Oh, Behave!
By Bruce Handy
(TIME, February 2) -- Is it just coincidence that the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill
hearings in the fall of 1991 roughly coincided with Bill
Clinton's emergence on the national scene? In the years since
Long Dong Silver became a household name -- not to mention Paula
Jones and Dick Morris -- one thing has become clear: the word
nadir no longer has any meaning in public life. Perhaps this is
why, according to the latest TIME/CNN poll, 60% of Americans are
"disappointed" by the latest allegations against the President
and 55% are "disgusted," but only 26% claim to be "surprised."
In late-night comedy monologues -- which serve as a kind of trip
wire for public sentiment -- Clinton's philandering has never been
in doubt. He has long been an easy joke, a shorthand figure of
fun right up there with staples like Michael Jackson and Pamela
and Tommy Lee. Indeed, last Wednesday night as the Monica
Lewinsky scandal was first breaking, Jay Leno scored a twofer on
the Tonight Show with a lame joke about the Lees' wanting to see
Clinton's home videos (he did a lot better with his line that
Clinton's may be the second presidency to be brought down by
Deep Throat).
Up until now, polls have shown that a majority of the American
people aren't unduly put off by Clinton's presumed fooling
around (especially if it happened back in Arkansas). For one
thing, in an era in which no one besides felons and welfare
mothers is held responsible for his or her actions, compulsive
womanizing has inevitably been redefined as sexaholism: the old
kind of touchy feely meeting the new kind of touchy feely, which
certainly sounds like President Clinton. One imagines that his
tomcat aura may even have helped him in those precincts of the
electorate that had come to see the Democrats as the no-fun,
take-your-medicine, be-nice-to-everyone party -- i.e., the
girly-man party -- after the Carter, Mondale and Dukakis debacles.
Of all Clinton's straddles, maybe this was his greatest: to be
seen as both family man and rogue, feminist sympathizer and
Kennedyesque swordsman, the New Democrat and the Old. It surely
must have allayed fears that he was going to let Hillary run
everything. As Grover Cleveland, the old goat, is reported to
have said when confronted with a sex scandal of his own, "I
don't believe the American people want a gelding in the White
House."
It's often claimed that a nation gets the leaders it deserves.
The TIME/CNN poll shows that 54% of Americans think the
President's moral standards are "about the same as the average
married man's." While it's hard to tell whether this is good
news for the President or bad news for average married men, the
real danger for Clinton is that what had once been mostly
confined to the back of the national classroom is now up at the
chalkboard giving lessons. The problem for the President isn't
that Leno, Bill Maher and Conan O'Brien are talking about his
sex life night after night (luckless David Letterman was in
reruns last week), it's that Ted Koppel, Sam Donaldson and Cokie
Roberts are. The disquieting effect is not unlike having to hear
how your dad is in bed. From your mom. Comics at least have an
advantage over newspeople in that they don't have to try to
maintain a straight face while discussing fellatio and semen
stains on national television.
Yes, it was one of those weeks where the news played like bad,
improbable satire (except at the core of the whole White House
mess, where the novelistic verisimilitude of Lewinsky's taped
conversations, their palpable high-school ickiness, lent her
charges an immediate measure of credence; Clinton had better
pray "the big creep" doesn't become his best-remembered
epithet). In one bad satire-like coincidence, Hollywood has a
not-so-bad satire in current release: Wag the Dog, in which a
President is accused of ravishing a "Firefly Girl." The
producers were reported to be cautiously optimistic that the
White House crisis would help out at the box office.
More concerned were the makers of the film version of Primary
Colors, due in March and starring John Travolta as a thinly
disguised Clinton. "Even though the character's a philanderer,"
says a person who has seen portions of the unfinished movie,
"he's portrayed as charismatic and good-hearted. You could even
say noble." It sounds like an engagingly complex
characterization, the kind of thing we need more of in movies.
But director Mike Nichols must be wondering whether two months
from now, after an onslaught of news reports, press conferences
and (Why not shoot for the moon?) impeachment hearings, the
public will have any interest in leaving the house and paying
money to see a make-believe skirt-chasing President, let alone a
putatively noble one.
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