Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest

17. "He Has Wronged America and Women": Clinton's Sexual Conservatism

17 “He Has Wronged America and Women” Clinton’s Sexual Conservatism Janet R. Jakobsen “He has wronged America and women,” proclaims Pheda Fischer, who is described in the New York Times as “a 74-year-old retired nurse from Waveland, Miss.” She continues, “I don’t understand why the women’s organizations don’t get upset. Don’t they have any morality? I still want him gone” (January 26, 1999, A15). The standard response to Ms. Fischer’s inquiry about the morality of “women’s organizations ,” or feminists in general, is that while they don’t like what Clinton has done and find him (as supposedly does the rest of America) to rate “near rock bottom ” as a “moral leader,” they like his policies and so want him to stay in office. Moreover, the narrative continues, those who hound the president, both the independent prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, and congressional Republicans represent the political faction—the radical and Christian right—that is the most hostile to women’s interests.1 Thus, feminists are willing to sacrifice morality to politics. This narrative has an appeal that is both commonsensical—along the lines of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”—and ideological, along the lines of “we always suspected that feminists were fundamentally amoral and self-interested.” In this essay I will suggest, however, that the obverse is, in fact, a more accurate account of at least some feminists’ response to the Clinton impeachment scandal. These feminists, myself among them, think that Clinton’s policies are 291 bad for women. These same feminists do not think that the right wing that sought to remove Clinton from office had accurately identified the moral problems in either his administration or in his personal behavior. Finally, we have questions about the moral integrity or hypocrisy of the right itself. We wonder whether Clinton ’s actions have been more morally problematic than those of any other postwar U.S. president with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter. To put the issue this starkly is to put it provocatively. Who, after all, wants to defend Bill Clinton on moral grounds? And yet it is important at least to engage with the question of how one understands the moral problems with Bill Clinton, because to do so provides the opportunity to explore the political effects of moral language and particularly moral language about sexuality in U.S. public discourse. Tina Turner for President In the fall of 1996, as presidential elections came around once again, my best friend was in line to vote in Philadelphia when a disagreement erupted between the woman in front of her and the election workers. The woman wanted to cast a write-in vote, which required a special form in these days of electronic elections. The election workers were resisting her request, apparently because it would be a hassle to find the form. My friend happily chimed in on behalf of her comrade in line, thankful for some interest in an election that seemed to offer only bad choices. Eventually, the woman won the day and was granted her constitutional right to vote, the form was procured and the line moved on. On their way out of the building, my friend and her new acquaintance conversed and eventually my friend gathered the courage to say, “If you don’t mind my asking, who did you write in?” “Tina Turner,” the woman responded. “Don’t you think that if she were president there would be a battered women’s shelter on every corner?” My friend wholeheartedly agreed, thinking that she had missed an opportunity by not voting for Tina Turner herself. The problem for my friend and me in voting in the presidential elections was that by the fall of 1996 Bill Clinton had already demonstrated that he was not an ally to any of the causes that we care about most: the struggles against racism and sexism, and for economic justice and sexual freedom. His first term was largely lackluster on a number of these issues, and he was most successful in making the traditionally Republican economic agenda central to the Democratic party (taking over from George Bush, for example, in the fight for NAFTA). Then, in the summer of 1996 Clinton did major damage in all of these areas simultaneously with JANET R. JAKOBSEN 292 two strokes of the pen by signing both the Personal Responsibility...