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| The Common Sense of the American Public |
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| no longer needs to be burped after hyped scandals |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, August 19, 1998. It is so tempting to emote for the ages on the topic of the President, his affair, and our affair with it. In short, I finally think that the American Public has matured beyond the levels understood by the media or Congress. I am, in fact, impressed. Not just because Clinton’s rating shot up ten points after his two minute mea culpa, but because the media had no template constructed with which to integrate facts with their hopes. The media had hoped not so secretly for an impeachment and the high ratings and increased readership such an event would bring. Having no courage of its own, the media needs blood in the water to exhibit its frenzy. But Clinton, while feeling and inflicting pain, doesn’t seem to bleed at all. The Republicans and the media don’t dare start impeachment proceedings as the law requires because it puts them on the opposite side of a hugely popular President with a nation in great economic shape. I don’t think they can pull it off even if they chose to, and I doubt that as well. We were instructed that the speech was Clinton’s most important and fate hung on it. It turns out that little if anything has changed. The public likes Bill Clinton. He fights his weight, his sex life an inspiration to many men and a source of fantasy to many women. He protects his family best he can and told Starr’s mob and the media to visualized minding their own business. That it was a private matter. Even conservatives huzza that. No other head of state anywhere else in the world would tolerate such an intrusion, and it is hard to conceive of anything to make ourselves more ludicrous in the eyes of the world. Not since Phillip Wylie wrote Generation of Vipers during World War II has a key underpinning of American Puritanism taken it in the slats. The public knows when we elect a President, we do not elect Daddy. Daddy would not be able to cope with the Reverend Falwells and Sharptons at home and Ghadaffi and Saddam abroad every day. The public doesn’t want a boy scout for President. They want political competence. If the President has a thing for goats, a shame, but it’s not an issue. The public knows this, just as it knows there are questions that ought never to be asked, much less required to be answered. |
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