Clinton's Crisis: It's the Sex, Stupid

So there we are, my seven-year-old son and I, sitting on the couch last week, watching the evening news. I flatter myself that it's a scene from the civics textbooks: Dad introducing Junior to the wide world of public affairs. My son knows something is up with President Clinton, but he's not sure what, precisely, and I'm not sure I want to explain it to him. Suddenly the words Oval Office pop out from the newsreader, and then President, then oral sex, and my son's brow furrows. He looks up at me, thoroughly puzzled. I reach for the mute button and kill the sound from the TV. This is not what the civics books had in mind.

I mention my homey vignette because already among the pundit class a consensus has emerged about the role of sex in the latest Clinton scandal: it is not, at the deepest level, about sex; the truly damning allegations are about possible perjury, and about the subornation of perjury, and about the obstruction of justice, and about other matters of law.

No. This thing is about sex.

On its face that statement may sound so banal as to be meaningless. Everyone knows sex is involved. My point is different. Sex is the whole ball of wax. If the scandal mortally wounds Clinton, it will be because the public understands the relationship he is alleged to have forged with Monica Lewinsky. It will be because they had sex and because of the kind of sex they had.

In the knowing, irony-drenched world of baby-boomer culture, no one wants to be thought a prig. So let's stipulate that simple adultery would not have endangered the President politically or created the lurid spectacle before us. He's been accused of that before and survived. People seemed not to believe his denials in 1992 about Gennifer Flowers--in fact, according to leaks from his recent deposition, the President seems not to have believed them himself--but the public apparently forgave him. An implicit bargain was struck, and it's hard to imagine a national convulsion erupting from disclosures that, say, he had stashed away somewhere in the Old Executive Office Building a cabaret singer roughly his own age.

The tapes of Monica Lewinsky, though, tell a story that is, shall we say, more complicated. If the tapes are correct--and Bill Clinton, of course, says they are not--the President of the United States is a sexual predator. The story line is boy-meets-girl, with a twist. The boy is 50 years old, married, and the most powerful and famous man in the world; the girl is by many definitions still a girl, a few years older than his daughter: 21, fresh from college, away from home, working for him without pay at her first real job. He is her boss; she is starstruck. He travels in motorcades; she works as a clerk. She is flirtatious and pretty and willing, and he takes her.