Who Cares, Anyway?

By LANCE MORROW

If America is only afternoon television, then people will care, in a slack- jawed way, whether Bill was unfaithful to Hillary with Gennifer. It is the kind of question asked on soap operas and on Oprah and Geraldo and Donahue. When the program ends, the audience will mute a commercial and scratch itself, glance out the window and see that reality still looks lousy. It will turn back to the television and click through the channels to find another hour of pointless junk.

The Clinton story raises the old questions about the "character issue" and the relevance of the sex lives of politicians. It is an issue that rounds up the usual suspects: John Kennedy and his girlfriends, Franklin Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer, Dwight Eisenhower and Kay Summersby, Gary Hart and Donna Rice. The story is still basically junk, a little sugar rush of news. But somehow the winter of 1992 feels a bit late for the prim old American Kabuki: the mayor caught in the whorehouse, the schoolmarm shaking her finger.

In the first place, the pseudo-moral attention lavished on this spectacle offends a sense of proportion and priorities. Did Bill Clinton have an affair with Gennifer Flowers? The question must get in line behind real news: drugs and drug murders, AIDS deaths, illiteracy, a population getting dumber, 74,000 jobs lost at General Motors, Pan Am and Eastern folding, the highest homicide rate in the Western world. As for the sexual problems of America, they have less to do with consenting Governors going to bed with other adults than with the abuse of children, with sexual violence and rape and incest.

In any case, the nation cannot afford to waste good candidates. There are not so many to spare. Look at what the country has in the way of candidates. For that matter, look at what the country has in the way of Presidents.

The Clinton mess last week suggested something about a certain brainless overstimulation of American media life. In his novel Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow wrote about the arrival of fame: "I experienced the high voltage of publicity. It was like picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk. It was like the rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation." Bill Clinton, wholesome, ruddy Arkansas boy, found himself handling poisonous snakes. Ugly stories have a slithering life of their own.

American politics is so much danger and luck: gossip that George Bush had a mistress never damaged him during the 1988 campaign. Why not? Did the thought seem less plausible -- less imaginable even -- in Bush's case? Or did the monster just get bored and pass him by?

The rest of the world has been waiting for some time for America to mature on the subject of sex. Assume, however, that public interest in a candidate's + sex life is not prurience, not a sort of freebasing of sleaze, but an honest curiosity about a politician's character. What does an extramarital affair reveal? On purely civic grounds, the public would be better off investigating the politician's other habits. Healthy diet? Does he drink too much? Does he drive a car recklessly? Does he read books?

Too much sexual buzz interferes with people's instruments and makes it harder to judge a candidate on important questions -- his or her stability, judgment, decency, intelligence, ethics, strength of will, experience, truthfulness. If the public is going to behave like an idiot on the subject of sex, the candidate will naturally do almost anything to avoid telling the truth about any behavior less than impeccable.

The issue of a candidate's sex life is essentially a phony, except when (as with Gary Hart, who recklessly dared reporters to find him out) it may reveal some troublesome trait of personality. Does anyone think that Franklin Roosevelt was a worse President because he had an affair with Lucy Mercer? Human sexual life is rich and complex, but its interest is more novelistic than moral.

Collective judgments based on gossip are always crude, often stupid, and sometimes stir up a lynch mob. Anyway, the standards vary absurdly. Why is it all right for Bob Kerrey to divorce his wife and invite an actress, Debra Winger, to move into the Nebraska Governor's mansion for a time (the Nebraskans loved that touch of glamour) and wrong for Bill Clinton to stay married to his wife and work through their troubles?

The nation is heading into one of the more important presidential terms in its history. The American economy must earn a place in a radically altered world (much changed from the triumphant postwar American years when Japan, Europe and Russia were in cinders and Detroit made the only cars worth driving) or else become merely an enormous truck farm and parts factory across the Pacific from Yokohama.

Given the size of the job that needs to be done, it is time for America to get serious. At the very least, turn off the television set. And grow up about sex.