The charge that he tried to conceal a personally embarrassing but not illegal liaison had not, it seemed, impressed most Americans as serious. Whether or not he had ever asked Vernon Jordan to call Ron Perelman and whether Vernon Jordan had in fact done so before or after the subpoena was issued to Monica Lewinsky had not, it seemed, much mattered to these citizens. Outside the capital, there had seemed to be a general recognition that the entire “crisis,” although mildly entertaining, represented politics as usual, particularly since it had evolved from a case, the 1994 Jones v. Clinton, that would probably never have been brought and certainly never been funded had Mr. Clinton not been elected president. For Thomas L. Friedman, then, the way around this was to produce more desirable polling results by refocusing the question, steering the issue safely past the shoals of “should he be president,” which was the essence of what the research was asking. “What might influence the public most,” Friedman wrote, “is the question of ‘can’ Mr. Clinton still govern in any reasonably effective manner.”
Since taking this argument to its logical conclusion raised, for a public demonstrably impatient with what it had come to see as a self-interested political class, certain other questions (If the president couldn’t govern, who wouldn’t let him? Was it likely that they would have let a lame duck govern anyway? What in fact was “governing,” and did we want it?), most professionals fell back to a less vulnerable version of what the story was: a story so simple, so sentimental, as to brook no argument, no talking back from “the American people,” who were increasingly seen as recalcitrant children, fecklessly resistant to responsible guidance. The story, William J. Bennett told us on Meet the Press, was about the “moral and intellectual disarmament” that befalls a nation when its president is not “being a decent example” and “teaching the kids the difference between right and wrong.” The story, Cokie Roberts told us in the New York Daily News, was about reinforcing the lesson “that people who act immorally and lie get punished.” The story, William Kristol told us on This Week, was about the president’s “defiance,” his “contempt,” his “refusal to acknowledge some standards of public morality.”
Certain pieties were repeated to the point where they could be referred to in shorthand. Although most Americans had an instinctive sense that Monica Lewinsky could well have been, as the Referral would later reveal her to have been, a less than entirely passive participant in whatever happened, we heard about the situational inviolability of interns (interns were “given into our care,” interns were “lent to us by their parents”) until Cokie Roberts’s censorious cry to an insufficiently outraged congresswoman (“But with an intern?”) could stand alone, a verdict that required no judge or jury. We heard repeatedly about “our children,” or “our kids,” who were, as presented, avid consumers of the Nightly News in whose presence sex had never before been mentioned and discussions of the presidency were routine. “I’d like to be able to tell my children, ‘You should tell the truth,’” Stuart Taylor of the National Journal told us on Meet the Press. “I’d like to be able to tell them, ‘You should respect the president.’ And I’d like to be able to tell them both things at the same time.” Jonathan Alter, in Newsweek, spoke of the president as someone “who has made it virtually impossible to talk to your kids about the American presidency or let them watch the news.”
“I approach this as a mother,” Cokie Roberts said on This Week. “We have a right to say to this president, ‘What you have done is an example to our children that’s a disgrace,’” William J. Bennett said on Meet the Press. The apparent inability of the public to grasp this Kinder-Kirche point (perhaps because not all Americans could afford the luxury of idealizing their own children) had itself become an occasion for outrage and scorn: the public was too “complacent,” or too “prosperous,” or too “fixed on the Dow Jones.” The public in fact became the unindicted co-conspirator: “This ought to be something that outrages us, makes us ashamed of him,” Mona Charen complained on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. “This casts shame on the entire country because he behaved that way and all of the nation seems to be complicit now because they aren’t rising up in righteous indignation.”
This was the impasse (or, as it turned out, the box canyon) that led many into a scenario destined to prove wishful at best: “The American people,” we heard repeatedly, would cast off their complicity when they were actually forced by the report of the independent counsel to turn their attention from the Dow and face what Thomas L. Friedman, in the Times, called “the sordid details that will come out from Ken Starr’s investigation.” “People are not as sophisticated as this appears to be,” William Kristol had said hopefully the day before the president’s televised address. “We all know, inside the Beltway, what’s in that report,” Republican strategist Mary Matalin said. “And I don’t think … the country needs to hear any more about tissue, dresses, cigars, ties, anything else.” George Will, on This Week, assured his co-panelists that support for the president would evaporate in the face of the Referral. “Because Ken Starr must — the president has forced his hand — must detail graphically the sexual activity that demonstrates his perjury. Once that report is written and published, Congress will be dragged along in the wake of the public…. Once the dress comes in, and some of the details come in from the Ken Starr report, people — there’s going to be a critical mass, the yuck factor — where people say, ‘I don’t want him in my living room anymore.’”
The person most people seemed not to want in their living rooms any more was “Ken” (as he was now called by those with an interest in protecting his story), but this itself was construed as evidence of satanic spin on the part of the White House. “The president’s men,” William J. Bennett cautioned in The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals, “… attempt relentlessly to portray their opposition as bigoted and intolerant fanatics who have no respect for privacy.” He continued:
At the same time they offer a temptation to their supporters: the temptation to see themselves as realists, worldly-wise, sophisticated: in a word, European. This temptation should be resisted by the rest of us. In America, morality is central to our politics and attitudes in a way that is not the case in Europe, and precisely this moral streak is what is best about us…. Europeans may have something to teach us about, say, wine or haute couture. But on the matter of morality in politics, America has much to teach Europe.