[In the following excerpt, Jay offers a negative assessment of No One Left to Lie To.]

‘The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.’ It is safe to assume that the Oscar Wilde of ‘The Decay of Lying’ would feel far more at home in the America of William Jefferson Clinton than in that of its most esteemed founding father. For whatever else may be accused of falling into decay these days, public mendacity has surely enjoyed a robust revival. The most memorable quotations from our national leaders are no longer the inspirational homilies of a Roosevelt or a Kennedy—‘You have nothing to fear, but fear itself’ or ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’—but the exposed whoppers of Richard ‘I am not a crook’ Nixon, George ‘Read my lips: no new taxes’ Bush, and Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton.

David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, hammered home the point in the course of his peroration during last winter's impeachment proceedings: ‘The President, then, has lied under oath in a civil deposition, lied under oath in a criminal grand jury. He lied to the people, he lied to his Cabinet, he lied to his top aides; and now he's lied under oath to the Congress of the United States. There's no one left to lie to.’ Christopher Hitchens borrows Schippers's scornful punch line for the title of his own screed against the President. Unperturbed by his proximity to right-wing Clinton-bashers like Schippers, Hitchens mounts a relentless and often compelling attack from the left on the link between the President's ideological duplicities and his personal ones, culminating in the scandal surrounding the ultimate erupted bimbo. His main ire is directed at the opportunistic ‘triangulation’ between pseudo-populist rhetoric, élitist, covertly conservative policies, and Clinton's own power-lust and ‘ruthless vanity,’ which undermined the chances of any genuinely progressive politics. …

Ironically, one of the most time-honoured techniques of political rhetoric is the appeal to truth and the accusation of base mendacity levelled against one's opponents. Hitchens's No One Left to Lie To is an exemplary instance of this rhetorical ploy; its tone is that of someone supremely confident in his possession of the unvarnished truth. That confidence is evident in his contemptuous dismissal of a politics of ‘the lesser evil,’ which stoops to compromise on issues of principle, instead of fighting for them no matter how vain the struggle or how collateral the damage. Not only does Hitchens discern a consistent pattern of duplicitous triangulation in everything Clinton has done, he is also confident of knowing all the motives underlying the President's actions. No action is overdetermined or indeterminant; they all serve the same triangulating function: maintaining political viability at the cost of betraying a liberal agenda.

No less ironically, the book is itself an extended op-ed piece, resting more on avid belief and strongly held opinions than hard, dispassionately presented knowledge, and liberally drawing on its author's formidable rhetorical skills to convince the reader. Hitchens's argument is based on a welter of assertions about Clinton's actions—many of which, I hasten to add, are all too plausible—that are never backed up in a convincing way by verifiable sources. Appearing hard on the heels of Hitchens's brief notoriety as a player in the impeachment scandal and, despite his protestations to the contrary, showing the effects of its rush to publication, the book does not, in fact, have a single footnote to allow one to test its truth claims. It relies instead on the repeated ad hominem excoriation of its main target as ‘the liar and the sonofabitch’ and an interpretation of every Presidential action in the worst way possible. Whereas Stephanopoulos's Clinton is depicted as forever struggling with constraints that limit his ability to get anything done, Hitchens's is able to complete the Reagan counter-revolution against the New Deal with breathtaking ease.

Not only does the effect of all this piling on become counter-productive, producing in the reader a certain sympathy for Clinton akin to the boost he got from being targeted by Kenneth Starr and his fanatic detractors on the right; it raises certain questions about Hitchens's own impatience with the messy ambiguities of politics. Take, for instance, his handling of Clinton's abiding popularity among African Americans, which was most clearly manifested during Monicagate. Hitchens ridicules the claim made by Toni Morrison and endorsed by Arthur Miller that because Clinton came from a broken home and had an alcoholic mother, he suffered from the same prejudices as those directed at blacks, and thus in some sense is ‘our first black President.’ He knows that when Clinton, as Governor of Arkansas, allowed a mentally deficient black murderer to be executed, or, as a Presidential candidate, slammed Sister Souljah in the presence of Jesse Jackson, or, as President, sacked Surgeon-General Joycelyn Elders and jettisoned the nomination of Lani Guinier as Assistant Attorney General for civil rights, he was showing his true colours as a false friend of the people whose pain he pretended to feel. Even more explicitly destructive was Clinton's welfare reform, whose likely intended consequence was ‘the creation of a large helot underclass disciplined by fear and scarcity, subject to endless surveillance, and used as a weapon against any American worker lucky enough to hold a steady or unionised job.’ Stephanopoulos may record that ‘Bill Clinton inspired me most when he spoke about race,’ but for Hitchens, it was all craven pandering that had lacked substance from the very beginning.

The trouble with this analysis—aside from the recent evidence that young black males seem to be doing better at entering the workforce than Hitchens's rehearsal of Marx's classic argument about the ‘reserved army of the unemployed’ suggests—is that it shows scarcely veiled disdain for the African Americans who remain stubbornly on Clinton's side. Hitchens fulminates against the ‘contempt with which Clinton and his circle view the gullible rubes who make up their voting base,’ but tacitly shares it. When, for example, he excoriates the Clintons for spouting ‘the tawdry pieties of Baptist and Methodist hypocrisy,’ he also reveals his inability to credit the people who share those pieties—many of them in black churches—with the ability to make reasoned judgments about the people they support. Many African Americans, moreover, seem to have the sophistication to understand that moralising jeremiads against character flaws in politicians can just as easily be used to discredit Martin Luther King as Bill Clinton. Black enthusiasm for Clinton may, in fact, reflect a sober ‘lesser evil’ policy that understands better than Hitchens, who pays no real price for his high-mindedness, the cost of giving power to the Newt Gingrichs and Trent Lotts of the world. …

Despite these qualifications, the conclusion remains that politics cannot be reduced to an arena in which truth-telling is automatically the highest good. In a film like Jim Carrey's Liar, Liar, redemption can be seen to follow the magical denial of even the possibility of duplicity, but the movies are not politics. Hitchens seems to think that politicians must be held to the most righteous standard, never allowing the lesser evil to undermine the quest for truth, come what may. While Stephanopoulos provides a more nuanced version of the conflict that inevitably pits principle against expediency, he, too, grows weary with the imperative to dissemble in order to win. Clinton somehow survives their opprobrium, however right they may be about specific policies or decisions. Slick Willy's greatest legacy to history, ironic as it may sound, may well be his blatant disclosure of the links between lying in politics, the processes of democratic opinion-formation and the difficulty of really defining what the meaning of ‘is’ is.