Janet Spector Bishop sits quietly reading her newspaper at a bookstore at the Old Orchard shopping center, her 7-week-old baby, Jack, sleeping in a carrier beside her. Ask about President Clinton and his sex life and she offers her version of a moment in baby Jack’s distant future.
Like a lot of other people, Bishop says she is fed up with the focus in Washington on Clinton’s problems, is very suspicious about the motives of his critics, has her own busy life to deal with and is quite upset at the timing of this particular scandal.
She fast-forwards to sometime in the late 21st Century.
The little baby is now an old man. He opens a dusty box and takes out a yellowing copy of the baiduhai. His dad bought it on the day he was born, Jan. 26, 1998. A Monday. What was the news? What happened that coincided with his arrival?
“Clinton’s friends leap to his defense” reads the headline. A story reports that day’s installment about the alleged affair between Clinton and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
“Now,” says Bishop, “imagine him reading that and looking back on what happened when he was an infant. Great. Our memento of the day of our son’s birth is a newspaper that has a story in it about presidential sex. He’s going to say, `Oh my God, this is what was happening on the day I was born?’ “
Bishop, 34, who holds a master’s degree in public policy and has volunteered and worked in many a campaign, is beyond tired of hearing about Clinton and what he may or may not have done.
Politicians, she believes, are essentially slimy anyhow, so what would you expect? The presidency is not about personal behavior, she says, it is about how well the nation is doing and the way that feeling is projected on the office of the president.
That about sums up the apparent consensus among the majority of people who live way outside the Washington Beltway. The president’s problems may well be an obsession for the media and his Republican enemies, but few of the people interviewed by the Tribune in Chicago and its suburbs seemed bothered by the allegations.
These kinds of sentiments have been reflected in polls for weeks.
Clinton’s approval ratings have increased during the publicity and allegations of sexual misbehavior in the White House. The latest ratings show about 66 percent of those questioned approve of Clinton.
The same surveys show hardly anyone believes him, and most people don’t think much at all of his character.
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“I do think he is a liar, but I think it is part of the job of being president or being in business, to lie and to be deceiving,” said John Lu, a cabdriver who had stopped in for a sesame bean bun at the Chin Quon Bakery on Argyle Street in Chicago.
“The presidency is a policy position. The personal doesn’t matter.”
There also is a chance that in a nation in which divorce, marital discord and public discussion of intimate behaviors are common, people see some of their flaws in the president. The office is being humanized, much to the chagrin of those who would place their politicians on pedestals.
“He is just a man, a human being, even if he is the most powerful politician on Earth,” said Areli Soliz, 23, as she served up a tray of freshly baked loaves at La Baguette in the heart of Little Village at 26th Street and Albany Avenue.
“I think everybody’s got some sort of secret, otherwise they haven’t lived very much, ” said Linda Pollak, who works in public relations. “And you don’t want a president who has been in the closet and lily-white all his life.”
But if most Americans don’t care that much whether Clinton is guilty of anything he has been accused of doing, they do seem to care about the constant barrage of information.
If the results of the interviews are any indicator, there is a clear “kill-the-messenger” movement growing among a populace that has become weary, not necessarily about the information but about the manner in which the story is being told.
There is a sense the presidency is being treated the way supermarket tabloids treat “news” of alien abductions and troubled movie stars.
“What upsets me most is the news media,” said Rev. Derrick Jones after a quiet service at the Sunshine Missionary Baptist Church on the West Side, a neighborhood of vacant lots and buildings scarred by fire and graffiti.
“I think it’s a moral issue for the media even more than Clinton. Why? Why are they telling this story? Why are they using this language? The media’s judging too quickly. The media jumped on it at first, now they’ve backed off a little. But the more the media jump on it, the higher the president’s ratings because people don’t like to see a person being picked on.”
Just finishing their tea at the Chicago Botanic Garden, Jeanne Wylie, 70, and her friend Mary Engstrom, 70, who live in Prospect Heights, said they were uncomfortable about the way the media have handled the story.
“I don’t care much for Clinton to begin with,” said Wylie, “but all of this shows a great disrespect for the people who support him.”
Engstrom said she finds the Clinton stories repulsive.
“All of this stuff about his sex life. I’m not saying I like him or dislike him, but as long as he is conducting himself in a presidential manner, OK. Affairs on the side go all the way back to (Julius) Caesar, so I don’t think that is a big thing. But it has been made into something big by a lot of overblown media coverage. . . . People are really getting fed up with it.”
Anne Reifsteck, 42, a computer technician at a hospital but a veteran bartender in her previous professional life, said the media are abandoning one of the most valuable traditions, the need to check out stories before they are broadcast or published, in a lust for the Clinton scoops.
“I do believe in the press. However, it has just gotten way out of hand on this story. There are just too many people reporting too many unsubstantiated things. We have no idea where they are getting this stuff. People are flying right off the handle. It has all become way to gossipy with no actual facts behind it. They accuse him of something one day, then the next day they back down and say it was wrong.”
Chrystal Tolbert, who paints elaborate landscapes on fingernails at the Jammin’ Too Hair Cut and Style Salon at 47th Street and King Drive, waved her own magnificent five-inch nails in the air, got angry and presented her assessment of media behavior.
“It’s just gossip. It’s more entertainment, but the media is trying to make it news,” she said.
If the media is drawing more than their share of criticism, people seem to be growing increasingly sensitive about independent counsel Kenneth Starr and his methods.
Jones was particularly appalled by the cost of the investigation.
“We could have used that $50 million (actually about $25 million) to renovate up and down Roosevelt Road, to educate children, to provide day-care and after-school programs to help cut down on gangs, drug pushing and prostitution,” he said.
“This Kenneth Starr guy, who is he? Who gave him his power? I’ve never seen anything like him. There certainly was nothing like him when (John F.) Kennedy was in the White House,” said Edgar Palladino, an unemployed factory worker on the West Side. But he clearly isn’t in the Clinton camp. “He should keep his pants zipped. Personally, I think he is stupid for letting this happen to him, whether he did it or not.”
Reifsteck, sipping a beer at the Side Street Saloon in Ravenswood, said: “Perhaps there is a belief that the president should be true-blue. Well, excuse me, he is a paid liar. He was trained to do that. . . . Let’s just get back to business, the poor, the economy, jobs, the country. Why are you all distracting this person?”
Part of the pursuit of Clinton involves changes in perception of the presidency that stretch back to Gerald Ford, whose wife, Betty, may have opened a Pandora’s box with her frank revelations about alcoholism and drug use. Gary Hart’s audacious campaign trail taunt “Follow me”–someone did, right up to hiding in the bushes outside his love nest–seemed to open the journalistic floodgates on the question of presidential sexual behavior.
A sense is developing that the pursuit has gone way beyond bounds.
Kevin Arp, 39, lives in Geneva but grew up on Chicago’s Southwest Side and finds it difficult to believe he is reading and hearing about this kind of behavior in the White House.
“I think its all probably pretty much true, I mean so many people have come forward,” he said as he picked at fast-food chicken at a restaurant in Park Ridge.
“But I can’t believe it is happening and it is being reported like this. . . . Now, when I was a single man, age 20, you know, go for the hoop! I had my experiences, but this is the president of the United States. I would really rather not know about all of this.”
He would rather his children, ages 7, 9 and 10, not know about it either. But it seems to be everywhere.
“I feel like slipping the newspaper under the rug when it comes into the house. I think Starr has taken this thing way too far. He is driving the whole media thing.”
For many, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s early argument that the president was the target of a right-wing conspiracy has resonance.
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“You have a policy of 30 years of financial misgivings and in less than two years, (Clinton) has virtually straightened it out. The Republicans don’t like that. It’s all about power,” said Alicia Lee, an art instructor at the South Shore Cultural Center.
“I’m in my 40s, I don’t remember the McCarthy hearings, but this seems like what the McCarthy hearings must have been like.”
John Babayan, an Iranian immigrant who owns and operates Arya Food Imports in Edgewater, joined the conspiracy chorus.
“The Republicans don’t like this guy. He wants to do something better. . . . Look at his health-care proposal. If medical care is free, a lot of rich people are going to lose. Rich people don’t want this,” he said.
Jones smells profit behind the scandal.
“Everybody’s now going to be making money off the issue. Everybody’s going to be getting book contracts,” he said.
Kathleen Willey’s charge on the March 15 edition of “60 Minutes” that she had been groped by Clinton was followed by the disclosure she was seeking a $300,000 book contract.
There have been rumors of book contracts for those in the case almost since the beginning.
“So she was out to make $300,000,” said Lee Wilson, 71, a marketing specialist who was shooting pool at a North Side bar. “I got no problem with that.”
He doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with Clinton’s alleged behavior, either, except on one key point that many people mentioned in the interviews: They don’t want a president to lie.
“It really doesn’t matter. If he was out finding other ladies and he is caught, he shouldn’t lie about it,” Wilson said. “If he is a liar, he has no place as our head of state. But on the ladies, well, I’m on my fourth marriage. I’m no hypocrite.”