Well, all my neighbors are either over eighty, or speak Chinese mostly, so I won't be able to cadge a seat for the show. What is it about, though, exactly?
I think the problem I am having is that I believe that up to a certain point marital fidelity and presidential skills have no correlation. That is, George Bush could have an discreet affair and still do exactly the same job as president, because all that the affair would reveal is that perhaps the sexual joy had gone out of his marriage, although he is seemingly devoted to his wife in other ways. So, no character or behavior issue arises.
The difference with Clinton, and with John Kennedy as well, is that there may be other risk-taking behaviors that go along with compulsive sexual behavior outside of marriage so profligate that it seems to become sexual addiction. Certainly there were lots of risk-taking behaviors in Kennedy's case, which probably got him assassinated. Was that good for the country? I would argue that it wasn't. I have heard the argument that Kennedy's other women did not make him a bad president, but I am not sure yet how I view his presidency. The recent PBS program on the Kennedys certainly revealed a lot of pushing-the-limits kinds of behaviors, and we may be just extremely lucky that we did not get into World War III because of them.
In Clinton's case, you can no longer argue that this is discreet or private behavior, and as the mother of a teenaged daughter, I am personally very offended that he is dragging the populace through the mud and dirtying everyone who has to see this spectacle, everywhere we turn.
Clinton's presidency has benefitted from the having a very good economy, which I personally do not believe has much to do with his leadership, and is, rather, cyclical and based on macroeconomic trends and, to some degree, the skill of Alan Greenspan. I am having trouble coming up with anything else that is particularly splendid about his term in office, and it seems much too soon to judge. But if his sexual behavior is so outrageous that it becomes public, and thus weakens him as a leader, how can you really separate Clinton the man from Clinton the president? |
