[lbo-talk] Christopher Caldwell on Bennett

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Tue May 13 03:57:36 PDT 2003


[Caldwell almost reaches a crescendo in the last two paragraphs. He is unwilling finally to damn the war on drugs as much as it fully deserves. But he does point out that it has high costs, and points out rightly that it all rests on the fundamental premise that no addiction, not even heroin, is a medical problem -- that addiction does not exist. Said out loud like that, it's a laughable proposition. This is why people like Bennett have concentrated their fire on the (sometimes questionable) extensions of the notion of addiction -- because their real goal is to cover the weakness of this reactionary stronghold, and to cut off any sympathy for addicts. Because once we admit that drug addiction is a physical rather than a moral problem, it transports the problem from the realm of crime to the realm of health. It makes of drugs something that are a problem only when one is addicted to them, and thus where criminalization creates criminals where none should exist. And in conjunction with the gross costs and failures of the war on drugs, it points to the completely opposite strategy of regulation, legalization and treatment. In other words, the strategy we've applied to alcohol ever since prohibition failed.]

[In the end, it might be the conservative (but libertarian) Caldwell who suggests the deepest critique of Bennett's hypocrisy: it's the been the underlying legitimation of disastrous and self-defeating policy. For the prosecution of which, Bennett once held a key and formative position. And his hypocritical tirades were a conscious tool of propaganda to promote those disastrous policies under which we still suffer.]

Financial Times; May 10, 2003

COMMENT: The man who gambled with American outrage

By Christopher Caldwell

In 1998, the Washington Times reported that William J. Bennett, who had been chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, and "drug tsar" under the first President Bush, had won a $200,000 jackpot at the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas.

The report, which Mr Bennett denied, sounded absurd to those who had followed his career. After leaving government, Mr Bennett had cashed in as a guru of "values" (as Americans call morality). His Book of Virtues and other titles on honour and child-rearing perched for months in the upper branches of the bestseller lists. During the Lewinsky affair he pilloried the president's "character" on television every day, and wrote a book lamenting the decline of "outrage" in American life. And he boiled his spiel down to an after-dinner speech that could be delivered over and over again for $50,000 a pop. Not exactly the profile of a high-roller.

Last week, reporters at two Washington magazines unearthed details of Mr Bennett's 1998 trip. He had indeed won a jackpot at the Bellagio of $25,000 but that had been a rare high point in a weekend binge during which he gambled away $625,000. It was not an isolated incident. Mr Bennett once wired $1.4m to cover two months' losses. He lost half a million dollars on a visit to the Bellagio just last month. Mr Bennett was the kind of player casinos call a "whale" -- he had six-figure lines of credit with at least four of them. They would fly him in on Lear jets and put him up in suites. Throughout the years that Mr Bennett was urging his fellow citizens to be more abstinent, patriotic and industrious, he racked up gambling losses of at least $8m.

Some people will say: "So what? It's legal and it's his money." But such people tend to be rare in the American press corps and the broader American public responded with Schadenfreude. Mr Bennett was assailed as a humbug. His career as an ethical entrepreneur appears to be over.

Americans are uneasy about gambling, and with good reason. Like Eskimos confronted with booze, they are new to the stuff, and handle it badly. Until the 1970s, gambling was banned in all 50 states except Nevada and New Jersey. Today it is a $51bn-a-year industry, legal in 28 states and spreading. In recent decades, certain states started lotteries as a way of sucking revenue away from their neighbours; all but a handful of states have followed suit. States with lots of American Indians let the tribes open casinos (rather than developing real economies) and pocket the tax money. The practically Indian-less state of Connecticut helped revive (out of a few remnants) the Mashantucket Pequot -- a tribe that all but disappeared centuries ago -- simply to start its gargantuan Foxwoods casino.

Gambling is now a mainstay of state finances. A bellwether election came in 1998, when Democrat Jim Hodges won the governorship of staunchly Republican South Carolina, thanks to an infusion of campaign money from the video-poker lobby. Mr Hodges promised to use gambling revenues to fund education. Other states have now made this Faustian bargain. Robert Ehrlich, Maryland's new Republican governor, wants to establish gambling as a way of closing revenue shortfalls without raising taxes. The new "gaming" lobbies, as they call themselves, are among the mightiest in Washington. Not everyone is pleased. The bankruptcies, broken homes and other social ills that gambling brings in its train have been noted by Empower America, the conservative think-tank of which Mr Bennett is co-president.

It has been Mr Bennett's opinion -- his signature opinion, in fact -- that private misconduct can poison the moral atmosphere of a whole society. This left him badly placed to claim that his betting was no big deal. "I've gambled all my life," Mr Bennett protested, "and it's never been a moral issue with me." Such statements were pounced on by everyone he had ever lectured: pot-smokers for whom marijuana has never been a moral issue, gays for whom homosexuality has never been a moral issue. And, of course, Clinton supporters. During the Lewinsky scandal, Mr Bennett insisted that the president's lying was as serious an offence as his adultery. Mr Clinton's defenders countered that the lying was part of the adultery: no one cheats on his wife and shouts it from the rooftops.

As revelations about his gambling emerged, Mr Bennett, like Mr Clinton, walked the fine line between disingenuousness and delusion. "Over 10 years, I'd say I've come out pretty close to even," he said, although the $500-a-pull slot machines he played keep at least 52 per cent of the money put into them. Confronted with a house tally of his losses, Mr Bennett countered: "You don't see what I walk away with. They don't want you to see it" -- as if casinos wish to be known as places where punters lose their shirts. Mr Bennett's gambling showed signs of compulsion. It was secretive. "No contact at res or biz!!!" read his dossier at one casino. He generally played between midnight and 6pm. "I view it as drinking," Mr Bennett said of his gambling. "If you can't handle it, don't do it."

Here one finds a link between Mr Bennett's public persona and the outrage his gambling has evoked. Mr Bennett is best known in the US as an architect of the War on Drugs. A cornerstone of the drug war is scepticism about the concept of addiction. Nineteenth-century novelists, particularly Dostoyevsky and Balzac, did not doubt that one could be drawn to intoxicants or gambling by a "disease of the will". Nor does George W. Bush, who marks the day he quit drinking as the turning point in his life, and whose "faith-based initiatives" are primarily a way to smuggle 12-step recovery programmes into national drug policy. But drug-war reformers such as Mr Bennett associated these ideas with woolly-headed liberalism, preferring to think that urges could be fended off through the exercise of one's own brawny American willpower. There is no denying the success of this approach in reducing drug use in America, but it has been bought at a steep price in incarceration.

That may be what turned a private peccadillo into a scandal: Americans' sense that they had been led down a long road by someone who didn't quite know what he was talking about.

The writer is a senior editor of the Weekly Standard magazine



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