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Chapter 7 Legalizing Outrage Robert W. Gordon In the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal’s early stages the makers of public opinion analyzed the affair in moral terms. They disagreed on exactly what was wrong with Clinton’s conduct. Some condemned him for adultery, some for betraying the implicit compact with his wife and the people that had once elected him President that he would avoid new sexual entanglements . Others thought Clinton’s sex life was nobody’s business but his own and Hillary’s; but were troubled by a powerful man’s exploitation of a vulnerable younger woman in his workplace, or by his disregard for the dignity of his office. Clinton supplied fresh reasons for denunciation when he denied on television any sexual involvement with “that woman” and kept denying it until it became unmistakably clear that the denials were false: now he was a liar as well as an adulterer, defiler of his office, and (possibly) sexual harasser. For Clinton’s fiercest critics, his affair and lies about it were just more evidence confirming his gross unfitness for his office, to be added to his history of draft evasion, “Whitewater” financial misdeeds, and “bimbo eruptions ” in Arkansas, the selling of access to the White House to Asian influence -peddlers, the firing of the White House travel staff, and the collection of FBI files on political enemies. Out of this critical constituency developed a well-financed fringe of extremists with access to radio stations, religious pulpits, right-wing publishers, TV talk shows, and Internet sites, who relayed to audiences of millions their theories that Bill and Hillary Clinton routinely arranged to silence with threats, or even murder, associates such as Vincent Foster who might expose their crimes and vices. To cultural conservatives , whether or not they believed the paranoid conspiracy theories, Clinton’s character defects symbolized the defective mentality and habits of an entire era,“the sixties,” with its contempt for discipline and the military 97 virtues, its slovenly permissiveness in raising children and indulging criminals and welfare dependents, its hostility to religion, its sexual laxity, and its postmodern, multicultural relativistic approaches to objective truth and absolute morals. For such critics nothing less would serve to cure the social disease than to cut away its source at the top, to purge the presidency of the polluting presence of Clinton and his sixties values and manners. He must be forced to resign in disgrace, and if he would not do so, he must be impeached. Their problem was that they could not bring the great majority of their fellow citizens—consistently about 60 to 65 percent of people surveyed in opinion polls from the time the scandal first broke to Clinton’s acquittal in the Senate—to agree that Clinton’s wrongdoing justified his removal from office. Faced with this persistent refusal, conservative critics denounced the people themselves as having been fatally infected with the sixties’ diseases of permissiveness and relativism. Yet if anyone had tried to count all the moral denunciations of Clinton ’s affair in 1998, he would surely have found it the most reviled adulterous affair in history. Hardly anyone except Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel passed up the chance to condemn it. On the affair’s impropriety there was as close to a universal moral consensus as one is ever likely to find in a contentious pluralistic society. The issue that divided the country was not whether Clinton’s conduct was wrong but what to do about it. Most people viewed the attempt to remove him from office as inappropriate, out of proportion to the scale and type of Clinton’s wrongdoing. Yes, Clinton had trouble controlling his sexual appetites: this was regrettable in a president, but not exactly news about this incumbent, and not uncommon among recent presidents, including the generally admired John F. Kennedy. Yes, it was troubling that his paramour was a young employee; but she had apparently initiated the affair, it was clearly consensual, and she was not complaining of harassment. Yes, Clinton had lied about the affair; but most people will lie to conceal an extramarital affair; and lying to the people, sometimes about matters of much greater moment, was also not uncommon among recent presidents, including the generally admired Ronald Reagan. The notion that extramarital sex and lying about it should automatically expel a person from political office set a standard that many officeholders, including some of Clinton’s most vocal critics, could not...

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