Who Cares, Anyway?

If America is only afternoon television, then people will care, in a slack- jawed way, whether Bill was unfaithful to Hillary with Gennifer. It is the kind of question asked on soap operas and on Oprah and Geraldo and Donahue. When the program ends, the audience will mute a commercial and scratch itself, glance out the window and see that reality still looks lousy. It will turn back to the television and click through the channels to find another hour of pointless junk.

The Clinton story raises the old questions about the "character issue" and the relevance of the sex lives of politicians. It is an issue that rounds up the usual suspects: John Kennedy and his girlfriends, Franklin Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer, Dwight Eisenhower and Kay Summersby, Gary Hart and Donna Rice. The story is still basically junk, a little sugar rush of news. But somehow the winter of 1992 feels a bit late for the prim old American Kabuki: the mayor caught in the whorehouse, the schoolmarm shaking her finger.

In the first place, the pseudo-moral attention lavished on this spectacle offends a sense of proportion and priorities. Did Bill Clinton have an affair with Gennifer Flowers? The question must get in line behind real news: drugs and drug murders, AIDS deaths, illiteracy, a population getting dumber, 74,000 jobs lost at General Motors, Pan Am and Eastern folding, the highest homicide rate in the Western world. As for the sexual problems of America, they have less to do with consenting Governors going to bed with other adults than with the abuse of children, with sexual violence and rape and incest.

In any case, the nation cannot afford to waste good candidates. There are not so many to spare. Look at what the country has in the way of candidates. For that matter, look at what the country has in the way of Presidents.

The Clinton mess last week suggested something about a certain brainless overstimulation of American media life. In his novel Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow wrote about the arrival of fame: "I experienced the high voltage of publicity. It was like picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk. It was like the rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation." Bill Clinton, wholesome, ruddy Arkansas boy, found himself handling poisonous snakes. Ugly stories have a slithering life of their own.

American politics is so much danger and luck: gossip that George Bush had a mistress never damaged him during the 1988 campaign. Why not? Did the thought seem less plausible -- less imaginable even -- in Bush's case? Or did the monster just get bored and pass him by?

The rest of the world has been waiting for some time for America to mature on the subject of sex. Assume, however, that public interest in a candidate's + sex life is not prurience, not a sort of freebasing of sleaze, but an honest curiosity about a politician's character. What does an extramarital affair reveal? On purely civic grounds, the public would be better off investigating the politician's other habits. Healthy diet? Does he drink too much? Does he drive a car recklessly? Does he read books?