L. Boxer:
Unless there's something specific that some of you have in mind, I'd suggest
that what have been mentioned so far are merely generalizations. Nothing in
the media has shaken Bennett's standing as a champion of good values, unless
you believe that gambling is immoral.
Those who aren't cheerleaders for Bill Bennett might point out that being against
homosexuality, for just one example, doesn't define him as a "champion of good values";
it defines him as a bigot.
Mr. Bennett is a hypocrite. He is against all sorts of behaviors that
adults undertake at little risk to anyone else but themselves, yet when it
comes to one he personally enjoys he is all for it. While "Drug Czar" he
was famous for his aggressive smoking habits, and I understand he still
loves to swill down the liquor. Alcohol and nicotine each slaughter
hundreds of thousands of US citizens every year and cost (typically poorer)
Americans many billions of dollars, both figures of which are far greater
than comparable ones for drugs that happen to be illegal today. Indeed,
he cruely supports imprisoning those who do so for medical reasons.
As far as government is concerned, the real "good value" is the one that
says "I'm an adult; keep out of my business, save when I commit fraud or
interfere with the rights of others." I'm always amazed how few really
believe in that wonderful Jeffersonian/libertarian ideal and will instead
defend any political hack that plays on their personal ideological
ballclub.
Quoting Michael Kinsley:
Although it may be impossible for anyone famous to become permanently discredited in
American culture (a Bennett-like point I agree with), Bennett clearly deserves that
distinction. There are those who will try to deny it to him. They will say:
1) He never specifically criticized gambling. This, if true, doesn't show that Bennett is
not a hypocrite. It just shows that he's not a complete idiot. Working his way down the
list of other people's pleasures, weaknesses, and uses of American freedom, he just
happened to skip over his own. How convenient. Is there some reason why his general
intolerance of the standard vices does not apply to this one? None that he's ever
mentioned.
Open, say, Bennett's The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American
Family, and read about how Americans overvalue "unrestricted personal liberty." How we
must relearn to "enter judgments on a whole range of behaviors and attitudes." About how
"wealth and luxury ... often make it harder to deny the quest for instant gratification"
because "the more we attain, the more we want." How would you have guessed, last week,
that Bennett would regard a man who routinely "cycle[s] several hundred thousand dollars
in an evening" (his own description) sitting in an airless Las Vegas casino pumping coins
into a slot machine or video game? Well, you would have guessed wrong! He thinks it's
perfectly OK as long as you don't spend the family milk money.
2) His gambling never hurt anyone else. This is, of course, the classic libertarian
standard of permissible behavior, and I think it's a good one. If a hypocrite is a person
who says one thing and does another, the problem with Bennett is what he says—not (as far
as we know) what he does. Bennett can't plead liberty now because opposing libertarianism
is what his sundry crusades are all about. He wants to put marijuana smokers in jail. He
wants to make it harder to get divorced. He wants more "moral criticism of homosexuality"
and "declining to accept that what they do is right."
In all these cases, Bennett wants laws against or heightened social disapproval of
activities that have no direct harmful effects on anyone except the participants. He
argues that the activities in question are encouraging other, more harmful activities or
are eroding general social norms in some vague way. Empower America, one of Bennett's
several shirt-pocket mass movements, officially opposes the spread of legalized gambling,
and the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, one of Bennett's cleverer PR conceits,
includes "problem" gambling as a negative indicator of cultural health. So, Bennett
doesn't believe that gambling is harmless. He just believes that his own gambling is
harmless. But by the standards he applies to everything else, it is not harmless.
Bennett has been especially critical of libertarian sentiments coming from intellectuals
and the media elite. Smoking a bit of pot may not ruin their middle-class lives, but by
smoking pot, they create an atmosphere of toleration that can be disastrous for others
who are not so well-grounded. The Bill Bennett who can ooze disdain over this is the same
Bill Bennett who apparently thinks he has no connection to all those "problem" gamblers
because he makes millions preaching virtue and they don't.
3) He's doing no harm to himself. From the information in Alter's and Green's articles,
Bennett seems to be in deep denial about this. If it's true that he's lost $8 million in
gambling casinos over 10 years, that surely is addictive or compulsive behavior no matter
how good virtue has been to him financially. He claims to have won more than he has lost,
which is virtually (that word again!) impossible playing the machines as Bennett
apparently does. If he's not in denial, then he's simply lying, which is a definite
non-virtue. And he's spraying smarm like the worst kind of cornered politician—telling
the Washington Post, for example, that his gambling habit started with "church bingo."
Even as an innocent hobby, playing the slots is about as far as you can get from the
image Bennett paints of his notion of the Good Life. Surely even a high-roller can't
"cycle through" $8 million so quickly that family, church, and community don't suffer.
There are preachers who can preach an ideal they don't themselves meet and even use their
own weaknesses as part of the lesson. Bill Bennett has not been such a preacher. He is
smug, disdainful, intolerant. He gambled on bluster, and lost.