Talking sex in the capital
Are Americans losing their puritan streak?
Correspondent Claire Bolderson reflects on another
extraordinary week in US politics.
I have spent the past two weeks talking about sex. I
have discussed with friends, strangers, everyone from
academics to taxi-drivers the sexual appetites of the
President of the United States, the times, the places,
the who-touched-who where, when and with what effect -
as revealed by Monica Lewinsky to the grand jury
investigating her relationship with Bill Clinton.
This choice of conversation topic, I hasten to add, was
not my own. It stemmed from the fact that Washington
is consumed by the Clinton Lewinsky affair, the national
press is obsessed and the government paralysed by it.
And with this obsession has come a strange and not
unwelcome turn of events - Puritan America is growing
up.
The United States is like a younger sibling or even a
child to us Europeans, full of youthful energy, almost
naive optimism and an unshakeable belief in itself, it's
always made us look unambitious, tired and cynical in
our relative middle age.
And like a confused and awkward adolescent, despite
the country having the world's biggest pornography
industry, America has until now, in public at least, been
coy about sex.
Any dirty talk is very
impolite, nice girls never
swear and Network television
is unable to bring itself to
show the naughtier bits of the
human flesh. Not anymore.
From the cafe now serving
the Open Face Monica
Sandwich to the lovely all
American Lisa on the
morning television news
who's taken to making very
saucy comments to the
weather man, to a Republican father of three in a
Washington suburb. Everyone is talking frankly and
openly about sex.
Kenneth Starr takes the rap
The conservative lawyer appointed to investigate first
President Clinton's financial dealings in Arkansas, then a
series of other alleged wrong-doing in the White House
and most recently and famously Mr Clinton's oval office
trysts, has produced for the public the most
extraordinary - and it must be said, not very legal
sounding tale of lust, unrequited youthful love, rejection
and betrayal.
You can buy it in any
Washington bookshop and it
is a very good read. Also
available now, thanks to the
Republican controlled
congress, is much of the
supporting evidence collected
by Mr Starr, evidence that
reveals an immature young
woman's passion for the
powerful man she addressed
as handsome and for whom
she bought dozens of tacky
gifts and numerous ties.
Boredom the prevailing mood
So all of this is now in the public domain because the
family-value espousing Republicans thought the people
ought to know - presumably they also thought that the
people would be shocked. But they're not.
The overwhelming sentiments, particularly outside the
cloying claustrophobia of Washington are boredom,
embarrassment and a desire for the whole topic to go
away.
At a crowded Democratic Party Unity Breakfast in
Boston there was not a single mention of the Clinton
scandal.
It may have been local party policy to keep off the
subject in front of the media but as the Mayor of Boston
told me with more than a hint of irritation when I raised
the subject, his constituents just didn't want to know any
more about the President's sex life, they care about
what he's done for the economy, particularly for the
creation of jobs, and about the effect that his crime bill
has had on the policing of their streets. Simple issues
relevant to their lives.
The American people don't approve of Mr Clinton's
behaviour but they are willing to forgive him - even to
forgive him for lying about it because that is of course
what most of them would have done.
Backlash growing
There is also emerging amongst all but the confirmed
Clinton haters a sense that perhaps Bill Clinton has
been treated a little unfairly.
Certainly his behaviour is that of a sleezy cheat even if
only half of what Monica Lewinsky told the prosecutors
is true. But Bill Clinton has always been an outsider in
Washington, a poor boy from the backward south who
never served in Congress and therefore came to town
with few friends in the political establishment.
It's a position that is now serving him in good stead with
the American people. Many, including the vast majority
of black Americans, see him as the victim of the
Washington elite.
Several black people compared his predicament to that
of the former footballer OJ Simpson when charged,
wrongly they thought, with the murder of his wife. "They
just want to destroy him," is a phrase I heard several
times in the past two weeks.
System on trial
Over the years though Bill Clinton has proved himself to
be a remarkably indestructable politician, and he may
yet survive this.
Whether the American political system will fare so well
is something about which I have some doubts. The
overall effect of the whole sordid scandal has been to
turn people away from politics.
Certainly the Democratic party's greatest fear is that
supporters won't turn out to vote in November's
congressional elections because they're so disillusioned
with the whole process, several people told me that they
fear a growing reluctance on the part of the American
people to participate in their country's great democracy
any more.
Like a child that realises as it grows up that its parents
are not after all perfect, they're coming to see that their
system of government and even their much worshipped
constitution has its flaws.
They are beginning to realise that ludicrously broad
powers were given to a partisan special prosecutor and
that nobody really knows what to do with the results of
his probing.
Mr Starr has put forward eleven grouds for impeaching
the President but as far as the American people are
concerned, what it all boils down to is a regretable
sexual relationship and few people want to cause a huge
and frightening upheaval in government for a very human
error of judgement like that.
The constitution doesn't help much - it says a President
should be impeached for high crimes and
misdemeanours but nobody knows what those are,
they've never been clearly defined.
Survival prospects
I heard a lot of people say that President Clinton should
just resign, that he can no longer lead, that in order to
restore faith in government he should take himself off the
scene. But I don't see that happening soon. Mr Clinton is
not a quitter.
As the former Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis
told me, Bill Clinton is the most tenacious politican
around. He's also one of the best lawyers ever trained in
the United States, and as his video taped testimony
shown to the public at the start of the week revealed -
he's more than a match for Mr Starr and his team.
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