_______________WHAT WE REALLY CAN'T FORGIVE CLINTON FOR: HE GOT CAUGHT BY FRED BRANFMAN (09/04/98)
	Fred Branfman's article suggests the wrong reason behind the drop in personal approval ratings of Clinton. I am a firm believer in first impressions. My 42 years on this planet have provided enough opportunity to wrongly second-guess my own first impressions to support this premise. The polls immediately after the deeply regretful four-minute Lewinsky speech suggested that the personal approval slipped some but not nearly as far as it is now. Why the drop? Is it because the American public is stupid and they need to be told what Clinton actually said? Or is it, as I suggest, because the talk show hosts' dissecting every word, saying over and over again that he was not conciliatory enough, that he is immoral, that he cannot be trusted in his political agenda, has caused people to second-guess their first impressions? I think this is much more likely. I was convinced it was the reason when I watched CNBC's "Hardball," where the host was literally drooling as he was spewing righteous crap and replaying three-word edited snippets out of the president's speech. So while the psychology behind our view of the institution of the presidency may explain the distaste for seeing this go on and on, the reason behind any decline in the personal approval ratings is the well-orchestrated use of a personal failing by political enemies. -- Jim Cady In his latest column, Fred Branfman writes: "If President Clinton resigns ... it will be because the American public is still not prepared, psychologically, to accept that our president is a mere mortal." His evidence? Some anecdotes about the Lincoln bedroom. And, of course, the difference between Clinton's two magic poll numbers: "job approval rating" and "personal approval rating." Seems to me that once upon a time there was only one presidential approval rating, and nobody knew just what it meant, but it was consistently high. This was boring and made for boring editorials. So, sometime right around Clinton's TV address a few weeks ago, someone invented a second approval rating, designed to be different from the first. And, what do you know! It's different! This must Mean Something! Perhaps someday the "personal" and "job" ratings will both become boring, and the pollsters will invent a third rating, like a "Chelsea's dad approval rating" or a "hypocrisy approval rating." Branfman seems to think that the public's ability to hold many separate opinions of Bill Clinton, simultaneously, is a sign of mental distress. What's his definition of normality, anyway? I am not 5 years old anymore; I am old enough to understand that saluting the flag, saluting the president and saluting Bill Clinton are different things. (My friends in the military are very familiar with this distinction, believe me.) I can also distinguish between Bill Clinton the flirt, Bill Clinton the Rhodes scholar and Bill Clinton the commander of our nuclear arsenal. Everyone knows that people have not one but many different lives, and that civilized society agrees, admittedly only after furious debate, to permit scrutiny of some of these lives but not others. How else could Clinton have won reelection, by a large margin, long after everyone knew about Gennifer Flowers? But the really amusing thing about the column is its attempt to derive useful information about the Lewinsky scandal by "studying" the American public. Next time try reading tea leaves or consulting the Oracle at Delphi. The public is even further removed from the scandal action than Monica's podiatrist; our only role seems to be rubber-stamping the final result. The scandal is a political game, an inside-the-Beltway intrigue beginning with a personal vendetta and culminating in an attempted coup d'état. The media, the pollsters, the court system, the president's hapless aides and Monica herself are not participants, but merely weapons in the hands of the high and mighty. In the end, the royal families will finish stabbing each other in the back, the bodies will be cleared away and Brutus will appear on the White House lawn and announce that his apparently reprehensible actions were actually in accordance with the "subconscious" will of the people, as determined by a carefully loaded yes-or-no question. And the authors of high school history books will come up with a way to make it all sound like progress. -- Michael Booth Are members of the media really so unplugged from society as a whole to think that we really don't mind a president doing something sleazy as long as he doesn't get caught? I was raised a Democrat in a family who worshipped at the throne of FDR. But I cannot help but be disgusted and outraged at the suggestion that this type of thing is acceptable. We know it happens everywhere, and undoubtedly it goes on extensively in Washington. So what? All that says is that the level of tolerance for disgrace is simply greater in that city. One of your contributors, Camille Paglia, says that this is simply sex between consenting adults and that no one she knows is outraged. That says more for the company she keeps than for the level of the misdeed. Many Democrats are outraged. One might assume that Ms. Paglia would allow us to be outraged for at least what Clinton did to his family. But I maintain that far from his private life, the bastard did this "on the job" during working hours in a government office with a government employee. I don't accept the concept that it's OK because other presidents did it and got away with it. As for your article's contention that we will lower the level for good behavior in future presidents, I hope the opposite is true. I hope that from now on elected officials will no longer expect their office to afford them the privilege of abusing the power to which they are elected. No more Bill Clintons, LBJs, John Kennedys, Richard Nixons or Bob Packwoods would truly make this all worthwhile. And no one can rightly claim we would be worse off without any of them. And perhaps all of them would have behaved better (and done a better job of governing) if they had been more certain that their misbehavior would come to light. -- Rick Donoho Fred Branfman's article delivers the truth. We Americans cannot handle the psychic disjunction between our grandiose expectations of the president and his infantile sexual behavior. We do not want an adolescent with sticky fingers playing with the nuclear football. It makes us scared. This much said, I disagree with Branfman that "it is healthy that people lower their psychic expectations of the presidency." We should not. We should continue to have just as high standards as ever, and we should continue to be outraged at the inept characters our election system continues to deliver. If we lower our standards, the qualities of our presidents will lower. The best outcome of the next presidential election would be for us to be unable to fill the office for lack of a qualified candidate. That should wake us up. -- Kip Leitner Fred Branfman's thesis that we cannot forgive President Clinton because "he got caught" is interesting but false. From the beginning, Bill Clinton broke new ground by connecting with the American people. He spoke to us about issues as if we had a brain. He took great pains to explain the intricacies of what he wanted to do, and we listened. We appreciated being treated like adults, and are now proving our maturity by forgiving him for being less than perfect! We also wonder how he can tend to his duties each day, which, to our amazement, he does. I believe that President Clinton will survive primarily because he IS a human being who admittedly has a weakness, but who also exhibits an iron will. And if we don't examine his warts too closely, we may still be able to view a shining figure against the sky. -- Diane Brandi Middletown, N.J. I don't agree that "the American public is still not prepared ... to accept that our president is a mere mortal." I think the public has been very accepting of Mr. Clinton's failures and his rather limited explanations. I do think the American public has a threshold for his failures. I think these failures aren't so much connected to sex as they are to arrogance and dishonesty. I hope that you're incorrect in assuming that the American public will modify their morals as a result of this scandal. Rather, I hope they reassert the need for standards of conduct for public officials. -- Jon Sigler
_______________DAYS OF RAGE (CONT.) BY STEPHEN TALBOT (09/01/98)
	I watched Stephen Talbot's documentary "1968," and having now read his critique of David Horowitz's response to that film, I find that much of his answer is, at best, rather disingenuous. The film was filled with what Horowitz aptly wrote was a narrative "shaped by radicals of the era." But in his answer, Talbot now refers to the "young, idealistic activists who sought to end the war in Vietnam by campaigning for Sens. Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy." The problem is that the radicals he features were not among that group. Take the moderate and highly regarded SDS leader Carl Oglesby. In his broadside "Message for McCarthy voters," a message most influential with SDS members, Oglesby explained that to support McCarthy was to support the very system that produced the Vietnam War. Moreover, if there were radicals in his camp, he wrote, they worked for Gene only because they hoped he would "bring off the capitulation [of the United States] without totally freaking everybody out." As for Bobby Kennedy's absurd proposal for a coalition government in Vietnam that would include the Viet Cong, Oglesby opposed it. That measure would, he argued, force the NLF "into a coalition whose other elements are precisely the forces which the NLF has been struggling to repel." The New Left's goal was defeat of the United States, victory for the Viet Cong, and the success of revolution. As he explained, it was communism that was "the primary form taken on by the struggles of the forcibly dispossessed to repossess themselves of their identity and destiny." And it was for this reason that he and other radicals rejected Martin Luther King Jr. and welcomed instead the "militant nationalism of American blacks." As for the events in Chicago during the Democratic Convention, the evidence reveals Horowitz and not Talbot to be on target. At the risk of sounding immodest, I suggest he and others read the chapter on the convention in my book "Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964-1996" (The Free Press, 1996). The purpose of the demonstration was to provoke a police riot and achieve the very polarization that Tom Hayden and other radicals desired. As Hayden put it at the time, "We are coming to Chicago to vomit on the 'politics of joy'" and not to transform America to realize the promise of its democratic potential, but to move toward revolution. "The government of the United States," Hayden explained, "is an outlaw institution under the control of war criminals." For Hayden, America was Weimar Germany in the pre-Nazi phase, and hence it was a "false democracy" whose true identity had to be revealed. The purpose of the confrontation was clear -- to provoke violence as the key strategy for exposing the fascist reality that lay behind the façade of a liberal political structure. As for Rennie Davis -- another moderate to Talbot -- he told the crowds in Grant Park to "build a National Liberation Front for America." Or as Jeff Jones of SDS said in his little speech, "Fight it out. Build a strong base and knock those motherfuckers on their ass." So much for Talbot's picture of radical leaders seeking to avoid violence. -- Ronald Radosh Center for Communitarian Policy Studies George Washington University
_______________NEXT STOP, HOLLYWOOD BY CHARLES TAYLOR (09/03/98)
	OK, so Charles Taylor enjoyed "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" and "Dance With Me." Bully for him. So why does he have to attack "Next Stop, Wonderland" with the same condescension he accuses "intellectuals" of when observing mainstream Hollywood movies? He calls "Next Stop" "terrible" and "warmed-over urban whimsy." I disagree and that's fine, except his reasoning for enjoying the other two movies makes his whole review transparent. He celebrates "Stella" and "Dance" for their frivolity, unabashed sentimentalism (hokiness, it seems), clichés and, last but not least, the beauty and ethnicity of the characters. The stories are, well, silly, but who cares?! We're at the movies to escape! And who could resist the precarious climax to "Dance": "Can Williams [as in Vanessa L.] and her partner combine the fieriness of Latin dancing with the precision required in professional competition?" Gee ... Further, Taylor writes that "Williams has a way with investing the blandest lines with edge and insinuation." Yes, the same Vanessa L. Williams (when did the "L" appear?) who garnered her acting skill from her cheesy music videos. Another plus for Hollywood lies in the grandeur of the sets ("lush and expensive"). Obviously, Taylor enjoyed himself at these movies. However, I can't help but get the feeling that he feels guilty for doing so, and takes his anger out on Brad Anderson, Hope Davis, "Next Stop, Wonderland" and most independent movies. Thus, "Next Stop, Wonderland" suffers from "style-phobic choppy editing and bad lighting." Low production budgets can result in this, Mr. Taylor. In fact, "This picture can't even rise to the cleverness of a good sitcom." In a word, bullshit. Boston isn't Jamaica, nor is it Las Vegas. The movie does a good job of displaying it. The movie doesn't moralize or try to send any sanctimonious message; it's entertaining with a bit of cynical humor and has a predictable romantic ending. I enjoyed it. I haven't seen "Stella" or "Dance" and probably won't, but I couldn't care less about the values of those who do see them. If those audiences feel their money is well spent, good for them. Several weeks ago Mr. Taylor favorably compared the charm, talent and acting ability of Phoebe Cates to Audrey Hepburn. I should have realized then to disregard his opinion. I won't make that mistake again. -- Paul Grasso Wayland, Mass. SALON | Sept. 10, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| WILL MOTHER JONES BECOME MORE POLITICALLY CORRECT? BY ASHLEY CRADDOCK

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