May 12, 2007
Gary Hart VI Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:50 AM EST A few points in response to Joshua Zeitz’s post on this subject. First, I am not a lawyer, but as far as I understand it, President Clinton’s conduct with regard to Monica Lewinsky did not violate any law. (His conduct with regard to the investigation is another matter, but not germane to the subject at hand.) But it most certainly violated his “contract” with the American people, who have a right to expect self-control from a President. He behaved despicably, and decent people of whatever political opinions should have said so. Therefore it was a legitimate news story. Indeed the media itself would have been violating its contract with the American people had it not covered the story. Second, as for the reaction of Gloria Steinem, Catherine MacKinnon, et al., to the scandal, he writes, “there’s a glaring difference between what Bill Clinton did and what Bob Packwood and Clarence Thomas did (or, in the case of the latter, [was] accused of doing). It’s one thing to enter into an affair with a subordinate; it’s quite another thing to chase employees around desks, grope them, or place erotica on their desks.” I propose a thought experiment. Assume everything is exactly the same as what happened in the Lewinsky scandal except for one fact: Bill Clinton was a moderate Republican (like Bob Packwood) instead of a moderate Democrat. Is there a person on the planet not in custodial care for chronic political hallucination who thinks that Gloria Steinem and Co. would not have been howling for him to be hanged from a lamppost in Lafayette Square, but would instead have said, as in effect they did, “That’s none of our business”? Third, he writes, “Many if not most of the women who staffed the commissions [on the status of women] were labor feminists and thus, by definition, working-class.” This reminds me of the famous line from Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip about Leonard Woodcock, then head of the United Automobile Workers: “All labor leaders are sensitive to the needs of the working class. That’s how they avoid belonging to it.” Fourth, he writes, “As a historian, I am more interested in what NOW was doing in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but I have no reason to believe its agenda is any less concerned today with issues faced by working women than it was 30 years ago.” I guess Mr. Zeitz is more concerned with NOW then than NOW now. Sorry, couldn’t resist. But I stand by my statement that the modern feminist movement is mostly concerned with liberal politics and has a narrow, class-based conception of the proper place of women in American society. Be a high-power lawyer whose kids are raised by nannies from the age of three days? Good. Be a full-time housewife or pursue a career that allows one to raise one’s own kids? Bad. Not liberated. Real women don’t do housework; cleaning ladies do housework. Consider Martha Stewart. She started with nothing and created a business empire that put her on the Forbes 400 list entirely by her own efforts. One would think she would be a feminist hero of the first order. No, sorry, wrong empire. Nothing domestic, please, we’re feminists. When Martha Stewart was railroaded into jail for an offense that would have gotten anyone else a slap on the wrist, the silence from the feminist movement was deafening. Fifth, Mr. Zeitz writes that my idea that a zone of privacy should extend around not only the sex lives of politicians but their financial lives as well, absent credible evidence of wrongdoing, must mean that I disagree “with the requirement that congressmen release a yearly accounting of their financial holdings and transactions.” Heaven knows Congress has its bad actors, from Republican Randy Cunningham, with his less-than-arms-length real estate deals, to Democrat William Jefferson’s $90,000 in cash stored in the freezer next to the four-cheese pizza and Ben and Jerry’s new Mint Chocolate Chunk ice cream (which is utterly delicious, by the way). I have no well-thought-out solution to the genuine problem of keeping government officials honest while keeping their private affairs private. Perhaps a nonpartisan commission could receive the necessary information and have broad powers to demand clarification as needed, but be under the same strictures as the IRS about releasing it. Only if the commission launched a formal investigation or referred the matter to the Justice Department for action would the fact be made public. But that’s an off-the-top-of-my-head suggestion.
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