Why Troopergate matters to voters - Bill Clinton's extramarital affairs - Symposium - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 4, 1994 | by Thomas C. Reeves

The response to the Troopergate allegations in the January 1994 issue of American Spectator and corresponding research published in the Los Angeles Times was not encouraging. Paul Duke and his colleagues on the PBS television program Washington Week in Review simply dismissed the 11,000-word American Spectator article, moderator Duke calling author David Brock one of the year's "losers" and describing the story as "slimy." New York Times columnist Frank Rich contended that if everything said by the troopers was correct, the charges "would make the president seem all too pathetically ordinary." In Rich's world. apparently, married people regularly engage in serial sex, lie and scream obscenities at each other.

In fact, few Americans deny the value of such age-old virtues as truthfulness, resoluteness, self-control and moderation. In one public opinion survey of presidential character, 79 percent of respondents said they favor a president whose private and public life is exemplary, and 62 percent agreed that "a president should give a perfect example for all Americans, at all times."

We owe it to ourselves and to the entire world to ensure that this nation's highest public official has sufficiently good character to inspire us by example as well as by oration. The effect could be salutary in many ways, including the the badly needed restoration of confidence in American institutions, our political system in particular.

From every angle, it simply is sensible to want a president who has good character as well as high intelligence, experience and political skill. One important measure of character is, and has been for centuries in this country and elsewhere, a person's willingness to honor marital vows and, in general, show sensitivity and respect for the opposite sex.