Scandal Is Not His Only Legacy

Is it over yet? Can we talk about something other than oral sex? Or will Kenneth Starr continue to indulge the absurd analogies between President Clinton’s tawdry piccadilloes and the high crimes of Watergate?

It’s true, as the adage has it, that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Nixon’s time of troubles was the stuff of tragedy for this country--the attempt to destroy one’s political opponents through the use of the CIA, IRS, FBI and various ex-agent goons, who broke into the Democratic Party headquarters and the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. All with the knowledge of Nixon, who personally authorized secret payment of hush money to purchase the silence of his agents, who committed serious criminal acts.

Nixon was an enemy of democracy; Clinton is an enemy of good taste. If Nixon had succeeded, this would be a very different country in which dissent would be confused with treason. To compare Nixon’s assault on our Constitution with Clinton’s effrontery to marital vows is a sick joke.

Clinton’s folly is, as he admitted to the nation, inappropriate personal behavior that is a matter between him, “my wife, our daughter and our God.” It hardly violates the constitutional obligations of his office. But his behavior carries a huge price, not the least being that we’ve been tormented by history’s seediest sex education course.

All other presidents have been spared prosecutorial invasion of their private lives. But now, for the first time, a politically motivated civil suit was permitted to entangle the president. The ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court to permit the Paula Jones case to go forward on the grounds that it would not intrude on the work of the presidency will go down as the stupidest decision in the court’s history.

Obviously, this case has profoundly intruded on the work the president was elected to perform. The once promising peace efforts in the Middle East and Northern Ireland are dangerously threatened; Iraq is defying U.N. inspectors; the Russian economy along with that of much of Asia is collapsing; our own stock market is sliding. Instead of dealing forthrightly with those problems, the president and the media are preoccupied with the mea culpa for his personal behavior.

Clinton, revitalized by his reelection, was pushing ahead on what he interpreted as a mandate to shore up the middle class with health care reform, an expansion of the guarantee of free education through college and an attempt to do something about gun control and the attraction of tobacco to youth. Instead, he has been mired in a sexual farce, and conservatives who could not defeat Clinton on a principled basis are able to undermine him on issues from tobacco to Social Security reform with this voyeuristic line of attack.

Evidently, not one of the serious charges lodged by Starr against Clinton has panned out: Whitewater, Travelgate, the Vince Foster suicide-cum-murder, the missing CIA files, etc. In this great whodunit played out for four years, suddenly the grand detective rises to proclaim that the crime is not murder, grand theft or larceny but one of the hormones.

Some counselor somewhere should have educated Clinton to the uncomplicated relief provided by autoeroticism. It is irritating in the extreme to think that a president so opportunistic in matters of political survival as to sign a welfare reform bill that increases the poverty population would risk all for a dalliance with a Beverly Hills skirt.

Do I feel betrayed by his chicanery? You bet I do. To think that Clinton provided years of political ammunition to the likes of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson and Newt Gingrich is truly depressing. Here is a leader who inherited a nation that was thought to be terminally second-rate and instead, under his leadership, proved once again to be a beacon of hope for the world. He should be celebrated as the best president since Franklin Roosevelt, but for the moment he seems destined to play the hapless fool in a farce easily exploited by his political enemies.

But it does not have to end this way. The American people have stood by this president even when so many of the so-called media experts disparaged their judgment. It is now Clinton’s time of atonement, to reward the public’s trust by coming out fighting on the issues people care about. If Clinton can move decisively in the remainder of his term to turn around the free fall of the world economy and continue low unemployment and low inflation at home, he will be remembered as a great president, and Starr will be viewed as no more than an annoying bee buzzing around the ashcan of history.