The punditocracy reacts to the Bill Bennett gambling story

Bill Bennett is one of those public figures that is so widely known among Washington insiders and political reporters, that a controversy such as the one that came out Friday was bound to get serious attention.

The news that Bill Bennett has what can fairly be described as a “gambling problem” spread like wildfire over the weekend, with Bennett’s conservative friends launching spirited defenses of their ideological ally and his critics taking great joy in bringing Bennett down a peg from his smug, self-righteous high horse.

The most vigorous defense I’ve seen of Bennett came from Jonathan Vast, an editor of the conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard. I also saw some interesting arguments in an email from a Carpetbagger regular, I call him Dr. Who, who suggested that I might have been unfair to Bennett.

Here are all the various arguments Bennett’s backers have offered, as well as reasons I think the points are unpersuasive.

* Everyone already knew about Bennett’s penchant for gambling. The original scoop said Bennett “made no secret” of his gambling, so some have argued this is much ado about nothing. The problem with this argument is that everyone didn’t know about Bennett’s gambling. A search of a major newspaper database turns up just one article — from seven years ago — that noted Bennett won $60,000 in a single trip to Las Vegas. Of course, even at the time, readers didn’t know if Bennett just got lucky while he was in Vegas for a convention or if this was part of a larger pattern. Moreover, Bennett says he’s always been open about this, but he still made sure that casinos knew they were prohibited from contacting him at his home or office, not exactly the kind of thing someone would do about a hobby they “made no secret” of.

* Gambling is legal. This is true, but it misses the point. Bennett spent most of the 1990s railing against all manner of vices that are completely permissible under the law, including such “sins” as drinking alcohol and premarital sex, which Bennett nevertheless found morally wrong. Legality had nothing to do with it.

* Bennett’s gambling habit is a private matter. Also true, but completely inconsistent with the conservative world view Bennett and his allies claim to profess. After all, just last month Sen. Rick Santorum, a Bennett ally, said there is no right to privacy and that one’s private actions, even ones that don’t affect others, can undermine the social fabric that maintains our very way of life. Bennett never made distinctions about public vs. private behavior, only virtuous vs. immoral behavior. To be sure, Bennett never missed an opportunity to rail against the private behavior of his ideological foes. As Josh Marshall noted over the weekend, ” I cannot think of a public figure who has been exposed over some private embarrassment in recent years…for whom a self-satisfied Bennett has not happily hopped on to Larry King or Tim Russert or Chris Matthews and droned on with shallow, grandstanding moralism, eagerly wrenching this or that person’s private embarrassment into some cheap political point.”

* Bennett isn’t the same as other people with gambling problems because he never lost so much money that it hurt his family. This seems like more of a practical argument than a moral one. After all, many alcoholics can maintain a job and stable family while having a drinking problem — it doesn’t mean what they’re doing is morally acceptable. Bennett’s whole philosophy is that strong character and moral society is based on people making the right choices about their personal lives. People don’t get a pass, in his view, by stopping just short of destroying their family or finances. Michael Kinsley addressed this point well in a Slate column over the weekend.

“Open, say, Bennett’s The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family, and read about how Americans overvalue ‘unrestricted personal liberty,” Kinsley said. “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.”

* Bennett “broke even” while gambling, so his gambling problem isn’t even a problem. This isn’t so much a defense as it is a sad rationalization for questionable behavior. Besides, I’m no expert on gambling, but I find it extremely unlikely that a man who gambles as much as Bennett does could “break even,” especially playing video poker and slots. The casino system just doesn’t work that way.

* The Charles Barkley Defense: I’m not a role model. This is the most troubling of all. Jon Vast at the Weekly Standard wrote, “Bennett doesn’t hold himself up as the model of goodness and truth” in his best-selling collections of other people’s work. I wholeheartedly disagree. Bennett presented himself as one with the moral authority to describe what virtues are all about. He made millions telling anyone who would listen that he knew the qualities of a person with character and insisted that those who fell short of his ideals weren’t trying hard enough. Whether he literally said, “Use me as an example” is irrelevant. He was setting a standard; if he failed to meet that standard he should be prepared to be called a hypocrite.

* Bennett isn’t a hypocrite because he never condemned gambling in specific. This is almost persuasive, but it falls short. First, Empower America, the group he helped create and continues to lead, has denounced gambling. Dr. Who argues Bennett “doesn’t control everything” the group says, which is true, but as the group’s chairman, it’s not that easy to disassociate Bennett from the positions of the organization he helps lead. Second, Bennett may not have singled out gambling as a vice, but he has said self control is part of strong character, and a guy who loses $8 million doesn’t sound like someone with strong self control. Third, by leaving gambling out of his own “hall of shame,” Bennett is conveniently giving himself a complementary get-out-of-purgatory-free card. As Marshall put it, “Bennett goes off on every ‘vice’ there is, save the one he seems to indulge. That seems very much like cutting himself the break he cuts no one else.” Or as Michael Kinsley put it, “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.”