Who Cares, Anyway?

(2 of 2)

Too much sexual buzz interferes with people's instruments and makes it harder to judge a candidate on important questions -- his or her stability, judgment, decency, intelligence, ethics, strength of will, experience, truthfulness. If the public is going to behave like an idiot on the subject of sex, the candidate will naturally do almost anything to avoid telling the truth about any behavior less than impeccable.

The issue of a candidate's sex life is essentially a phony, except when (as with Gary Hart, who recklessly dared reporters to find him out) it may reveal some troublesome trait of personality. Does anyone think that Franklin Roosevelt was a worse President because he had an affair with Lucy Mercer? Human sexual life is rich and complex, but its interest is more novelistic than moral.

Collective judgments based on gossip are always crude, often stupid, and sometimes stir up a lynch mob. Anyway, the standards vary absurdly. Why is it all right for Bob Kerrey to divorce his wife and invite an actress, Debra Winger, to move into the Nebraska Governor's mansion for a time (the Nebraskans loved that touch of glamour) and wrong for Bill Clinton to stay married to his wife and work through their troubles?

The nation is heading into one of the more important presidential terms in its history. The American economy must earn a place in a radically altered world (much changed from the triumphant postwar American years when Japan, Europe and Russia were in cinders and Detroit made the only cars worth driving) or else become merely an enormous truck farm and parts factory across the Pacific from Yokohama.

Given the size of the job that needs to be done, it is time for America to get serious. At the very least, turn off the television set. And grow up about sex.