Only Pundits Are Outraged at Clinton Scandal

When President Clinton knows he’s about to be trapped on Martha’s Vineyard, let the world beware. Back in June of 1993, knowing that an August vacation in the Vineyard lay in store for him, he ordered the cruise missile attack on Baghdad that killed Leila Attar, one of Iraq’s leading artists. Once on the Vineyard that same year, his bloodlust was unabated. Clinton set in motion the Delta Force mission to Somalia, which ended in much unnecessary slaughter of innocents. Trap him in a holiday home with Hillary, feed him a couple of bowls of New England chowder and he’s on the line to the Pentagon with murder in his heart.

The politicians and the pundits got it the wrong way round. Given the time it takes to mount these missions, to identify a target in Khartoum and an old CIA training base for terrorists (formerly “freedom fighters”) in Afghanistan, it’s clear that Clinton OK’d the raid first, then, on Aug. 17, testified to the grand jury and addressed the nation in the full knowledge that two days later he would be recapturing the initiative with America’s Missions of Vengeance. The dog wagged the tail, or at least Clinton can claim it did.

For the press, it was the most gloriously satisfactory week since the death of Princess Diana. Nothing excites an editorialist more than the prospect of sustained moral outrage. Hardly had Clinton’s Monday night address concluded before the nation’s editorial cavalry set spur to their high horses. The president, the Manchester Union Leader shouted, “did not even have the decency to pursue his affair in some seedy hotel room. . . . His sheer recklessness and sybaritic lack of self-control is breathtaking.”

“In purely personal terms,” hissed the Boston Globe, “what Clinton apparently did was loathsome. Monica Lewinsky was on the lowest rung of White House staffers.” The inference here seems to be that if Clinton had made a pass at some more senior member of his executive entourage or Madeleine Albright, his behavior would have been less contemptible.

Then there was David Broder’s commentary in the Washington Post that Clinton was not only as bad as President Nixon, but actually worse. We speak here of the Nixon who sent burglars to raid the offices of the Democratic National Committee and of Daniel Ellsberg’s shrink; who suborned perjury from the burglars by paying them more than a half a million dollars extracted from a Greek American millionaire, promising cooperation to Greek torturers in Athens by way of a thank you; who carried on a secret war.

Why does Broder think Clinton worse than Nixon? “Nixon’s actions, however neurotic and criminal, were motivated by and connected to the exercise of presidential power.” In other words, when Clinton was cavorting with Monica Lewinsky, he wasn’t acting presidential. When Nixon screamed to chief of staff H.R. Haldeman about Jewish plots against him, ordered fresh burglaries, dispensed fresh bribes, he was protecting the presidency.

The more one wades through these editorials and commentaries, the more obvious it is that most of the nation’s editorial writers and commentators are athwart the preoccupations of their audience. In fact, far from being “sordid” or “distracting,” the Lewinsky scandal has opened up a fresh and uplifting vantage point to take a look at the American psyche on the edge of the millennium. Ordinary Americans don’t confuse the political office of the presidency with the personal behavior of the White House occupant. They regard his sexual life and extramarital forays as amusing but unimportant. They’ve long since accepted that on the character issue, Clinton carries a discount. They think Ken Starr is wasting money. They reckon that for years now, the Clintons have had some sort of pact on his infidelities.

One of the few provocative editorials on the whole scandal came in the Jerusalem Post: “Unlike John F. Kennedy, whose alleged philandering was never an issue during his short term, Clinton is still paying the price for espousing a life of libertarian values (or lack of them) in a system that is basically puritanical, judgmental, hypocritical. It is ironic that the man who fought a furious military establishment for the right of homosexuals to serve--his first naive blunder as president--should be almost crippled by a good old-fashioned heterosexual affair. What if Clinton had been caught in a gay tryst and forced to out himself in public? Would the hounds be baying as loudly as they have been over Lewinsky, or would have that been too politically incorrect?”

Clinton’s legacy--his sex life--is secure. He’s shown that by 1998, America has matured in its sentimental education, with only the opinion-formers lagging far behind, as they always do.