Clinton Says Sex Rumors Are Irrelevant : Politics: In TV interview, candidate says he will not deny having committed adultery. He and his wife again attack tabloid’s accusations.

Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, accompanied by his wife, Hillary, told a vast nationwide television audience Sunday that rumors about sexual infidelity on his part should be irrelevant to his campaign for the presidency but that he would not deny ever having committed adultery.

“I’m not prepared tonight to say that any married couple should ever discuss that with anyone other than themselves,” he said when asked about extramarital affairs during an interview on CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes” program after the Super Bowl.

When the interviewer, CBS correspondent Steve Kroft, noted “that’s not a denial,” Clinton responded: “Of course it’s not.”

“I have acknowledged wrongdoing. I have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage,” he said. “I think most Americans who are watching this interview tonight, they’ll know what we’re saying. They’ll get it.”

Clinton, 46, one of the early leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, was seated on a couch next to Hillary Clinton, 44, and occasionally held hands with her. He appeared calm through most of the 11-minute interview segment. But he showed a flash of anger when Kroft suggested that the candidate had reached an “understanding and an arrangement” with his wife.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Clinton said. “You’re looking at two people who love each other. This is not an arrangement or an understanding. This is a marriage. That’s a very different thing.”

His wife added: “I’m not sitting here--some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together, and, you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.”

“I don’t think being any more specific about what’s happened in the privacy of our life together is relevant to anybody besides us,” she said, adding that everyone needs “some zone of privacy.”

The Clintons’ highly public discussion of their 16-year marriage--an extraordinary step without clear precedent in the history of presidential politics--came after a week in which unsubstantiated charges of infidelity threatened to consume his campaign.

The latest charge came from Gennifer Flowers, an Arkansas woman who received an undisclosed sum from the Star, a supermarket tabloid, for her story of a prolonged affair.

“That allegation is false,” Clinton said.

Flowers, he said, was “a friendly acquaintance.” But “there’s a recession on. Times are tough,” he said, suggesting that more women might make charges against him in exchange for money.

Coming only three weeks before the critical New Hampshire primary, where recent polls have shown Clinton in the lead, the CBS interview formed the center of Clinton’s strategy to regain the offensive and put to rest questions about whether his marital faithfulness should be a campaign issue.

Clinton decided to accept the risk of a televised discussion of his private life after publication of Flowers’ story in the Star. Aides said Clinton feared being trapped into responding to an endless series of tabloid stories if he did not make a dramatic public appearance.

His campaign will now argue that the press should no longer focus attention on his past conduct. “I think most people are more worried about what’s going to happen to their families in the future than what happened to ours in the past,” Clinton said, previewing a line he likely will repeat frequently in the next several weeks.

But outside analysts questioned whether the TV appearance would actually end the questions about Clinton’s past, and even Clinton conceded that he and his wife would be “kidding ourselves” if they thought the questions would disappear completely.

In the short term, “I think his campaign will get a real lift out of the appearance. This can’t fail to sell because of the emotion,” said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato, who has written extensively about the “character issue” in politics.

But, Sabato warned, the interview “cannot end the controversy for the long run. None of us--reporters, analysts, voters--have really sorted out our complex feelings” about the intersection of politics and private life, he said.

Not long after taping the interview, Clinton made clear what he will try to do in the future.

At a campaign stop in Portsmouth, N.H., a woman--identified by Clinton campaign aides as a reporter--asked Clinton about the reports of his relationship with Flowers. As several people in the audience booed and shouted: “No one cares,” Clinton responded: “Watch ’60 Minutes.’ I said all I have to say, and I’m not going to say any more.”

Clinton said he expects that more tabloid stories will appear about him as the campaign continues. The situation is “out of my hands,” he said in an interview with The Times as he campaigned Sunday.

He said that he had warned his top campaign contributors in a meeting Saturday in Washington that “I fully expect there to be as many stories as they (the tabloids) are willing to pay for.”

“The only thing I can control about this is my conduct and my convictions, and I think it’s up to the American people now,” he said in The Times interview.

But, he added, he envisions no point at which the questioning of his private life might force him to drop out of the race.

“I can take it,” he said. “I just hope the American people don’t reach a point where they want to reward this kind of (tabloid media) behavior, because if we chuck it in based on this kind of journalism, we’re in real trouble.

“I think what the press has to decide is: Are we going to engage in a game of ‘gotcha,’ ” Clinton said in the “60 Minutes” interview. “If people have problems in their marriage and there are things in their past which they don’t want to discuss, which are painful to them,” should that mean “that they can’t run?” he asked.

Clinton strategists now hope to turn the New Hampshire primary into a referendum on public reaction to his admissions. In addition to his basic campaign theme--that he can offer economic leadership to restore the fortunes of the middle class--Clinton will now cast himself as the champion of substance, opposed to the eruption of gossip and tabloid-driven rumor into the nation’s politics.

And if Clinton can win in New Hampshire, he can then argue that the voters have spoken on the issue.

New Hampshire residents offered mixed assessments Sunday night.

“Any woman is now going to continue to question him,” said Elizabeth Ciemins of Hanover. “It’s better that he admitted it and didn’t deny it, but it is still going raise a doubt--a question, at least--in a woman’s mind,” she said.

Bob Shaw of Manchester, however, said he accepts Clinton’s statements. “If she (Hillary) accepted it, that’s all that matters. Why should we worry about it if she’s forgiven him? Like there aren’t enough problems in marriages, right?”

Clinton advisers and outside analysts both agreed that for the next several days, until voter reaction can be clearly measured, the campaign will move through uncharted waters.

Although many Presidents have engaged in extramarital affairs--biographers have, for example, documented affairs on the part of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson--no serious presidential candidate has ever openly discussed such matters before a vast television audience. In 1987, former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart admitted to having sex with women other than his wife, but he did so only after his conduct on the campaign trail had destroyed his candidacy.

Sunday night’s appearance involved a high-stakes gamble for Clinton. National polls show at least half of the electorate has virtually no idea who he is. For many among the potential voters who watched the Clintons--CBS estimated the audience at 50 million people--his statements in the interview will be their first introduction to the Arkansas governor.

Neither pollsters nor political analysts profess to have a real sense of how the public might respond to Clinton’s strategy. In 1987, a Times poll found that 22% of the public said they would switch away from a candidate they had previously supported if they knew that candidate had been unfaithful to his wife. A CBS poll over the weekend put the number at 14%.

But some political analysts believe the number of voters who react to the issue exceeds the number who admit it, while other analysts believe a candidate who is candid about past problems, as Clinton argues he has been, can overcome voter antipathy.

CBS edited down the 11-minute interview segment from an 1 1/2-hour talk that the Clintons taped earlier Sunday in a third-floor room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston. A CBS spokesman said that at one point during the taping, an overhead lighting support fell and nearly hit Hillary Clinton, but she was uninjured.

Friends of the Clintons reported that both of them appeared to be in an upbeat mood after the interview. “The feeling was they hit a home run,” one close friend said.

Clinton seemed calm as he left the interview, even pausing for a joke. Asked who he was backing in the Super Bowl, he smiled and said: “That’s one of those private questions.

“We did our best, and we feel good about it,” he told reporters. “The American people are the judges now. We’re going to let them judge.”

Later, at a rally in Portsmouth, N.H., Clinton seemed almost visibly relieved to get onto the stage, much the way athletes talk of pressure dissolving once they step onto the field.

“A lot of you have told me to hang in here the last couple of days, how rough all this is,” Clinton told the crowd. “Yeah, it’s rough, but it’s nothing compared to somebody going home at night and sitting down over a table and looking at their children and wondering if they’re going to have another job again and feeling like they have failed their kids.

“You talk about rough, that’s rough. And if I’ve taken a couple of tough days in the campaign to get a chance to resume the campaign fighting for those kinds of people, I gladly accept that burden.”

After his appearance in New Hampshire, Clinton returned home to Little Rock, Ark., to watch the TV program with his wife and their daughter, Chelsea, 11.

Clinton told reporters at Little Rock airport that he was amazed the issue had attracted such attention.

“You’re (the press) doing this because of a paid story in a tabloid which ran stories about Saddam Hussein’s master-race sperm bank . . . and about Richard Nixon’s weird sex life,” he said. “I never thought I’d live to see the day that that sort of story would drive American politics.”

Clinton plans to return to the campaign trail today with appearances in the South.

Lauter reported from Washington and Brownstein from New Hampshire. Times staff writer Laurie Becklund contributed from Little Rock.