WHAT’S CHARACTER, AND DOES IT COUNT? AND HOW MUCH PRIVACY, IF ANY, SHOULD WE AFFORD PUBLIC OFFICIALS?
WHAT’S CHARACTER, AND DOES IT COUNT? AND HOW MUCH PRIVACY, IF ANY, SHOULD WE AFFORD PUBLIC OFFICIALS?
By
Ken Eliasberg
In recent years, much has been made of character as a consideration in evaluating our public officials. Actually, character has always been a quality that voters consider in making their selection; the difference is that character concerns were subsumed, sort of a subliminal factor that was not frequently discussed (at least not as frequently as today, perhaps due to the unfortunate fact that it is in all too short a supply in the political arena). What has changed? Bill Clinton! His wild wanderings all too frequently forced us to take a peek at this quality. At the height of his scandal ridden administration (and here I’m looking only at his sexual scandals; there were lots of others, many of which were of a far more serious nature, involving matters such as national security) he informed us, when the question of his character was put to him, that various charges might damage his reputation, but they could not affect his character. While this is a totally specious assertion, in a larger sense, it is absolutely true. After all, you cannot damage something that does not exist, and, in Bill Clinton’s case, he had (and has) no character; ergo, how could any charge damage it? It would be like talking to a surgeon about amputating a nonexistent limb.
Clinton further pushed the character envelope when he and his enabling wife tried to argue that their personal behavior was a private matter. Now one might find it understandably difficult to support this assertion in a situation where the highest PUBLIC official i.e. the president of the United States (POTUS) was being fellated in the country’s most PUBLIC facility (the Oval Office of the White House), by a PUBLIC employee (a White House Intern; how