BILL BENNETT'S BAD BET

Sinners have long cherished the fantasy that William Bennett, the virtue
magnate, might be among our number. The news over the weekend - that
Bennett's $50,000 sermons and best-selling moral instruction manuals have
financed a multimillion dollar gambling habit - has lit a lamp of happiness
in even the darkest hearts. As the joyous word spread, crack flowed like
water through inner-city streets, family-court judges began handing out
free divorces, children lit bonfires of "The Book of Virtues," "More
Virtuous Virtues," "Who Cheesed My Virtue?" "Moral Tails: Virtue for Dogs,"
etc. And cynics everywhere thought, for just a moment: Maybe there is a God
after all.

If there were a Pulitzer Prize for schadenfreude (joy in the suffering of
others), Newsweek's Jonathan Alter and Joshua Green of the Washington
Monthly would surely deserve it for bringing us this story. They are
shoo-ins for the public service category in any event. Schadenfreude is an
unvirtuous emotion of which we should be ashamed. Bill Bennett himself was
always full of sorrow when forced to point out the moral failings of other
public figures. But the flaws of his critics don't absolve Bennett of his own.

Let's also be honest that gambling would not be our first-choice vice if we
were designing this fantasy-come-true from scratch. But gambling will do.
It will definitely do. Bill Bennett has been exposed as a humbug artist who
ought to be pelted off the public stage if he lacks the decency to slink
quietly away, as he is constantly calling on others to do. 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.

Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.