed this terrible, terrible deed, but our responsibility does not end there.”23
Clinton’s call to collective “responsibility” was embraced by editorialists across the nation who saw in the bombings the potential for a kind of purging of partisan politics as well. These responses made the event in Oklahoma City into a message not simply about the dangers of the growing militia movement—which had become radicalized in the wake of the violent ends to standoffs with federal law enforcement at Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas—but about the political culture of Washington, DC. The day after Clinton’s speech in Minneapolis, for example, David Broder compared the attack to those unpredictable “forces that change our politics in fundamental ways” and wrote: “My hunch is that the Oklahoma City bombing may trigger the next such political shift” away from partisanship.24 Similarly, for E. J. Dionne the bombings were a wake-up call for “mainstream politicians” who needed “to examine their consciences and ask whether their approach to winning political battles may be aggravating dark passions.”25 In order to stave of these “dark passions,” which echoed Clinton’s “dark forces,” Dionne proposed what he called “an extended period in which political rhetoric is toned down.” This call for less contentious rhetoric was not directed at all parties, however. It clearly singled out a particular group of “mainstream politicians” who, by implication, were being tagged as anything but “mainstream.”
A powerful assumption about the bombing emerged rather quickly: Because of its rhetoric attacking “big government,” the Republican Party—especially conservatives associated with the emerging right-wing talk radio culture—shared the blame for McVeigh’s actions. As Michael Lind wrote soon after the attacks, “Mainstream conservatives, it can be argued, have helped to legitimate the worldview of the Oklahoma City bombers.”26 Or as one evocative headline editorial headline put it, “Gingrich’s Reckless Rhetoric Comes Home to Roost with Bombing.”27 With these suggestions in the air and with the right rejecting them vociferously, reporters began to ask questions, like this one from Reuters during an exchange with the president just two days after the attack:
Mr. President, there has been a loud, constant drumbeat in this country in recent years: The government is the enemy; the government is bad. Given the way this case seems to be pointing, do you think that in any way contributed to what happened in Oklahoma City on Wednesday?28
Clinton demurred, saying only that he had to wait until the investigation was complete to comment on the matter.
Still, while Clinton was not explicit in making a direct link to the Republican Congress, he hardly discouraged such speculation. (Such conjecture invited repudiation from figures such as Gingrich, who told a reporter that it was “grotesque to suggest” connections between his “Republican Revolution” and the bombing, and from Rush Limbaugh, who promised his listeners that that “liberals intend to use this tragedy for their own political gain.”29) In his Minneapolis speech, for example, Clinton spoke ominously of “things that are said over the airwaves,” of “loud and angry voices in America today” that “leave the impression, by their very words, that violence is acceptable.” He called on those who “do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division, with the promoters of paranoia” to speak out “against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.”30 The connection between “speech and behavior” was more vividly drawn in Clinton’s 60 Minutes interview:
You never know whether there’s some fragile person who’s out there about to tip over the edge thinking they can make some statement against the system, and all of a sudden there’s a bunch of innocent babies in a day care center dead. . . . People should examine the consequences of what they say and the kind of emotions they are trying to inflame.31
In bridging a focus that assumes intentional rhetorical incitement on the right—“trying to inflame”—with images of “innocent babies” killed as a result, Clinton offered a audiences a perspective on the event that repeatedly joined its undeniable political motives to its undeniable cost in the suffering and death of actual individuals. This way of seeing could easily extend beyond the event itself, thus disabling the charge of rightwing rhetoric’s central negative image—the federal government—via the familial and social associations attached to the victims themselves, especially its most innocent and blameless. As the journalist and later White House aide Sidney Blumenthal has said of Clinton’s speeches in April and May of 1995, their “homage to the positive contributions of federal workers” meant that “the federal government ceased to be a rhetorical trope and became instead the distinct individuals who had been murdered.”32
For Blumenthal, the “federal government” as “trope” was an abstraction with a galvanizing resonance for the Republican opposition, one that depended on a caricature of government stripped of any humanity, and thus of its lived reality. Once Clinton could effectively implicate such a caricature within the context of the bombing itself, this same rhetorical power could then be turned against the right, made into evidence if not of its direct culpability in the act itself, certainly of its complicity in what Clinton would later call the “atmosphere” that made it possible:
So often referred to by the demeaning term “federal bureaucrats,” the slain employees had been killed because they served us, helping the elderly and disabled, supporting farmers and veterans, enforcing our laws. . . . Somehow they had been morphed into heartless parasites of tax dollars and abusers of power, not only in the twisted minds of Timothy McVeigh and his sympathizers but also by too many others who bashed them for power and profit. I promised myself that I would never use the thoughtless term “federal bureaucrat” again, and that I would do all I could to change the atmosphere of bitterness and bigotry out of which this madness had come.33
To source “madness” in an “atmosphere of bitterness and bigotry” is to locate it in the agon of politics and society. Timothy McVeigh’s twistedness, argues Clinton, was not most relevantly a disturbance of the mind. It was the artifact of a similarly twisted symbolic and political world with many interconnected parts; the bomber was not alone. He had “sympathizers,” people who shared a common vocabulary that gave meaning to a centrifugal “madness” that could move some to target their fellow Americans simply “because” they work for the government. Though different on one level, these “sympathizers” were united with McVeigh in that they drew motive from the same rhetoric, one that dehumanizes those who work for the federal government, that empties the contents of their distinctiveness and compassion with the force of a “demeaning” epithet.” It is a rhetoric that has “morphed” decent people into greedy and frightening monsters, made them into the perfect enemies of the deranged. The symbolic product of this morphing is what, for Clinton, wraps together the twisted radicals—McVeigh and his sympathizers—with the self-interested politicians and rightwing radio talk show hosts—the “too many others who bashed them for power and profit.” Naming government as freedom’s antagonist, the latter provide a metaphorical landscape of targets—“federal bureaucrats”—for the literal acts of the former.
In the aftermath of the bombing, Clinton thus worked through an explanatory form that took care in connecting the “atmosphere” (a scene) to the violent bombing (an act). Political considerations clearly, and not surprisingly, influenced this constant and strategic pairing of scene and act. As Clinton speechwriter Michael Waldman has written: “[Clinton] saw the political opening the bombing had created, for while Timothy McVeigh was planning an anti-government explosion in the heartland, the Republicans in Congress were proclaiming an anti-government ‘Republican Revolution’ in Washington.”34 Indeed, recounts Elizabeth Drew, Clinton’s “approval ratings in most polls shot up” at that time with one aide telling her: “We tried all year to say we’re the mainstream and they’re the extreme—now we can show that.”35
What did strategically constructing appeals—“tried all year to say”—in partisan, contrastive terms—“we’re/they’re”—pitting the center against the margin—“the mainstream/the extreme”—this demonstration—“to show that”—amount to as an epideictic response to the awesome terror of the Oklahoma City bombing? How did Clinton make try to make effective his judgment of the blast as a chance for democratic renewal, one defined in terms of purging the “dark forces” he linked suggestively, but unmistakably, to his political opponents in Congress and on the airwaves?
From a rhetorical perspective, the “political opening the bombing had created” was exploitable only via a certain balancing act: Clinton had to offer a compelling vision of what the bombing required from all Americans to preserve their democratic institutions, find a way to make himself the chief protagonist (and his adversaries the villains) of this same vision, and yet not seem to be doing so all the while. Such a vision could not seem reactive or petty, in other words, but had to match the intensity and solemnity of the threat it imagined while calibrating each in the proper dosages. In the midst of its exploitation for political purposes, the event had to seem, for it was indeed, something more than a mere “political opening” for the president—especially in light of the immediate sense from the right that Clinton was doing what he was, in fact, actually doing.
The use of the “mainstream/extreme” contrast involved carefully incorporating Republicans into the negative threat symbolized by the “atmosphere” that gave rise to the event. On the other hand, this same contrast had to contain a correspondingly broad, positive force to measure up to the size and scope of the “dark forces” it defined as in need of expiation. The event had to live at the hinge of these two forces in order to become the material for a call to transcendence. What allowed for this rhetorical space of contrasts to emerge? How did the administration’s response work to create dramatic tension between these opposed forces, each of which required its own distinct rendering of the blast’s significance in terms of a shared national past and future?
Forming a Center against Disorder: “Remarks at the Michigan State University Commencement Ceremony in East Lansing, Michigan, May 5, 1995”
Such questions arise as a way to explore how in his effort to exploit a distinct political opening—Drew recounts one aide who snapped his fingers saying, “In Oklahoma, we just hit”—in his struggle with Republicans, the president worked to evoke a unity of purpose against a broad spectrum of threats to the federal government. Such questions arise, specifically, in light of a commencement address Clinton delivered on May 5, 1995, at Michigan State University in which this appeal achieved particular rhetorical clarity and power.
Joe Klein recounts how Clinton told him that “the House Republicans were as much a target of [the Michigan State] speech as were the right-wing militias” and that the speech was described by the president as a “breaking of the ice” that allowed him to go on the attack after years of being on the defensive.36 And yet, as Carol Gelderman points out, despite claims made by the media and political opponents “who accused him of scapegoating and of trying to stifle criticism of the government,” Clinton not only dominated the response to the tragedy in a way that helped him politically, but more importantly he “fulfilled one of the major duties of a president, which is to speak out in public about a clear danger to the nation’s peace and to take steps to meet that danger.”37
While Gelderman cites President Clinton’s urging of civility and his demand for new antiterrorism measures as examples of such “steps,” my approach to the speech is focused less on these goods than on the underlying form the oration takes. In short, the president’s rhetorical art reaches beyond proposing new initiatives or connecting the bombing to incendiary words. Most centrally, it involves asking Americans to unite in seeing the threat to “government” symbolized by the bombing not simply as a threat to themselves, but as a reminder of an historically recurring duty to reaffirm the nation’s democratic order. Within such an order, Clinton will argue, claims about government find their proper place; outside of such an order, they constitute a mortal hazard. With its growing militia movement and its connection to the bombing—McVeigh had lived on a farm with his conspirator Terry Nichols in the town of Decker, about 100 miles away from Michigan State—the state of Michigan had become at the time associated with this threat. Accordingly, Clinton uses the place of his speech to open with a reminder that this association is limited. There is, in fact, another Michigan that is not of the militias.
Clinton begins by saying he has “fond memories of Michigan State . . . the site of one of the great presidential debates in 1992.”38 Later, in his peroration, Clinton will draw more explicit attention to the setting of his address, specifically opposing what he deems “the real Michigan”—with a revived “automobile industry,” “the best cherries in the world,” and the “Great Lakes and the ‘UP’ [upper peninsula]”—to the negative “publicity in recent days about Michigan and the militias.” Clinton anticipates this final move when he opens his speech with a more subtle play against the typing of Michigan as home to the militias. Michigan, he recalls, has also been home to a recent presidential debate. In principle, such a ritual reaffirms a government of the people by inviting the nation’s citizens to assess those who wish to represent them at the highest level. Clinton redefines Michigan from the onset as an appropriate place from which to reflect on government itself, its meanings, and its actual role in the lives of the citizens who grant it authority.
Quickly pairing the place and the purpose of his speech into an implicit harmony, Clinton praises two government programs with lessons for the nation as a whole, but with specific origins in Michigan. He wishes that other states would emulate its “tuition guarantee program” and the “Michigan Educational Trust,” for they are examples of government working so that “more people can afford to go to college and stay there until they get their degrees.” And, notably, he praises these initiatives because they are examples of the kind of programs that allowed, in his words, “a person who never, ever, would have had an opportunity to be here today” to become president.
Clinton opens his speech, then, in tacit rebuttal of charges made across the spectrum of antigovernment rhetoric—from the halls of Congress to the literature of the extreme right—that government is mostly ineffective, economically stifling, and distant from the needs of its citizens. He offers locally relevant proofs, instead, of its ability to create “a remarkable set of educational opportunities for young people in Michigan” and to be the decisive factor in helping him to achieve his dreams. Clinton then turns to a living example of how government, through its laws, its courts, and its means of enforcement, can empower citizens to exercise their constitutional rights in the face of violent opposition and vigilantism. He tells his audience that he is “joined today by another Michigan State alumnus who spoke from this platform last year, my friend and fellow Arkansan, Ernest Green,” a member of the “Little Rock Nine” who risked his life “for the cause of school integration and equal opportunity” in the wake of President Eisenhower’s decision to back up the Supreme Court’s Brown decision with force. In his stand against segregation and inequality, Green illustrates something larger than himself and broader than the specific struggle in which he fought. Green, Clinton declares, “made the right choice at the right moment in his life” and, for this, “he is a good model for you, and I hope you will do the same.” For the “you” Clinton addresses to be able to “do the same” as Green is for this “you” to reach beyond the “moment” it is in, while at the same time recognizing its “moment” as something symbolically interchangeable with the one Green found himself in. Clinton suggests that just as Green’s time was one of violent domestic conflict and corresponding attacks against the legitimacy of the state, so is the one that this “you” confronts.
Clinton further emphasizes the interchangeability of “right moments” in which to make “right choices” of a certain kind when he turns to another former commencement speaker, Theodore Roosevelt, who addressed the university during
a time not unlike this time. We are on the edge of a new century; they had just begun a new century. We are on the edge of a new era; they had just begun the dawn of the industrial age. Like us now, they had many, many opportunities but profound problems. And people were full of hope mixed with fear.
Images of thresholds—“edges,” “just begun,” “dawn”—establish the logic of similarity here, as does the presumption of a similarly contradictory essence that defines each “time.” “We” and “they” both straddle historical and technological fault lines; “we” and “they” both live in times of uncertainty. The ambiguities of these “times” are what make the “right choice”—the address’ key metaphor for political judgment—important as an affirming act of citizenship. Associated with the capacity to face ambiguity and uncertainty are a series of qualities Clinton links with “Roosevelt and his generation of Americans.” They were “optimistic,” “aggressive,” and “determined to solve the problems before them.” Such qualities spurred a decisive action, what Clinton calls the “launch” of the progressive era. Clinton accompanies this “launch” with a set of active verbs. The generation that “launched” the progressive era, also worked to “free” market forces, to “protect” the environment, to “keep” our children safe, to “stand strong” internationally. Altogether, these actions are what Clinton will define as “the right choices at the right moment,” ones that not only addressed the “challenges of the present,” but that also “paved the way for a better future, and redeemed the promise of America.”
To redeem something is, among other things, to return it to its proper place from some other place. As such, redemption succeeds and becomes honorable largely in terms of overcoming its antagonists. In the case of the progressives, for example, the continuation of the promise was resisted by “the heavy hand of monopoly,” by those who threatened the environment, by the owners of “sweatshops,” and by foreign powers who challenged “America’s role in the world.” The example of the progressives shows how the potential for succumbing to such barriers—the “wrong” choice—exists not apart from the promise of America, but rather as its counterpart in a broader drama of redemption that is itself always implicated in the politics of the day, and thus subject to its pressures and meanings. If, as Clinton says, “our journey as a nation has never been an automatic march to freedom and opportunity,” it is because of the potential for wrong choices; the essence of the “journey” is violable in practice. This potential reveals the fragility of the space of choosing, of the contingency of the center beyond politics, which Clinton rhetorically honors. Proper to the “journey,” then, is not simply the telos of “freedom and opportunity,” but a recurrent test of citizens’ ability to maintain the center amidst conditions of uncertainty and polarization. This imagined space of choosing is what contains and mediates the opposing options that citizens will continually face at key times in the nation’s history.
If the “promise of America” is a democratic one that requires redemption through citizen choice rather than through divine order, it must be exercised in the agon of political action. Such a promise therefore requires a space in which to make choices, a stable locus of choosing in which right choices and wrong choices can present themselves for assessment. As an implicit political center, this space of choosing suggests its value to democracy in America, while also suggesting its vulnerability. Making “the right choice at the right moment” is also about choosing to protect the space in which others have made the “right choice” in the past and can have the chance to make it again in the future:
Throughout all 219 years of our Republic, times of great change like this have unleashed forces of promise and threat, forces that uplift us and unsettle us. . . . The basic question before us is as old as our country: Will we face up to the problems and seize our opportunities with confidence and courage?
Were “times of great change” those either of self-evident misery or of clear triumph, in other words, citizens would have little role to play in response; the “basic question” would not really be a question at all, but a matter of following the obvious. Instead, the question here is one that carries with it a “responsibility” to maintain, amidst the mutating “forces” of history, the ordered space apart from history that makes possible the freedom to choose in the first place. What is worse than the negative and unsettling “forces” unleashed by history? The possibility that such forces will overwhelm the drama of redemption so that “choosing right” is no longer even an option in the future; the agon of choice would be gone, and with it American democracy. To answer Clinton’s call to responsibility is therefore to answer a call to maintain the center amidst the possibility of a chaos so powerful that the very cycle of redemption is upset, overcome by the kind of political disorder that knocks the cycle of renewal off its axis.
Once this demand is set, Clinton quickly reveals its many obstacles in his time. Lurking beneath “reason for optimism” domestically and “reason for hope” internationally are challenges to choosing right that seem disparate, but are in fact united in their disordering effects. Although “freedom and democracy” have proven their ability to advance in spite of totalitarian government, they have yet to answer what Clinton calls the “real threat to our security,” that is, a world in which “the forces that are lifting us up and opening unparalleled opportunity for us” also make us “very, very vulnerable to the forces of organized destruction and evil.”
Though such vulnerability inspires what Clinton defines as “the great security challenge” for the future, Clinton’s speech focuses on its present, and on the signs of what the failure to meet this “challenge” have meant already: “The dark possibilities of our age are visible now in the smoke, the horror, and the heartbreak of Oklahoma City.” The bombing, in this construction, allows audiences to see the feared future backing itself into the present; something completely unknowable becomes partially known when the event is treated as a sign of things potentially to come. Once the bombing becomes Clinton’s device for making “visible” possibilities greater than itself, it becomes amenable to a series of negative associations with violence and otherness that span space and time—the first bombing of the World Trade Center, a nerve gas attack in Tokyo, terrorism in the Middle East, organized crime in the former USSR, and the use of the Internet as a resource for building bombs, even as children use to it “learn from sources all around the world.” These are examples Clinton cites to support his claim that Oklahoma City reveals a “threat [that] is not isolated” and that “you must not believe” is isolated.
How has Clinton arrived at this juncture? He started in praise of government initiatives to expand educational opportunity. From this, he segued to two exemplars—Earnest Green (and implicitly the civil rights movement) and Theodore Roosevelt (and explicitly the progressive movement)—of “making the right choice at the right moment” in order to “redeem the promise of America.” These redeemers of a promise have each given commencement speeches, occupying the exact role Clinton occupies; they have each spoken from the same “place.” Too, Clinton notes, one is a “fellow Arkansan,” while the other was also president. A shared participation in points that demand “historic choices for America” is, finally, what cements the coherence of a set of relations between the speakers. This underlying coherence accompanies the speech’s capacity to draw disparate audiences into a single vector of purpose that nevertheless spans ages and contexts. The space of choosing, that which contains the possibility of deciding “to go forward or turn back, to reach out or turn inward, to unify or divide, to believe or doubt,” is where the possibility of redemption dwells for each generation as they each face their own “point of challenge in change.” But this center, this “point,” also contains the seeds of its own dissolution. The flip side of the intensified coherence that allows us to see the drama of redemption repeat itself, and to act so as to redeem the promise ourselves, is the “dark possibility” of the fracturing of this space for good.
Insofar as choosing wrong aligns itself, in the case of the Oklahoma City bombing and its related events, with ignoring a global “threat” to the lives of millions and to the institutions of the state, it becomes the same as hastening the end of democracy. To choose wrong is to turn way from a threat to the primary agents of democracy’s authority throughout history—the nation-state and the people who underwrite its legitimacy. It is this “threat” that motivates Clinton’s call for Congress to “pass strong antiterrorism legislation” along with his warning that
the failure to act will undermine [our constitutional rights]. For no one is free in America where parents have to worry when they drop off their children for day care or when you are the target of assassination simply because you work for our Government. No one is free in America when large numbers of our fellow citizens must always be looking over their shoulders.
In this passage, the stress is on the vulnerability of citizens, in particular parents, children, and government employees, to targeted terrorist violence. Their vulnerability is associated with an undermining of rights, a loss of freedom, and pervasive anxiety; in a sense, Clinton suggests that “no one is free” already because government has failed to protect adequately against the “threat.” And so what stands between the growing threat of political violence that Oklahoma demonstrates, and those who might become its unwitting victims, is the state’s capacity to ensure security for its citizens. Clinton’s legislation provides for a “domestic antiterrorism center,” for “up-to-date technology” to trace bombs, for “1,000 law enforcement personnel,” and for increased penalties for harming “members of the uniformed services or Federal workers.” He has insisted that Congress pass it “immediately,” since the issue of security is “not and must never be a partisan issue.”
It is at this point in the speech, once Clinton has offered what seems to be a concrete way that his audience can “make the right choice” by supporting his plan to combat terror, that the discourse takes a major turn. In a switch from addressing his gathered audience of students directly, and including himself within its scope, Clinton calls another audience into his speech, one that before was only present in the speech’s connotative backdrop. He begins to address those who, for the remainder of the speech, will personify in their words and associations “the dark possibilities” of Oklahoma City, and therefore the broader threat posed to the center. The rhetorical shaping of this audience proceeds through a set of dichotomies that arise between the center as a space of choosing and the threatening “you” that will dominate the second half of the speech.
After referring to the climate of fear the attack has engendered, and to the potential and already-realized loss of freedom it symbolizes, Clinton wants those gathered to keep “this in mind” as the impetus for what will follow. For Clinton begins at this juncture to disregard, seemingly, the people who are before him—the students, faculty, family, and others gathered in East Lansing—and to speak instead to another audience, one both nearby and far away:
It is with this in mind that I would like to say something to the paramilitary groups and to others who believe the greatest threat to America comes not from terrorists from within our country or beyond our borders but from our own Government.
This is the first in a sequence of similar constructions in the speech, all of which entail the speaker referring directly to his own act of speaking, no matter who he addresses: “I want to say this to the militias and to others who believe this, to those nearby and those far away”; “So I ask you to hear me now”; “So I say this to the militias and all others who believe that the greatest threat to freedom comes from the Government instead of from those who would take away our freedom”; “I say to you, all of you, the members of the Class of 1995”; “And I would like to say one word to the people of the United States”; “So, my fellow Americans and members of the Class of 1995, let me close by reminding you”; “Let me remind you once again.” Apparently superfluous, the small tokens that unite this form of self-reference are nevertheless rhetorically significant. They work to place what is being said into a realm apart from who says it. Clinton does not simply “say” this; he “want[s] to say this.” He does not simply “say one word”; he “would like to” do so. He does not merely address the militias; he asks them “to hear me now.” These small moves in each case paradoxically place Clinton in a realm apart from the conflict he is addressing, while also increasing his ability to define its nature. He exists simply as if to say things that need to be said, and thus to put before the eyes of citizens certain fundamental truths about the “you”—the one composed not only or even mainly of “the militias,” but of the nameless “others” who share their antipathy toward government—which threatens to overwhelm the center.
Clinton begins to define the composite nature of the threatening “you” by sequencing two principles of relationship. First, the speaker grants the “you” certain truths about its makeup. The speaker is “well aware that most of you have never violated the law”; that “some of you have recently [made comments] condemning the bombing in Oklahoma City; and that “you have every right, indeed you have the responsibility, to question our Government.” These were the common rebuttals used by the defenders of the militia movement at the time, and Clinton accepts them at face value as premises everyone shares. Thus, each time he mentions the “you” in the passage it is, ironically, to place “the militias and all others who believe that the greatest threat to freedom comes from the Government” into the realm of the normal and the lawful, that is, Clinton’s realm. He brings the full breadth of the “you,” of its general adherence to the law, of its recent words of goodwill, and of its rights under the Constitution, into the foreground. And yet, unsurprisingly, this is plainly a setup for something else. For Clinton quickly follows these words with some far less comforting truths about the “you” as well, ones that hide within its very breadth.
The president also knows that
there have been lawbreakers among those who espouse your philosophy. I know from painful personal experience as a Governor of a State who lived through the coldblooded killing of a young sheriff and a young African-American State trooper who were friends of mine by people who espoused the view that the Government was the biggest problem in America and that people had a right to take violence into their own hands.
Clinton here builds a unity at the level of identity that contains a less relevant distinction at the level of action. The few who engage in acts such as “coldblooded killing” and the many who “have never violated the law” both appear in Clinton’s speech as espousers of the same “philosophy,” albeit divided in terms of how they put it into practice. And yet, Clinton will, in the next paragraph, work from the principle of the relationship he has just elaborated in order to build another that is similar in its outline, but different in its character.
The initial sequence he develops arranges the “you” into opposed parts, with one nevertheless including the other on some level: those who espouse the notion that “government is the biggest problem” and the minority among them who literally attack state institutions and employees so as to realize the most radical “end” of such a notion. This claim provides the criteria to make a reasonable distinction between the mostly lawful, sometimes civil, and always constitutionally protected part of the “you” and its lawbreaking, murderous, and rights-undermining counterpart. Clinton will go on to suggest, however, that this particular relation between the two parts of the “you” is far less important than another.
Indeed, for Clinton, the problem of the “you” is not really that of a mostly law-abiding majority close to the center that needs to reign in a radical, extremist fringe on the margins. Rather, the problem entails their mutual implication in a generally hostile stance toward democracy. Such a stance blurs the line between constructive political debate within a system of mutual identification and factional political combat with little regard for its ethical or human consequences. How do we know when such a line has become blurred? When, Clinton suggests, legitimate beliefs about government routinely burst the bounds of democratic process and, instead, become expressed as radically “free” rhetorical incitements to action without any corresponding structure to mediate them.
As such, Clinton will presume it his duty to reassert the force of this line:
So I ask you to hear me now. It is one thing to believe that the Federal Government has too much power and to work within the law to reduce it. It is quite another to break the law of the land and threaten to shoot officers of the law if all they do is their duty to uphold it. It is one thing to believe we are taxed too much and work to reduce the tax burden. It is quite another to refuse to pay your taxes, though your neighbor pays his. It is one thing to believe we are over-regulated and to work to lessen the burden of regulation. It is quite another to slander our dedicated public servants, our brave police officers, even our rescue workers who have been called a hostile army of occupation.
The key difference in each case between what is attached to “one thing” and what is attached to “quite another” hinges on acts that contain two vital steps—“to believe” and “to work”—and those that do not, and so risk the very possibility of democratic self-governance. Clinton begins his chain of antitheses with this combination as a rhetorical device, and then returns to it twice in exactly the same fashion. In each case, Clinton attaches “to believe” to an easily recognizable tenet of mainstream conservatism at the time, providing a model that is explicitly directed at his adversaries. With this in mind, “to believe” becomes a preface not simply to bold expression or action, but to a mundane kind of “work” that will aim “to reduce” or “to lessen” various powers of the federal government, rather than to eliminate such powers. Work, for example, calls to mind associations with process, compromise, and even frustration in a political structure with others. Reduction and lessening, the two acts Clinton associates with the kind of “work” that legitimately follows from “belief,” are complex acts of adjustment through deliberation, not ones of substitution or elimination. They take time, they require diligence, and they can potentially build collective responsibility for policy outcomes.
On the other hand, each “to believe/to work” combination is set against acts unmoored from any such principle—threatening to shoot police, refusing to pay taxes, slandering our public servants, and calling rescue workers hostile. The centripetal coupling of belief and work as the corresponding agents of sustainable self-governance finds its centrifugal foil in a cluster of acts and statements that undermine the very possibility of such governance in the first place. To refuse to pay one’s taxes not only weakens the state treasury, it signals disregard for the burdens accepted by our fellow citizens. To “refuse” or to “slander” are also things that require nothing in the way of deliberation with those with whom one disagrees. Thus, when Clinton makes each the representative act of a “philosophy” he connects to examples of “coldblooded killing” he is interpolating into that philosophy (or discerning from it) a fundamental truth about where it leads: steeped in the belief that government is a “problem,” the solutions offered by such a “philosophy” tend a way from collaborative acts of construction, and toward individual acts of destruction, tend away from sentiments of collective responsibility, and toward those of resentment and the claiming of unfounded “rights.” The “philosophy” becomes, in a sense, unphilosophical, less a set of reasoned propositions about government than a platform for exaggerated grievances that lead to lawlessness and the temptation to violence.
It is in the shadow of such lawlessness that Clinton reveals how the anti-government, unphilosophical philosophy that defines the threat to the center is both redundant and “un-American” in its aims. It is redundant because “our Constitution was established by Americans determined to limit” abuses of power by government, and continues to provide for an exceptional degree and specification of freedom—“This is a very free country.” The depth and clarity of this freedom should be appreciated most, Clinton pointedly suggests, by “those of you in the militia movements [who have] broader rights than you would in any other country in the entire world.” Clinton then brings this exceptionally American freedom into a consensus narrative of national political identity; he makes it a function of the constraints on governmental power established by the Constitution:
As long as human beings make up our government there will be mistakes. But our Constitution was established by Americans determined to limit those abuses. And think of the limits: the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, access to the courts, the right to take your case to the country through the media, and the right to vote people in or out of office on a regular basis.
That the threatening “you” seems to take such rights for granted invites questions about its motives. For if these rights are not really what is at stake, then what do “you” desire? What more do “you” want, if not the rights enjoyed by “we in the freest nation on Earth?”
Clinton answers in terms of “rights” that are most certainly not in the Constitution:
But there is no right to resort to violence when you don’t get your way. There is no right to kill people. There is no right to kill people who are doing their duty or minding their own business or children who are innocent in every way. Those are the people who perished in Oklahoma City. And those who claim such rights are wrong and un-American.
He suggests not only that it is absurd to claim such things as “rights” but that “those” who would find such “rights” implied in the Constitution are both “wrong and un-American.” At the same time, such behavior is neither historically isolated, nor confined to the militias. Clinton finds analogues to the threatening “you” across U.S. history and society. Others, too have defended their violence as “freedom of political speech”—the Weather Underground of the “radical left in the 1960s resorted to violence,” gang members who justify “taking the law into their own hands” because of the lawlessness of their communities, and “the people who came to the United States to bomb the World Trade Center.” This final analogue seems especially strange to say the least, since it was a foreign terrorist group that committed the act and since Clinton’s other two examples are domestic, as are the militias. And yet, foregrounding a link between political violence against the state and foreignness—or, at least, “un-American-ness”—is partly the point here.
Clinton attempts to cast the “you” as a fundamentally negative feature of American identity, a constant reminder of what the nation must never become. What marks “the militias and all others who believe that the greatest threat to freedom comes from the Government” in this instance is a kind of lack, a failure that coincides with an absence of fidelity to the Founders. They cannot grasp how the freedom promised by democracy has always been intertwined with a government’s capacity to create and protect spaces for the exercise of democracy. Most odious is their brazen attempt to “appropriate our sacred symbols for paranoid purposes and compare yourselves to colonial militias who fought for the democracy you now rail against.” Clinton implores, “How dare you call yourselves patriots and heroes!” thus rejecting any attempt to equate the militias’ actions with an historically righteous form of violent resistance and setting the stage for another layer in his definition of the threatening “you.”
Toward the end of his speech, Clinton strengthens the identification of government with what I earlier called the “space of choosing,” and therefore moves more clearly to associate threats to the former with those to the latter. In the lead-up to speech’s most quoted phrase, Clinton begins his peroration by offering his gathered audience—“all of you, the members of the Class of 1995”—a maxim through which to understand the fundamental deception embedded in the arguments propounded by the militias and others: “There is nothing patriotic about hating your country or pretending that you can love your country but despise your government.” This maxim uses the notion of “pretending” to suggest that the claim to “patriotism,” like the claim to “rights,” has been used to avoid deeper and more difficult responsibilities associated with citizenship. Along these lines, to “despise your government” leads to what Clinton calls “turning your back on America” not only because it encourages the actual targeting of other Americans, but because it paints a false picture of civic virtue, one that ends up destroying relationships among citizens and between citizens and their government.
Thus, in an implicit contrast with the terminology of “revolution” that undergirded both the Republicans in Congress and the militias themselves, Clinton paints an alternative, less martial vision of such virtue. This vision, which resembles the rhetoric of the April 23 eulogy, is a communitarian one based not in the bold acts or statements of the militias, but in the quotidian practices of the nation’s citizens that serve to maintain not only order, safety, and progress, but values such as reciprocity and diligence. It is based in what Clinton calls the “responsibilities” of everyday people, those he calls “the real American heroes . . . the citizens who get up every morning and have the courage to work hard and play by the rules.” The phrase “work hard and play by the rules” recalls one of the earliest slogans of Clinton’s campaign rhetoric from the fall of 1991. Here, as before, it defines citizens who are not only models of discipline and order, but underappreciated heroes who toil invisibly and typically for the benefit of others.
The modest, everyday qualities Clinton’s ascribes to his American heroes not only support the realism of his depiction, but they more firmly ground such heroes in a value contrast with those who compose the threatening “you.” The “real American heroes” are neither revolutionaries, nor particularly concerned with politics in any outward way at all. And this is key, for their “responsibilities” are not to the ends of a “philosophy” but to the needs of others, that is, to the well-being of fellow citizens near and far. To defend the space of choosing is, in a sense, equivalent to the heroism displayed by millions every day. By “choosing right” in small ways these heroes exemplify an ethic of right choosing that audiences are implored to embrace and to see in opposition to the threatening “you” represented by the militias. Clinton’s heroes are overworked mothers who still read to their kids, rescue workers who risk their lives to save the trapped and the injured, and parents who sacrifice to pay for their children to “have the education that you have had.” In contrast, Clinton describes “the militias and all others who believe that the greatest threat to freedom comes from the Government” in terms of presumptions that inherently weaken our capacity to even define such “responsibilities” in a coherent way. They presume that “violence is an acceptable way to make change” and that “Government is in a conspiracy to take your freedom away,” and thus they feel the need to “treat law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line for your safety every day like some kind of enemy.” These presumptions and forms of action are inconsistent with maintaining the legitimacy of the rule of law, and thus they undermine the possibility of democracy—in Clinton’s words, “Without respect for this law, there is no freedom.”
At the same time, Clinton’s speech is not, of course, primarily about encouraging “respect for this law.” As its conclusion demonstrates it is about respecting a spirit of order, one ensured by the Founders. This order is what in Clinton’s words, allows for the possibility of defeating fear itself: the “Founding Fathers created a system of laws in which reason could prevail over fear,” while the militias explicitly use fear to undermine such a system, and thus to undermine reason itself. Those “who believe the greatest threat to America comes not from terrorists from within our country or beyond our borders but from our own Government,” are the enemies not simply of the government, or even of the nation. They are the unreasonable ones, so deluded in their thinking that they stand for a threat to reason itself, and yet so intimately involved in the history of America that they serve as a constant reminder of civic duty:
We must not give in to fear or use the frustrations of the moment as an excuse to walk away from the obligations of citizenship. Remember what our Founding Fathers built. Remember the victories won for us in the cold war and in World War II, 50 years ago next week. Remember the blood and sweat and triumph that enabled us to come to this, the greatest moment of possibility in our history. . . . Make the choices that Theodore Roosevelt made, that Ernest Green made. Seize your moment. Build a better future. And redeem once again the promise of America.
As in Clinton’s inaugural, a narrative of enduring national purpose becomes lashed to one of enduring democratic fragility. To “redeem once again the promise of America” becomes to “remember” the struggles and successes of others similarly faced with “fear” at moments across history, and then to choose as they chose. And, in turn, to “remember” that the “fear and frustrations of the moment” that Clinton refers to are eternally threatening is also to remember they can be surpassed with a corresponding power of transcendence that allows Americans to rise from social and political division in order to reaffirm the endurance of their democracy.
Conclusion
The closing moments of Clinton’s speech thus combined the warning of a threat to common democratic values posed by the blast with a call to unite against this threat in its aftermath. In a piece titled “Toxic Speech” published after the Michigan address, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter displayed a similar tendency, suggesting is broader reach.
For Alter, in fact, the president should have acted much earlier than he did. Clinton should have taken “a cue from his Sister Souljah triumph in the 1992 campaign” and made the centrist “denunciation of incendiary rhetoric on both the left and the right a regular feature of his presidency.” Because the bombing had forced consideration of such rhetoric to the surface, however, circumstances had demanded that Clinton take the lead from the center—and he had: “Now, finally we’re beginning to take a hard look at our whole Vulture Culture the endless shouting and demonizing that doesn’t necessarily lead to violence but coarsens and worsens us all.” What Alter terms “Vulture Culture” leads to an erosion of “faith in democratic life” in which “anger breeds withdrawal breeds profound alienation and a new, lonelier civic existence.” For Alter, the Oklahoma City bombings brought into focus a certain truth that might lead to a new start for American politics: “If we lower our voices, we won’t necessarily save any lives. But we may help save our ability to reason and govern together.”39
It was along these same lines of interpretation in the weeks and months following the blast, that the actions of McVeigh could be dialectically transformed by the president and others into the impetus for a new order that would cultivate moderation as a civic virtue and resist extremism in the name of democracy. Alter’s call for quiet and reasoned voices—a counter–“Vulture Culture”—moves to evoke a concern among audiences for maintaining their own “faith in democratic life” despite evidence that might contravene it. Giving presence to such a concern was central to the president’s rhetorical effort. And of its function as an illustration of epideictic, the philosopher and rhetorician Chaïm Perelman would likely have found much to say.
Rather than privileging the deliberative dimension of political discourse, Perelman looked toward “the spiritual unity which the epideictic discourse properly reinforces” as the only way to preserve democracy. It was the ordering eloquence of epideictic—the stabilizing achievement of a language of community—that Perelman saw as vital:
In order for a democratic regime to function, that is, in order for a minority to accept the decision of the majority, after deliberation, the values common to all members of the community must be considered more fundamental than those which tend to separate it.40
The tendency to define democratic legitimacy merely by “considerations of a quantitative order” is insufficient rhetorically to create at least the presumption of commonality—“must be considered more fundamental”—required for democratic life.41 For Perelman, who dreamed it possible to “reason about values instead of making them depend solely on irrational choices based on interests, passion, prejudice, and myth,” the ability, as Alter put it, “to reason and govern together” was contingent upon a kind of rhetoric that itself made democracy possible.42 Reasoning and governing were arts contingent upon the values and meanings established by epideictic, for, as Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca asked, “Without such common values, upon what foundation could deliberative and legal speeches rest?”43 What democracy’s advocates too often tended to forget was a certain requirement, in other words. The common desire for transcendence must be evoked so as to cohere the partisan desires of different groups and individuals into some kind a shared space:
We must first want the political order which transcends the particulars and the conflicts of interests, we must want the communion in the church, whatever divergences there may be in the interpretation of sacred texts, in order that submission to the laws, obedience to the authorities, and respect for the established order should prevail.44
Perelman does not spell out the source of this “want” for a “political order which transcends the particulars” as something metaphysical or ontological. Rather, one takes from Perelman that such a desire must be sparked rhetorically in practice, as in the case of the Michigan State University commencement address. Citizens must be persuaded to “want” order in general if they are to seek to change any order in particular
In Perelman’s account, then, the desire for transcendence through order does not exist apart from democratic politics but within its ambit as its condition of possibility and as one of its key, renewable resources for persuasion. Through recourse to rhetoric praising or defending transcendent political values that are presumed to bind all, this want can take on expression. It can serve as a counterweight to the centrifugal tendencies of democracy, in particular against faction and the refusal of marginal, yet disproportionately influential, political groups—like the militias—to accede to the legitimacy of law.
And yet, given what we know about the production of political transcendence, and about the White House’s thinking at the time, the question of what purposes the call to order would align itself with in the coming months remains an important one. If broad, noncoercive forms of “submission,” “obedience,” and “respect” for order were truly at stake in the rhetorical response to what was a potentially destabilizing event in U.S. history, to what particular ends would the community Clinton called into being be directed? Although I will take up this question in the subsequent chapter, I want to address part of it here before closing this one.
Invited to “redeem the promise of America,” citizens were defined by Clinton as members of a timeless, idealized community. The errand of redemption required unity so as to confront the all-encompassing scenic threat to democracy that had prompted the violent act itself. Respect for the law, justice for the innocent, reverence for tradition, fraternity with one’s fellow citizens, and reasoned deliberation over matters of dispute—these were just some of the values Clinton stressed. Each value, in turn, became tied to a “mainstream”—marked in terms of civility, prudence, commonality, and national purpose—against which the “extreme”—marked in terms of violence, recklessness, separation, and national threat—could be isolated. With the range of means available for persuasion that emerged through this contrast, Clinton sought to define the “extreme” not merely in contrast to the “mainstream” but as incompatible with democracy itself. This enlargement of the threat was integral both for its association with the House Republicans, as well as for a construction of its aftermath via analogy with other “moments” of choosing, other “points of challenge in change when critical decisions are made by our people.” And yet, what makes the enlargement strategy of Clinton’s responses noteworthy is how the intensity of its central division worked to selectively contain other divisions over government inside the “mainstream.”
This work of containment—of defining one debate over government as within the domain of order, while defining another as between order and disorder—becomes key in the near future; it will underwrite Clinton’s attempt throughout 1996 to claim the center. Such work will help to define the space and meaning of a transcendence of left and right on key issues facing the nation in spite of the considerable political constraints he was under and the fierce, if often tin eared, opposition he faced.
Although it demarcated the sides in a set of fearsome struggles—for example, between democracy and terrorism, government or no government, those who protect children and those who target them for death, and the like—the border used to distinguish “mainstream” from “extreme” after the blast was, as we know, a strategically ambiguous and contingent one. As Clinton rhetorically drew this border, he would fashion an epidictic transcendence of the ordinary political divisions of the day. Just as important, however, he would also continually return to these divisions from his transcended position in order to give broader meaning to what was behind the attacks and to recommend who should do what to forestall similar events in the future. As such, he both included and excluded his adversaries from the realm of the “mainstream” when it came to the question of government. Command of this ambiguity was decisive. After the blast, it helped Clinton to do two things.
First, it allowed the “distance” of antigovernment ideology from the values of democratic governance to coincide with the “closeness” of Republicans to the institutions of democratic representation. As such, the “extreme” was outside of the “mainstream,” and yet close enough to one of the main political parties to warrant concern. In turn, this “closeness” carried within it the promise of reintegration, of surmounting the “distance” from the center in order to restore stasis—even sanity—to the political system by working with Republicans to shrink the size and narrow the scope of government. After the blast, the president could proclaim the extremism of his opponents, on the one hand, while seeming to be a reasonable steward of their more legitimate claims, on the other. As Clinton’s commencement speech urged audiences to make the “right choices at the right moment” in order to save democracy from antigovernment extremism, it thus pays to ask about what the making of such “choices” entailed in the text for the vision and purpose of “government” that Clinton advocated in the months following.
In asking such a question, we arrive at the shape and limit of this political moment in terms of “government” as an object of discourse, and thus to the limits of the analogies the speech depends on for its heroic vision of “choosing right.” For though the national errand of “choosing right” in a world of threat and ambiguity is exemplified in the speech by two instances of direct and transformative federal intervention into questions of economic, environmental, and social justice, Clinton was in no place politically—nor was he ideologically disposed—to call for a use of “the power of Government” in any way reminiscent of the Progressive or civil rights eras. And this discrepancy is telling, since it reveals how the analogical extension of each moment of choice into the present involved not only reminding Americans to make the “right choice,” but also asking citizens to forget aspects of how to do so as well when it came to the how they saw government. Clinton creates a presence of purpose around “choice” in facing threats to democracy. And yet, these stirring illustrations of courage were, for the needs of the moment, drained of their history as well.
To “make the choices that Theodore Roosevelt made, that Ernest Green made” meant joining in a collective struggle animated, in part, by the belief that government could and should be used to bring greater opportunity and equality to the United States. In each, the connection between the federal government, democracy, and national community though complex, involved envisioning the first—government—as an agent through which to expand the national meaning and scope of the second and third—democracy and community—to more Americans. While Clinton may have shared such a belief in government, it was hardly essential to his political identity, nor was it the animating promise of his administration when it came to government, especially in the spring of 1995. By seeking to quell and then to reintegrate the debate over government into such a system, Clinton’s rhetoric after the bombing was, in short, a call to order, with all that entails. If Green and Roosevelt can be said to have “saved” the nation at the “right moment,” their saving was of the kind that sought to extend the benefits of liberal democracy to greater segments of American society by dismantling economic and racial hierarchy. Their “right choices at the right moment” coincided with the end of eras defined by stratification, and the start of ones defined by increasing, however imperfectly, democratization. By contrast, Clinton’s rhetoric revealed less the vision of democracy expanded through struggle, than of community saved through transcendence, and of a renewed relationship between the very ideas of “government” and “community” as a result. As the 1996 election approached, and a budget showdown with Republicans loomed, this vision would gain strength and acquire a guiding purpose beyond the soothing of a rattled nation.
Notes
1. Russell Hanson, “Democracy,” in Ideas in Context: Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 70.
2. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1949), 256.
3. Bill Clinton, “Keynote Address of Gov. Bill Clinton to the Democratic Leadership DLC’s Cleveland Convention,” May 6, 1991, www.ndol.org/print.cfm?contentid=3166.
4. From interview with Burns and Sorenson, Dead Center, 13.
5. On Clinton’s speech as an “inaugural jeremiad,” see David E. Procter and Kurt Ritter’s “Inaugurating the Clinton Presidency: Regenerative Rhetoric and the American Community,” in The Clinton Presidency: Images, Issues and Communication Strategies, ed. Robert E. Denton and Rachel Holloway (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 1–17. On the “jeremiadic logic” of Clinton’s campaign rhetoric, see Craig Allen Smith’s “The Jeremiadic Logic of Bill Clinton’s Policy Speeches,” in Bill Clinton on Stump, State, and Stage, ed. Stephen A. Smith (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), 73–100.
6. “Inaugural Address,” Public Papers of the Presidents, William J. Clinton, 1993 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), 1:1.
7. Charles O. Jones, Clinton and Congress, 1993–1996: Risk, Restoration, and Reelection (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 55.
8. Elizabeth Drew, On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (New York: Touchstone, 1994), 36.
9. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), 520–21.
10. Douglas Jehl, “Clinton Accused of Forsaking the Center,” New York Times, December 7, 1994, B10; John Aloysius Farrell, “President Returns to Center as He Seeks a Way to Govern,” Boston Globe, December 14, 1994, p. 1.
11. Quoted in Richard L. Berke, “Moderate Democrats’ Poll Sends the President a Warning,” New York Times, November 18, 1994, A30.
12. “Remarks at the Democratic Leadership Council Gala,” Public Papers of the Presidents, William J. Clinton, 1994 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994) 2:2155.
13. “The President’s News Conference,” Public Papers of the Presidents, William J. Clinton, 1995 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995), 1:547
14. The phrase “The Incredible Shrinking President” comes from a Time magazine cover. The story it touted alerted readers to the fact that Clinton was suffering a lower approval rating than any other postwar president so early into his first term. “That Sinking Feeling,” Time, June 7, 1993, pp. 23–29.
15. Michael Waldman, POTUS Speaks: Finding the Words That Defined the Clinton Presidency (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 82.
16. “Remarks on the Bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma,” in Public Papers of the Presidents, William J. Clinton, 1995 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995), 1:552; See Waldman, POTUS, 82.
17. “The President’s News Conference with President Fernando Cardoso of Brazil,” in Public Papers of the Presidents, William J. Clinton, 1995, 1:558; “Interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes,” in Public Papers of the Presidents, William J. Clinton, 1995, 1:574.
18. See www.oklahomacitybombing.com/oklahoma-city-bombing-pictures-1.html (accessed October 26, 2009).
19. “Reassuring the Children of America,” CBS News Special Report, April 22, 1995, www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic.
20. “Remarks by the President and Hillary Clinton to Children on the Oklahoma City Bombing,” in Public Papers of the Presidents, William J. Clinton, 1995, 1:569.
21. “Remarks at a Memorial Service for the Bombing Victims in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma,” in Public Papers of the Presidents, William J. Clinton, 1995, 1:573–74. All references to Clinton’s address at the memorial service come from this transcription, which can be searched online at www.gpoaccess.gov/pubpapers/wjclinton.html.
22. “Remarks at a Memorial Service,” 573.
23. “Remarks to the American Association of Community Colleges in Minneapolis, Minnesota,” in Public Papers of the Presidents, William J. Clinton, 1995, 1:580. Emphasis added.
24. David Broder, “Turning from Extremism,” Washington Post, April 25, 1995, A17.
25. E. J. Dionne, “A Time for Politicians to Look Within,” Washington Post, April 25, 1995, A17.
26. Michael Lind, “Understanding Oklahoma,” Washington Post, April 30, 1995, C1.
27. Rod Waston, “Gingrich’s Reckless Rhetoric Comes Home to Roost with Bombing,” Buffalo News, April 27, 1995, Viewpoints, 3.
28. “Remarks and an Exchange with Reporters on the Oklahoma City Bombing,” in Public Papers of the Presidents, William J. Clinton, 1995, 1:568.
29. Peter Applebome, “Terror in Oklahoma: Radical Right’s Fury Boiling Over,” New York Times, April 23, 1995, A33.
30. “Remarks to the American Association of Community Colleges,” 580.
31. “Interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes,” 574.
32. Sidney Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars (Plume: New York, 2003), 132.
33. Clinton, My Life, 652.
34. Waldman, POTUS, 82.
35. Drew, Showdown, 200–202.
36. Joe Klein, The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 144.
37. Carol Gelderman, The Bully Pulpit and the Creation of the Virtual Presidency (New York: Walker and Company, 1997), 167,
38. “Remarks at the Michigan State University Commencement Ceremony in East Lansing, Michigan,” in Public Papers of the Presidents, William J. Clinton, 1995, 1:641–45. All references to Clinton’s address at Michigan State University come from this transcription, which can be searched online at www.gpoaccess.gov/pubpapers/wjclinton.html.
39. Jonathan Alter, “Toxic Speech,” Newsweek, May 8, 1995, p. 4.
40. Chaïm Perelman, “Rhetoric and Politics,” trans. James Winchester and Molly Black Verene,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 17 (1984): 133.
41. Perelman, “Rhetoric and Politics,” 132.
42. Chaïm Perelman, “The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Practical Reasoning,” in The Great Ideas Today: 1970, trans. E. Griffin-Collart and O. Bird (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1970), 280.
43. Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkerson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1960), 53–53.
44. Perelman, “Rhetoric and Politics,” 133.