nation’s Commander in Chief, one might have expected a rousing discussion from critically informed political leaders weighing the evidence while patriotically contemplating the needs of the country. One might at least have expected a gathering of riveted participants and spectators acting as national witnesses, fighting for seats to behold an extraordinary and historically rare event. How strange, then, to read the transcripts and discover that someone found it necessary to scold his colleagues and urge them to engage in democratic inquiry’s most basic practice: pay attention.
Perhaps Congressional leaders had already given this issue a lot of thought. Impeachment arguments had been circulating for months, as had evidence to inform judgments about Clinton’s fate. But there was also a perception of partisanship overshadowing these deliberations. Many voters believed that House members had their minds made up before any formal debate ensued. To the skeptical, the impeachment proceedings seemed to be propelled by theatrical performances from Congressmen who engaged in an act of pretense—playing the role of concerned and inquiring national leaders while intending to cast a vote that conformed to party dogma. This is, in fact, what happened. On December 19, 1998, the vote to impeach on grounds of perjury was approved by a 228–206 vote and on the grounds of obstruction of justice by a 221–212 vote. Had the Democrats controlled the House, there would have been a different outcome.2
That result, along with the nameless comment recorded in the transcripts, is notable for encapsulating the problem the impeachment raised: how to distinguish appearances from reality, a problem that reverberated through every facet of this event. Was the discussion at those preliminary meetings for real? Organized as a true attempt to excavate a scene of high crimes and misdemeanors? Or, as opponents argued, was the impeachment a political stunt orchestrated by one political party to undermine the authority and credibility of the opposition? Indeed, the endeavor to differentiate appearances from reality implicated the very charges against the President who, many agreed, might have misrepresented facts when testifying, but did not commit a bona fide impeachable offense.
Contemporary critical theories (philosophical, feminist, rhetorical) have left us “spinning in ‘textuality’” (Pollock 114), unable, it would seem, to do much but observe that appearances and realities are theoretically indistinguishable. How this premise implicates political life has raised concern for those who are invested in the idea that standards of judgment exist and should be consulted by citizens facing contentious issues. Indeed, while the impeachment inquiry investigated a specific speech act delivered by a particular person, it also posed a general question about whether and how conceptions of political discourse should incorporate the perplexing idea that, as put by Della Pollock, “words don’t stick. They are `Janus-faced,’ `fickle,’ indifferent to discourses of truth and meaning” (114–15). If words don’t stick, then the very charge of perjury would seem to be impossible to prove. And with no standards to reference, we may be confounded about how to judge arguments that seem to be contrived. The question the impeachment raised is whether that all or nothing perspective is the only option available to us when we evaluate political controversies.
In this chapter, I argue that impeachment discourses staged two epistemological encounters. In one, the styles associated with representations of realism collided with those rhetorical elements that signify inconstancy and mercenary strategizing. The other staged an encounter between rhetoric’s “practical” aim to use language for desired ends and postmodern theorizing about language’s incapacity to be pinned down to meet desires. In both contact zones, rhetorical style had a central role to play but its status was paradoxically central and ambiguous. Because style’s influence on judgment is undertheorized in both conventional and theoretical conceptions of political debate, the point of public debate gets characterized as the endeavor to distinguish mere style from arguments of substance and through that process, identify what really matters, which will inevitably be the argument over the mode of delivery. Indeed, democratic deliberation itself could be described as the endeavor to distinguish the substantial and significant from the sham appearance, to take note of and dismiss the mechanistic production of stylized platitudes and contrived realities. The technologies of evaluation that appear to facilitate those practices would seem to be substantial themselves, giving us the tools we need to differentiate between reality, pretense, what has merit or may be ignored.
Such interpretive maneuvering, however, brings us back to the polemics intrinsic to any endeavor to determine what should matter. Because even as we might want to believe, in general, that public debate is a bona fide practice that truly enables democratic inquiry, we will be beset by the power struggles inscribed within any attempt to step “beyond” language when explaining how our interactions with language should organize our interpretive experiences, including that of judgment.
Given that the impeachment provoked anxieties about whether it was possible to know who was doing what with language, we can look to the discourses that circulated in 1998 to see how they exposed the limits of our ability to see beyond “mere” appearances when called upon to definitively render a verdict about whether any statement fails to exhibit commendable discursive obedience. Impeachment discourses explicitly addressed questions about how to differentiate false claims from true ones and how to determine if a given speech is genuine, as if that quality is itself identifiable and valuable. Public arguments relied upon dominant interpretive methodologies that work by preserving the binary that would distinguish the stylized political platitude from the statement of substance. But the question of authenticity proved to be an unctuous one. Rather than demonstrate that we have the capacity to see clear differences between substance and style, impeachment discourses ventured into a world of fun house mirrors and their myriad distortions.
This chapter explores the ways in which style is invoked within narratives about political judgment as a placeholder for a complex and ephemeral interpretive process whereby speculations about language’s persuasive power get transformed into judgments of the significance of any given representation put up for review. At the center of this work of translation is a narrative depicting style as a provocateur that indicates whether a given representation is acting responsibly. In effect, styles act as metaphors for conceptions of how we think language functions to facilitate communication itself. But when it comes to style, we tend to confuse the metaphorical with the real. To look at rhetorical style is not only to explore conceptions of how language acts to communicate, style’s study also reveals how cultural preferences for particular representational modes get sanctioned when we pretend that reigning interpretive technologies move us past the speculative to the authentic.
The Straight Path and the Spin
In 1998, Clinton faced several charges. He was accused of lying under oath when testifying in a prior case led by Paula Jones, who alleged that Clinton, when Governor of Arkansas, had sexually harassed her. The impeachment, however, did not address sexual misconduct but speech misconduct. At least that was the official distinction, but it soon became apparent that when arguing for Clinton’s removal, the two categories often blurred. Had the president perjured himself when he testified that he never had a sexual affair with another young woman, Monica Lewinsky? Clinton was also accused of obstructing justice by attempting to cover up their affair. A summary of Clinton’s linguistic infractions included, among other charges, that the President coached false testimony from witnesses speaking on his behalf; that he obtained gifts, then hid them once they were deemed to be evidentiary and subject to subpoena (hence a lie of omission); that he continued to lie about his liaison with Lewinsky in both public statements and to his staff, leading them to then give false testimony in subsequent legal proceedings; and that he bought Lewinsky’s silence by obtaining a job for her after convincing her to sign an affidavit in the Arkansas Federal Court that falsely testified to the status of their relationship.
Each of the charges linked criminal behavior to an act of representation, suggesting that methods are available to identify the kind of linguistic comportment that should be penalized. From the GOP perspective, there should have been no dispute at all. Perjury would seem to be a discernible crime, requiring a straightforward act of adjudication. Either a person lied under oath or did not. The evidence will be clear. This stance relies upon a
