October 3, 2002
SUBSTANDARD:
The Clinton Standard (Richard Cohen, October 3, 2002, washingtonpost.com)This quality of Clinton's -- the sheer ability to get out of bed in the morning when you or I would have pulled the covers over our heads -- is indeed one of Clinton's great attributes. Sometimes -- in New Hampshire after Gennifer Flowers or in the White House after Monica Lewinsky -- I could only marvel at his ability to keep going. A lesser man would have quit.But Clinton is a bad model for other politicians. In the first place, few of them have his charm -- or, in the impeachment era, his enemies. Torricelli was facing an unobjectionable Republican named Doug Forrester and not that Talibanic inquisitor, Ken Starr, and the goon squad that supported him in Congress.
Second, Clinton's offenses were not about job performance but about sex. His critics tried to make abuse of power and perjury the issue, but at heart it was always about sex -- something about which most Democrats, and even a few Republicans, have some knowledge. We all have our secret lives, whether real or fantasy -- and thank God for us that no Ken Starr calls us to account for them.
Where does one even begin?
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 3, 2002 4:47 PM
Don't dismiss the sex angle so quickly. Democrats were the ones eager to pass workplace sexual harassment laws; in fact, it was Republicans who argued such laws could be used to embarass people.
I think if Bill Clinton had done like Kennedy and had sex with starlets and prostitutes, there would have been some embarassing news stories, but nothing else.
At any rate, it is wrong for liberals to say it was all about sex. It is also wrong for conservatives to say it had nothing to do with sex, because it did involve workplace sexual harassment.
Cohen, god. There is no one more infatuated with old Dionysus Presley, as Lileks once called the former prez.
Cohen's article on Clinton last spring during the Palestinian terror attacks was unbearable. The article imagined Bill Clinton in his robe, reading the news and smiling over the fact that Bush was finding the Israel situation so difficult, and how he had handled it with such aplomb.
It read as though it was filmed through gauze.