BILL BENNETT'S BAD BET

The Bookmaker Of Virtues

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.