Thanks to Bill Clinton, I had a brief conversation with my 13-year-old daughter this week about whether the president of the United States had an affair with a young intern at the White House. That’s not a conversation I wanted to have.
We don’t dodge discussions with the kids about morality and behavior. It’s difficult enough when they get mixed messages from their music and film and sports stars, but you have to wade in there and give your message, too.
Dennis Rodman makes a fool of himself? It’s hard, but not that hard, to explain his occasionally bizarre behavior. Sure he’s bizarre, but kids don’t start learning in 1st grade that they should admire and respect the office of power forward.
The president of the United States makes a fool of himself? That takes a whole lot more work, because the message that children learn early on about the presidency, and the message that Bill Clinton is sending them today, are in deep conflict.
After Clinton denied that he had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky when she was a 21-year-old White House staffer, a lot of the debate turned technical: What’s the eavesdropping law, what’s obstruction of justice, what’s the corroborating evidence, what’s an impeachable offense, what grounds does Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr have to get involved with this?
Those are important questions, and the answers will determine whether Clinton gets to finish his term.
But they’re secondary questions, really. The real question homes in on the moral responsibility of the person who is president. Clinton had a moral responsibility and he has kicked it away.
It’s not that he had another affair. If Lewinsky had been 41 instead of 21, this would be a different story. But you can’t write off a fresh-faced White House intern as a bimbo. It doesn’t work.
Now previously outlandish words like “pervert” and “misogynist” are being thrown around. Even people who have long overlooked Clinton’s peccadilloes have to consider that, given the chance, Clinton would have no respect for their daughters.
Does the president have a moral responsibility? No one would argue in the affirmative more strongly than Clinton, at least when he’s talking about feeding poor children and getting old folks to the doctor and fending off those wicked Republicans who want to tax the poor and give to the rich.
His supporters can argue that he has denied the charges of an affair with Lewinsky, they can whisper off the record that she is unstable, they can wail that there is political motivation driving the whole thing.
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They can talk until they’re blue in the face. If the Lewinsky story sounded outlandish, if it didn’t seem to fit so neatly into the way Clinton has conducted his adult life, no one would give it more than a moment’s thought. In this case, it sounds all too believable, and there’s every reason to expect that as events play out, it will gain more credence.
Moreover, in case they still doubted it, this gives people more reason to think that Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones have been telling the truth all along. The Washington Post reports that Clinton, during his sworn deposition taken by lawyers in the Jones case, admitted an affair with Flowers. Flowers, of all people, hit the nail on the head Thursday: “You think the boy would learn.”
You could argue that voters lowered the bar on presidential morality when they elected Clinton in the first place, knowing the stories of his alleged affairs. You could argue that that election emboldened Clinton to believe that his pre-presidential conduct would be accepted at the White House, too.
But that’s nonsense. Even people who were willing to overlook the past imperfections, people who considered the political promise of Clinton and decided it outweighed the peccadilloes, had reason to expect he wouldn’t act so recklessly once he was handed the presidency.
It looks like he did. Now the issue of presidential morality has reached a whole new plane, one on which even children like the perplexed ones in my house are talking about what it means for the president to go to bed with a young woman not much older than his daughter.
Clinton, by the unfortunate confluence of his position and his conduct, has made it more difficult to teach what is moral behavior.
I doubt that Clinton will be impeached, or will be compelled to resign to avoid impeachment. Few people relish the chance to repeat what the nation went through with Richard Nixon.
No, more likely it’s going to be a long, slow, and demeaning slide toward the end of his presidency. Three years of events just slightly less strange than what happened Wednesday, when the president of the United States interrupted Middle East peace discussions to deny he had sex with an intern.