New Rules of The Road

Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who would like to be President, held a funny kind of film screening last week. At the invitation of his campaign organization, 50 or so journalists, political operatives and Senators joined him at the Washington headquarters of the National Cable Television Association. The occasion was a private screening of a documentary about McCain produced for the A&E network series Biography. McCain is one of those baroque pearls of American politics, lustrous but irregular, so nobody was surprised that the film made the most of his days as a Navy flyer and a Vietnam-war POW or that it played up his bumpy Senate fights against Big Tobacco and for campaign-finance reform. But it also went long and deep into how he piled up demerits at the U.S. Naval Academy and lost several planes on training runs. It raked over his hard-partying past, his affair that destroyed his first marriage, and his second wife's onetime addiction to pain-killers. Before the final credits rolled, it had also worked through his involvement (and exoneration) in the Keating Five savings and loan scandal of the 1980s.

Not exactly PT-109. When J.F.K. was gearing up for his 1960 presidential run, the Kennedys spread the story of his bravery in the Pacific, not his conquests in Georgetown. But that was when smart candidates wanted charisma. Now they want cover, which, oddly enough, requires them to make pre-emptive strikes on themselves. In the aftermath of the White House scandal, it's a good bet that "youthful indiscretions" will get you more press than anything you say about school vouchers. Will voters care? If the past year teaches anything, it's that, up to a point still undefined, they won't. But for now, it's a smart move to get your shortcomings on the table before your opponents and the media do. Welcome to campaign biography in the post-Lewinsky era, the world of kiss and tell on yourself.

McCain's unusual movie night was just one sign of how the Year of Monica is changing campaign 2000. But in the same way that there is no consensus on what the past year was finally about--sex and lies? sexual witch hunts and hypocrisy?--no one is yet sure what its repercussions will be. Watergate was followed by an era of weakened presidential leadership and moralizing politics. But Watergate was about clear abuses of presidential power, not middle-aged sex play and the attendant embarrassments, and it ended with Richard Nixon in pieces on the ground. By comparison, Bill Clinton is merely scuffed and dented, and his accusers are on the defensive, while most people profess indifference to the whole matter. So everything that happened in the past year points to two conclusions that appear contrary but may not be. One is that in the next election, what used to be called the private life of a candidate will be anything but private. The other is that certain personal shortcomings may not be as important to voters as they once seemed.