Let us be clear: What Bill Clinton won in court Wednesday was exoneration, not vindication.
Judge Susan Webber Wright held, properly and courageously, that Paula Corbin Jones had not made out a case that Clinton’s behavior toward her constituted sexual harassment or that she suffered any harm from it.
What the judge did not do was give Clinton a gold star for deportment. Judges don’t do that, and Clinton would not have merited one in any case.
Legally infirm though it was, the Jones lawsuit exposed to the American people the depth and gravity of our president’s “problem.” Quite simply, where women are concerned, he is a man who has trouble keeping his zipper zipped and his hands to himself.
Once this might have been deemed a grave moral flaw, a disqualifying character defect. Now, if the polls are any indication, it apparently is regarded by most of the American public as simply a “problem,” not something to get too worked up over and certainly not disqualifying.
The American people are, of course, entitled to make that judgment. But it is a dangerous illusion to think that public behavior and private behavior are really separate, that the way one behaves when nobody else is looking–character–is unrelated to how one will discharge public responsibilities, that trimming and fudging in private matters won’t lead to trimming and fudging in public ones.
Clinton, of course, is not the only modern president to have had a “problem.” Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon all had deep character flaws, some of which became apparent only in retrospect. Without question, Nixon’s character defects led to his downfall as president. Kennedy, it now is clear, left himself vulnerable to blackmail. And in all three cases, the nation was, to some degree, placed at risk.
So great has been the focus on the lurid and the lascivious in assessing Clinton that the issue of governance has been lost. But the question that counts is not whether he does or can take no for an answer but whether he has allowed his “problem” to affect the way he runs the government, the uses to which he puts his authority as an elected official.
The judge said he did not in Paula Jones’ case. Let us hope he did not in any of the others either.
