Lying and Regency
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by: Jordon
Not everyone in the pressroom thought that the Flowers story merited the attention it received. Writing in the Wall Street Journal in January 1992, columnist Al Hunt de-fined the scandal over Democratic candidate Bill Clinton's alleged affair with Gennifer Flowers not as a sex scandal but as "a press scandal." A candidate's private life should become the focus of press and public attention, argued Hunt, under very few conditions, among them, if the candidate lies in "a contemporaneous situation," "if any extramarital sexual relationships directly affect a politician's public Chanel Replica Jewelry life or governing decisions," and "if there's blatant hypocrisy involved. Any candidate who's running on a platform of restoring morality in America had better be pretty pure--just as there's a greater burden on defense hawks to explain a lack of military service, or pro-busing liberals to explain sending their kids to private schools."
The condition of currency was not met in the Clinton-Flowers situation. By Flowers's admission, the alleged affair was long over. Since the claimed behavior had occurred behind closed doors, whether Clinton was lying or not was almost impossible to ascertain. The situation involved no relevance to governance, no demonstrated abuse of power, and no blatant contradictions of the sort Hunt described between Clinton's rhetoric and the supposed affair.
Had Clinton lied? In the 60 Minutes interview, he had responded to a question about his presumed 12-year affair with Flowers by saying that the allegation was "false." More than four years later, in his deposition before the trial in which Paula Jones accused him of sexual harassment, Clinton would admit to having had sexual intercourse with Flowers once. Presumably the denial in 1992 was not to an affair but to the notion that the "affair" had lasted twelve years.
The standard posited by Hunt carries a trap for politicians, and this trap was sprung on Bill Clinton in 1998. Once an allegation about one's private life has surfaced, as the charge that Clinton had engaged in a sexual relationship with a White House intern did in early 1998, the press will ask the politician whether it is true or false and persist until an answer is elicited. If the politician denies the charges, then under the standard that makes lying newsworthy, reporters will seek disconfirming evidence. In this scenario, leaders would be well advised to hang a picture of Grover Cleveland above their desks.
In 1992, the 60 Minutes interview effectively dispatched interest in Gennifer Flowers back to the tabloids where the story had originated. When, in the fall 1992 issue of a men's magazine, Flowers alleged that she had aborted Clinton's child, the rest of the press ignored the story.
On January 18, 1998, online gossip columnist Matt Drudge posted a bulletin on his Web site; saying that editors at Newsweek had killed a story about President Clinton¡¯s is having had an affair with a White House intern. By Chanel Jewelry Wholesale January 21, that story had migrated to the Washington Post. On January 26, at the end of a statement on after-hours school care for children, Clinton looked directly into the cameras and said insistently, "I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm not going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time--never. These allegations are false." The next morning, Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked by Matt Lauer, the co-anchor of NBC's Today show, "What is the exact relationship between your husband and Monica Lewinsky? Has he described the relationship in detail to you?" Later in the same interview, Lauer asked, "If an American president had an adulterous liaison in the White House and lied to cover it up, should the American people ask for his resignation?"
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