>>You're still confused?
No, but that statement confirms that you are. Thanks for making it absolutely and convincingly clear.
It's About Fitness To Lead
By Michael Kelly
Wednesday, August 26, 1998; Page A19
In contemplating the question that hangs in the paws of August's dog days
-- Is Clinton doomed? -- a good place to begin thinking is to concede to
the president's defenders their last remaining piece of territory.
Which of course is: It's just about sex. The Lewinsky affair is not about the
things that the president's attorney general said it was about when she
asked that the independent counsel investigate it: It's not about a specific
and credible allegation that the president lied under oath; it's not about
perjury, or suborning perjury, or conspiring to obstruct justice. It's about,
in the phrase that is suddenly the vogue, "consensual sex between two
adults."
A nicely euphemistic description, that. "Consensual sex between two
adults," as it falls lightly on the ear, sounds frolicsome and fun and vaguely
French. Or perhaps vaguely American -- old American, I mean. The
America of "It Happened One Night" and "The Seven-Year Itch," the
America where newspapers referred to women as ladies and to mistresses
as companions, and where no one ever wrote about Fiddle and Faddle in
the White House press pool. The phrase conjures up a sort of lost
innocence.
In the "consensual sex between two adults" construct, what the president
and the intern did was between the president and the intern and the
president's family. Actually, according to the president, it's just between
him and his family. "It's nobody's business but ours," as the president
righteously informed us. What transpired between the two consenting
adults in the Oval Office was not technically right, but really not so awfully
wrong either -- certainly not to the degree where a reasonable person
might seriously question the president's fitness to lead the nation.
Indeed, no questions on this subject should ever have been asked. As
Hendrik Hertzberg has limned coolly in the New Yorker and Russell
Baker has waxed wrothly in the New York Times, it is not the president
and his paramour who are responsible for the devastation at hand; it is the
scandalmongers and finger-pointers who have insisted upon making such a
destructive fuss about what is, after all, nothing more than a bit of c.s.
between two a's.
The primary assumption of this argument is that the sexual relationship
between Clinton and Lewinsky was not -- in and of itself, apart from issues
of perjury, etc. -- of such a nature as to give rise to serious opprobrium.
But this assumption is insupportable, as will soon become undeniable.
With the delivery of Kenneth Starr's report to Congress, the precise nature
of the Lewinsky-Clinton consensus will be known. This was a relationship
in which an immensely powerful and attractive older man, an accomplished
seducer, recognized in a vain, celebrity-stricken, ambitious and seriously
screwed-up young female employee a target of opportunity; and in which
he then exploited her as a workplace sex toy; and in which he encouraged
her to persist in her pathetic delusion that she was the object of his great
and lasting love; and in which, in the end, he discarded her.
A secondary assumption is equally insupportable. It is that, if it were not
for that horrid Ken Starr, no harm would have ever been done. Clinton
had been discreet about his indiscretions, and they would have remained a
secret, from his family and from the nation. This is silly. The illicit affairs of
a sitting president do not remain secret. What guaranteed the eventual
disclosure of the president's sex with the intern was the president's sex with
the intern. Of course Clinton's behavior with Lewinsky was bound to come
out -- one way or the other, sooner or later. Of course the damage was
going to be done -- to the president's family, to the presidency, to the
nation. And of course the president must have known that the damage was
going to be done. He just didn't really care -- hey, he has people to take
care of that sort of thing.
In the end, which looms, it will be understood that, even if it's just about
sex, it's also about fitness to lead: about the exploitation of the vulnerable,
about the abuse of office, about great and careless cruelty, about the sort
of man who treats others as commodities to be used and abandoned and
who then lies about what he has done.
Is it worth impeaching a president over this? Probably not. But that doesn't
mean that a president who behaves this way is worth the office. There will
be a few people who won't understand the moral enormity of the
president's behavior -- Bob Packwood, Woody Allen -- but that will not
be enough. And then the conversation will turn to the stuff that is not about
sex, the perjury and the conspiracy and all that: the crimes. If he is not
doomed, he is awfully close.
Michael Kelly is the editor of National Journal.
washingtonpost.com |
