Sex charges pollute discourse, mar Clinton's moral authority

National Catholic Reporter, March 27, 1998 by Raymond Schroth

Our first clue that we were heading into one of the weirdest periods in American political and media history was the stunned expression on poor Yassir Arafat's face. He had come to Washington with the hope that somehow the moral force of the Clinton presidency would, for once, swing in his direction. But here he was, sitting next to the president in his photo-op chair at a news conference called to talk about their meeting, and, as the reporters shouted and cameras clicked away, the president of the United States started talking about his sex life. Hey, says Arafat to himself, this is supposed to be about me!

The events began to pop at an insane pace. On that Sunday morning, as I turned off the tube at the end of ABC's "This Week," an awful feeling of sadness overwhelmed me. I had never really admired Bill Clinton; but now these supposedly knowledgeable people -- Cokie Roberts presiding, with Sam Donaldson, George Will, William Kristol and even Clinton's pal George Stephanopolous (who could only "hope" that his old boss was not guilty of Oval Office adultery, of urging perjury and lying about it) -- had drawn a scenario in which, at the request of a delegation of Democratic Party heavyweights, President Clinton would resign within a week.

Tears of compassion welled up in my eyes. One of my friends suggested that the poor fellow might, like Vince Foster, kill himself. Or, as some journalists predicted, the wandering, disgraced Bill Clinton driven from office would become one of the "homeless."

Six weeks later, the president's situation is both better and worse. The overwhelming majority of Americans believe that Clinton had an affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky, think that it's understandable for him to lie about it and agree that his private life is separable from his public life as president.

Sentiment has swung against the tactics of the Javert-like public prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who, seemingly out to "get" the president -- as the Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh implied in the March 5 issue of New York Review of Books -- hauls mothers, journalists, private detectives and personal servants before his grand jury.

Yet the president's image -- in the new media culture where the line between image and reality has long been erased -- could hardly be worse.

While in January, based on leaks of about the 20 hours of Monica tapes, we suddenly learned to talk of presidential fellatio as easily as we would discuss the Olympic Games, today the White House -- although the president refuses to offer an explanation -- spins that they were "only kissing." A recent New Yorker cover -- which many found offensive -- depicts a dozen phallic-looking reporters' microphones pointing at Clinton's crotch, as if whatever he is going to say would emanate from that part of his anatomy.

Night after night the TV comics ridicule him in their opening monologues. Jay Leno: "The president's polls go up when his pants come down!" And the Internet, with lewd Lewinsky Web sites, spreads jokes we can't print here: V&at does Ted Kennedy have that Bill Clinton needs? And, did you hear the one about Bill Clinton, the pope and the Blessed Virgin Mary?

The pundits' predictions, repeated on the Sunday morning news programs, that Clinton would be gone within a week have proved premature; but whatever the long-range political consequences of Interngate, historians will remember these weeks for what they did to transform public discourse and what they revealed about American values in the 1990s.

First, the impact of the 1960s sexual revolution, which, whatever its liberating influence, was still the separation of sex from commitment and love, has assumed new dimensions. To a writer for The Nation, for example, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Clinton's having sex with an intern because they are "both adults." (Whether either is truly an adult in his/her sexual attitudes is less than clear.) The president's presumed trysts are called "peccadilloes," as if a middle-aged president of the United States using his office to engage in adulterous activity with an employee half his age is, at worst, a social gaffe.

In a culture where half our marriages split, where millions of Young people don't know what their fathers look like and where unwanted babies are aborted or deposited in motel dumpsters, the national leader's sex life is irrelevant? Second, the new media -- that is, the Internet and the 24-hour cable news channels -- have radically transformed how we receive and process information. Every day after work I and the 10 percent of the population with Internet hookups can click around the Web sites: local newspapers, the Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Time, The Washington Post, MSNBC, CNBC and the infamous Drudge Report, where Matt Drudge provides access to nearly every columnist in the country and his own unverified rumors.

On late-night CNBC, Geraldo Rivera and Charles Grodin have turned Clinton into an Oval Office O.J. -- nonstop prosecutors, former prosecutors, mainstream pundits like Cokie Roberts, ax grinders and White House spinsters pick apart the "news" whether or not anything new has happened. And on C-Span: Henry Hyde on how the Judiciary Committee will handle the impeachment data this summer; and Marvin Kalb with a round table of top editors who basically agree that, while there have been a few slip-ups, the press is doing a good job.