Last Updated: February 03, 2000
Printer-friendly version
The 2000 election
Scandal - and what we find scandalous - tells us a
lot about our society, and it often foreshadows what is to come, as Gennifer
Flowers demonstrated
When it comes to covering presidential campaigns, we're now officially
in the post-Clinton era. For many people, that's going to require a certain
shifting of gears. It was nearly eight years ago that Gennifer Flowers
held her legendary press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan,
playing her phone tapes of the governor of Arkansas warily saying "all
you've gotta do is deny it," over and over.
We've been down quite a few new roads since then - the sex stories we
turned into a mini-industry (Lewinsky and Jones), the ones we skipped over
(Bob Dole's former mistress, Newt Gingrich's next wife) and the ones that
caught us by surprise, like Speaker-to-be Bob Livingston's sudden resignation
from the House, and the string of revelations about the foibles of members
of the impeachment committee. (Among them, what I consider the most underpublicized
scandal of the decade: the revelation that Bob Barr, the self-righteous
representative from Georgia, had once raised money at a charity event by
licking whipped cream off the breasts of several women.)
The American media has mushroomed in size since 1992, and there are
a lot of reporters, producers and editors around who have no experience
with a presidential race devoid of bimbo eruptions. The nightmare of the
Internet outlets and all-news cable networks has got to be an election
season full of monogamous candidates talking about health care.
I have confidence that something new will come up. This is one of those
periods in American history when the pressure on the media to get yappy
and a tad tawdry is intense. The communications industry is packed with
start-up ventures eager to make a name before their capital runs out, and
it's hard to get a lot of attention by sponsoring forums on the Social
Security trust fund.
Along the way, some reporters are bound to get burned, and some editors
will be forced to relearn the old lessons about what happens if you push
too hard for an expose. The book publishing community, for instance, has
recently discovered that it's a bad idea to print stories about George
W. Bush's alleged drug use, based entirely on anonymous sources gathered
by a writer with a criminal record whose reporting expertise lies in "X
Files" trivia.
But the lessons don't all come down on the side of perfect discretion.
Before our current scandal-sensitized era, there was that long, long stretch
when reporters were instructed to ignore private misbehavior in public
men, under the theory that even the longest nights of sin had nothing to
do with one's day job. Most journalists were still working under that assumption
in 1974, when a strip-tease dancer named Fanne Foxe jumped out of the chairman
of the Ways and Means Committee's car and into the Tidal Basin. But the
public soon learned that Rep. Wilber Mills was not only a friend to exotic
dancers but an out-of-control alcoholic. It was hard to argue that it didn't
make any difference if the chair of the House tax-writing committee was
discussing fiscal policy with the president while under the delusion that
buzzards were chasing him.
Nearly two decades later, I was at the Waldorf Astoria for the Gennifer
Flowers press conference, joining with my colleagues in making catty comments
about the singer-turned-Arkansas-state-employee's bad dye job, and vowing
never to get trapped in anything this tacky again. We were all sure that
Clinton had known Flowers as something more than a friend, but none of
us felt we were performing a public service by covering her story. Yet
in retrospect, who could argue that it was irrelevant?
As we were learning that private misbehavior might be more newsworthy
than we'd believed, we were also discovering that the public was extraordinarily
pragmatic about the private failings of public men and women. The old assumption
that a politician was doomed if he was revealed to be an adulterer was
shattered. In fact, over the last quarter-century we've seen men re-elected
despite revelations that they
a) had procured a government job for a lover who was a fugitive from
the law,
b) had conducted an affair with a Capitol page and c) was supporting
a secret second family, while conducting an affair with a mistress on the
side. They don't seem any more likely to throw them out of office for private
sinning than they would fire their automobile mechanic for cheating on
his wife.
Personally, I'm eager to see what kind of scandals come up this season.
Gossip about candidates' personal lives often says something interesting
about the society that's spreading it. For instance, substance abuse rumors
seem particularly popular now, because, for the first time in American
history, the public can reasonably assume that a large number of middle-aged
men and women in public life had at least a passing adolescent acquaintance
with drugs. For the wary public, the new slogan may be: "Never trust anybody
over 53."
Collins is a member of The New York Times editorial board and writes
a political column.
