Forgive me, America, for I have sinned

Kennedy also made several symbolic gaffes. His public statement about the accident was filmed against a background of leatherbound lawbooks, and he referred several times to his family, including, regrettably, their annual participation in the Edgartown Sailing Regatta. He appeared to be surrounded by lawyers (rather than clergymen) when dealing with the aftermath of the accident. All this contributed to the image of a man who relied on wealth and family connections to shield him from the consequences of his actions.

Bauer regards Clinton's handling of the Monica Lewinsky scandal as a textbook case in defusing such crises. Initially, he did react badly, with exactly the sort of denials, evasions and stonewalling that, in Bauer's eyes, characterize the worst possible response. Then, seven months after the story broke, he abruptly changed strategy. He "pulled out every repentant stop," taping televised statements to the public and expressing great contrition and humility at a multidenominational White House prayer breakfast stocked with theologically conservative but politically sympathetic ministers. Before the assembled clergy he acknowledged, "I have sinned." One attendee later compared Clinton to King David repenting of his adulterous lust for Bathsheba, and spoke of "this man who opened his heart and acknowledged his realization of his sin." Hearing that from the mouth of an obviously pious church figure (instead of a lawyer) convinced many that Clinton's contrition was genuine. The president also announced that he would conduct his reformation under the guidance of an "accountability group," a common practice among neoevangelical men, thereby disarming many critics from the religious right.

To avoid seeming sexually predatory, Clinton carefully refrained from personally disparaging Lewinsky. Nevertheless, as Bauer points out, Clinton's allies managed to dig up past lovers and colleagues who could testify that Lewinsky talked constantly about sex and had set her cap for the president even before she got to the White House. Still, instead of attempting to paint himself as the victim of a scheming woman -- often the first impulse of a man in his position -- Clinton was able to point to special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and the forces behind him as the real persecutors of both Lewinsky and himself. Even the president's notorious verbal equivocations about the affair were excused by many members of the public, who saw him trying to escape self-incrimination in the context of a legal witch hunt.

Bauer insists that although the public mostly didn't want to see Clinton prosecuted or impeached for the wrongs he committed, it still demanded that he be called to account in other ways. Here, she makes an important distinction between legal confession and what she calls "Augustinian" confession. Augustinian confession, the kind practiced with "almost picture-perfect" skill by Haggard as well as Clinton, involves one part of the man indicted by the other, the weak and sinning aspect of his personality reprimanded and shamed by the portion of him that belongs to God. It's a vision of Christian moral struggle that originates with St. Augustine and his "Confessions," and Bauer writes that it is "so widely valued because it demonstrates a certain idealized view of the human self: the self as freely deciding, free in will, and essentially independent from the surrounding legal system." In a legal confession, on the other hand, the individual is compelled to incriminate himself in the face of an overwhelming outside power, the state. In such cases, the public's sympathies often lean toward the individual, especially when those people are already mistrustful of centralized power, like many Southern white evangelicals.

No wonder Clinton made many among the religious right so apoplectic! He co-opted their Southern-fried piety with the prayer breakfast and accountability group. He skillfully deployed the rhetoric of evangelical confession, having grown up with it as a Baptist. He pulled their anti-big-government carpet out from under them by casting their legal attack dog and the architects of the impeachment trial as vengeful, self-serving wielders of federal authority. His supporters were even (and Bauer doesn't make enough of this point) able to cast Lewinsky -- and by extension Clinton himself -- as the victim of a decadent Beverly Hills lifestyle that left her a child of divorce and a desperate seeker of sexual attention from powerful men. The religious right was left to fulminate at the public's "insufficient" outrage over the whole mess. "His success in this was so extraordinary," Bauer writes in awe, "that he led his opponents into placing themselves as a moral elite sitting in judgment over the American people."

It would be a mistake, Bauer cautions, to assume as some have that the failure of Clinton's impeachment represented "an example of the public upholding the division of private from public morality." To the contrary, Clinton's triumph was the result of "a leader successfully demonstrating his own humility and equality with the electorate by admitting to and apologizing for his moral errors." And the theater of such admissions must be expertly staged. When Carter confessed to the occasional extramarital desire during his 1976 presidential campaign, he made the mistake of doing so in an interview with Playboy magazine and of using a mild vulgarity, the word "screw." Carter was trying to assure Playboy's readers that he was not going to conduct a self-righteous crusade against their cherished freedoms, but when the statements went national, he was perceived by social conservatives as catering to the wrong side in the culture wars, which are seen as a manifestation of the holy war for America's soul.

Although evangelicals are only a minority of the electorate, Bauer traces the dissemination of the rites of evangelical confession to other denominations and the culture at large through radio and TV therapists and the talk show boom of the 1980s. Phil Donahue, coaxing personal revelations out of his guests and roaming the aisles with a microphone to draw reactions from audience members, resembled nothing so much as a preacher in a revival tent calling on his flock to testify. Oprah Winfrey has mastered the form by making confessions of her own weight, addiction and relationship troubles a part of the secular redemption promised by her show. Yet, mystifyingly, Bauer never mentions the ubiquity of 12-step programs as another quasi-secular manifestation of the same social trend. The American faith in the curative power of standing in front of a crowd, freely admitting your own misdeeds and weakness, surely reaches its fullest and purest flower in that context.

You can see the insistence on public confession as an intolerable invasion of privacy or as a laudable call for accountability; Bauer avoids taking any such position herself. (Despite its colorful title, "The Art of the Public Grovel" is not a polemical book.) Cardinal Law, for example, was unable to hold on to his office when he failed to satisfy demands from American Catholics that he (and by extension the church itself) publicly repent of his involvement in covering up sexual abuse perpetrated by priests. Bauer sees the rebellion of the lay community over this controversy as an example of the "Protestantization" of American Catholics. The expectation that church leaders humble themselves by admitting their trespasses before their congregations runs radically counter to the history and practice of the Catholic hierarchy. "Power within the Catholic Church," Bauer observes dryly of the Vatican's astonishment over such demands, "had never been located in the pews."

If even a cardinal can't get away with swathing himself in the force field of his rank, certainly no elected official can hope to, either. "Scandal-marked politicians," Bauer writes, "cannot preserve a dignified silence; they must prove, through humble confession, that they are willing to acknowledge the power of the voters at whose pleasure they serve." (And if planning to make just such a confession, they could do a lot worse than study this book.) What are missing, of course, are voters capable of marshaling that power to better effect, a public who insists on not just symbolic accountability for the sins of sexual transgression, but meaningful accountability for the graver sin of abusing the people's trust. The possibility that Americans will ever call themselves to account for their sins of omission in this department seems remote. I'd bet on the Second Coming arriving before that happens.