Clinton's Scarlet Legacy

When it comes to Bill Clinton's legacy - a question that almost everyone seems to be obsessed with these days - forget about the great economic boom that his policies did so much to stimulate.

You can also disregard his consistent leadership on the world stage. And the way he revitalized the Democratic Party which, prior to his election in 1992, had been kept out of the White House for 20 of the previous 24 years.

Yes, those are all worthy achievements, but they don't exactly render him unique. After all, other presidents have led the country through prosperous times or excelled in foreign policy or been strong party leaders.

What truly sets Clinton apart from all his predecessors is that he did more than any of them to expunge the scarlet letter from our national politics.

As we all learned in high school (if not before) The Scarlet Letter was the title Nathaniel Hawthorne chose for his dark and brooding novel about life in 17th century New England. When Hawthorne's heroine, Hester Prynne, is found guilty of adultery, she is ordered to wear a badge of shame - a scarlet A - on the front of her garment whenever she appears in public.

Well, there's no doubt that we have come a long way from the rigid moral oppressions of that Puritan era. But even as we moved into more tolerant times, a persistent strain of puritanism continued to simmer beneath the surface of our so-called permissive culture.

Throughout most of our history, for example, it was an article of faith that politics and adultery don't mix.

It's true that in local and even state elections, voters were often willing to cut misbehaving politicians some slack. But candidates who ran for president were expected to be models of fidelity who never strayed from their firm commitment to what is sometimes called family values.

This is not to suggest that all our national leaders lived up to the lily-white images that shaped their public reputations. From biographies and other sources, we know that some of our most esteemed presidents - such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy - extended their sexual activities beyond the confines of their marital beds.

But those exploits were not generally known at the time, and conventional wisdom has long held that if their adulteries had been exposed while they were still alive and politically active, they would never have been able to run for president. Or, if already in the White House, their misdeeds would have aroused so much public revulsion that they probably would have been forced to resign in disgrace.

To appreciate how strong a stigma adultery has been in our national politics, we need look back no further than 1987 when Gary Hart - then the front-runner for the '88 Democratic nomination - engaged in behavior that led to accusations of infidelity.

During one stormy news conference that year, Hart was asked, point-blank, if he had ever committed adultery. Although he managed to sidestep that question, h was now caught in the cross hairs of a scandal that forced him to drop out of the presidential race.

It was against this stern background that Bill Clinton came charging into the national arena. And let's not forget that long before we ever heard the name Monica Lewinsky, the Arkansas governor and his candidacy had been branded with the scarlet letter.

In the early stages of his run for the White House in 1992 - just a few weeks before the New Hampshire primary - a lounge singer named Gennifer Flowers went public with steamy revelations about a lengthy affair she claimed to have had with Governor Clinton.

The overwhelming reaction among politicians and media pundits was to write off Clinton as a dead duck, yet another presidential wannabe whose lofty ambitions had been consumed by the flames of an illicit passion.

Instead, the governor agreed to be interviewed on 60 Minutes where, seated next to his wife, Hillary, he confessed to correspondent Steve Kroft (and by extension to millions of voters) that he had "made mistakes in my marriage." It was painfully clear from his tone and body language just what sort of "mistakes" he had in mind.

And it worked. In effect, Clinton succeeded in lancing the adultery boil and, to the astonishment of all the hidebound traditionalists, he went on to capture the Democratic nomination and win the presidency.

But that, as we all know, was hardly the end of it. Even before his first term came to an end, Paula Jones came forward with her charges of Clinton's sexual intimidation in a Little Rock hotel room. And the lawsuit she filed led inexorably to the biggest and juiciest scandal of all - the Lewinsky affair.

When that story broke in January 1998, most of the know-it-alls once again declared that Clinton was finished, that he would never be able to serve to the end of his second term. In fact, more than a few predicted that his resignation was imminent.

And once again, the conventional wisdom had it wrong. Even though the scandal turned out to be even more sordid that was first reported and even though it continued to dominate headlines for the next year, the president dug in his heels and somehow managed to steer his way through the legal and political storms that swirled around him.

It's true, of course, that he did not get through the ordeal entirely unscathed. In December of '98, Bill Clinton became only the second president in American history to be impeached by the House of Representatives, and that will surely leave an indelible stain on the record of his presidency.

Beyond that, even his most ardent admirers concede that the Lewinsky scandal was such a monumental distraction that it drained almost all the energy out of Clinton's presidency and severely undermined many of the policy advances he had hoped to make in his second term.

Nevertheless, the case can be made that Clinton not only survived the crisis, but that he ultimately prevailed.

His Republican oes were certainly stunned by the results of the midterm election in November 1998. Throughout that fall campaign, they were supremely confident that voters were so outraged by Clinton's behavior that his fellow Democrats would lose 40 or more seats in the House and Senate.

But instead, it was the Republicans who were hit by the sharp sting of a backlash. Voter resentment toward the GOP's aggressive tactics in pushing for impeachment was the only plausible explanation for the fact that it was the Democrats who gained seats in the congressional races. And those gains were viewed as a victory for Clinton as well.

The strong showing by the Democrats in that November election bolstered the solid core of support Clinton needed to carry the day when the impeachment case went to trial in the Senate in January 1999. Because of that support, there was never any realistic prospect that the Senate would vote to remove him from office.

What was even more remarkable was the way the majority of Americans stood by him through every phase of the scandal. At the height of the crisis, as the impeachment debate was raging in Congress, polls revealed that Clinton's job approval rating was in the 70 per cent range, and those high numbers persisted through his last two years in the White House.

Since modern polling began, there have been other popular presidents who served two full terms. But neither Dwight Eisenhower nor Ronald Reagan - to cite two of them - enjoyed such high approval ratings during their last years in office.

And so, as the Clinton presidency draws to a close, it may be too much to describe his reign as an unequivocal triumph. But he was certainly no loser, and I suspect that in the future the political bluenoses - who have had their way for too long in our history - will think twice before they play the adultery card against a president or even a presidential candidate.

For that card has been defiantly trumped by Clinton, and that, I suggest, will stand as his most distinctive and enduring legacy.

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