The President and the Prosecutor: Three Views on Politics and Personal Life
Tomasky, Michael
IF BILL CLINTON were impeached or forced to resign over the Lewinsky case, the incident might force a national examination of how men in power treat female subordinates. The most important...
...If called upon, special and other federal prosecutors can trip the accused into lying in a heartbeat...
...In this single respect, the media are the most to blame...
...At the same time that news coverage has become more entertainment friendly, the press in general has become grotesquely self-referential...
...Rather, 6 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 the question is whether a man—president, bank president, legal partner, department head, what have you—who sees women primarily as carrying cases for glands and hormones should be involved in running the world...
...They know the ruling classes are decadent, but they also know that, under the standards by which Clinton is being judged, the working and middle classes are pretty decadent themselves—people understand that society cannot exist according to these standards...
...But so far, anyway, every time the people say that they will not make their civic decisions on the basis of this prurience, the puritans start in again, trying to explain to the people how wrong they are...
...If Clinton behaved this way, and if his ouster meant we'd end up with new ground rules, then it might be not merely necessary COMMENTS & OPINIONS but salutary...
...the mood is absurdly self-congratulatory...
...But if they manage to kick it in, will they stop there...
...And what high-powered prosecutors can do, ambitious district attorneys can do, too, if they put their minds to it...
...Great moral arbiters, that bunch (the public understands this, too...
...MICHAEL TOMASKY is a political columnist for New York magazine...
...And so the press, besotted with power and self-regard, wants Clinton's scalp not for the standard ideological reasons but simply to prove that it can have it...
...The most important question his alleged behavior raises, after all, is not whether a little adultery hinders a man's ability to make great and grave decisions...
...The political right and people like Starr can always be relied upon to lecture the rest of us about our morals...
...That senator's taste for little frilly numbers...
...Liberal, godless Hollywood would get the message and crank out even more moralizing movies (most movies always have been, which is why Bob Dole was so wrong, but now he'll be able to crow about having been right all along...
...BECAUSE NO one really wants illicit political sex to stop, this might be enough to settle accounts in Washington for a while...
...People may hate the media, but the media sure love the media...
...Will this congressmember's fondness for the bottle be exposed...
...why should it, when there's so much more undiscovered perfidy afoot in the land...
...And importantly (and thankfully), the people, according to all the polls, have resisted this hysteria...
...But under the new morality, Ellen might be well advised to rethink her career...
...Beware, governors, state legislators, and county commissioners...
...The third force here is the press...
...But one doubts this is the moral lesson our national instructors have in mind for us...
...Louche behavior and unseemly morality aren't hard to find in Washington, and any reporter with a Nexis terminal can spend an hour calling up quotes from Senator So-and-So about family values, thereby "justifying" the story on the basis of the senator's "hypocrisy...
...But I doubt it...
...His motivation is political, too, although in his case probably combined with some deep animus against a man he sees as an irresponsible libertine (Starr doesn't seem too concerned about the harassment of women in the workplace—if he feels any sympathy for Monica Lewinsky, he sure has an odd way of showing it...
...First, certain (but not all) segments of the right have been after Clinton over sex from Day One—Richard Mellon Scaife and perhaps others have, according to Arkansas journalist Gene Lyons, paid for snoopers to go down to Arkansas to fish out any and all women with whom Clinton may have been involved...
...Today, they meet outside Clinton's bedroom window...
...Gore actually did one brave thing, in defending Ellen DeGeneres...
...Three forces are linking arms here...
...How on earth is this happening...
...The rest of the press will pounce...
...that if you cleansed every bank, law firm, university, and electrical repair shop of the boozers and cross-dressers and adulterers, there'd be a dramatic shortage of banking and lawyering and educating and wiring in this country...
...if it were, then it would seem hard to explain why, in the millions of column inches and minutes of air time devoted to the Lewinsky matter, this issue has been so little discussed...
...Well, let it flow...
...Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott chime in to this effect, and Al Gore, who will find himself called upon to acquiesce and is probably feckless enough to do so, holds hands with Tipper while announcing that he, too, craves a "new honesty" in the capital's dealings with the American people...
...What's much more likely to be waiting at the end of this road, instead, is that the investigation and criminalization of private behavior found wanting— that is to say, of (a)morality—will become routine...
...Next, because what happens in the Washington office of the Entertainment State reverberates out West, the cultural landscape will be scoured for other manifestations of perversion...
...For the press, though, this is new...
...Thus do these three interests converge...
...it could be, for example, that bagging a president will prove, forgive the metaphor, orgasmic enough that the puritans will roll over and go to sleep for a while...
...Junior Republicans in the House of Representatives take to the floor of the House to cry out that yes, the American people do want a president who lives by a strict personal code of morality, and it's high time such a morality was restored to Washington...
...As I write these words, indications are that the private lives of the chattering class will soon be getting some ink...
...Let's say this president, a prochoice, relatively (by Washington standards) pro-woman and pro-gay president, is brought down on a morals charge...
...First, let's look at who's doing it, and why...
...Then maybe we can drop all this and start thinking about the morality that matters, morality of policy, which is underscrutinized in more or less inverse proportion to the overscrutiny of bedroom morality...
...Their motivation is simply political...
...there is a difference, a profound one, between a vice president applauding television's first openly gay DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 7 COMMENTS & OPINIONS protagonist and a vice president denigrating the medium's most popular single mother...
...Second, what Starr has been trying to do since the day the pathetic Linda Tripp knocked on his door—bring a criminal perjury charge against a citizen of the United States because he may have lied about his sex life—is, I'm willing to wager, utterly without precedent in modern America...
...it surely does not...
...Pundits write about themselves and each other, editors are stars...
...All this could turn out differently...
...This or the other cabinet member's little black book...
...Consider what might unfold in the weeks and months after he packs up and heads back to Arkansas...
...The "respectable" papers give their editorial approval to this ethos...
Vol. 45 • April 1998 • No. 2
