Once upon a time (and it wasn't so long ago) parents fondly told their sons and daughters that they could grow up to be President. Nowadays the option is still there, but Mom and Dad would generally prefer that Ashley shoot for dental school instead. In two recent polls, one conducted for CNN and the other for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, only about a third of parents said they would steer their kids toward the White House. The parental attitude is, it's a dirty (and thankless) job and someone else should do it.
On best-seller lists, someone else is, and he's not exactly a moral paragon. In the current best seller Absolute Power, the Leader of the Free World, the heir of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, almost kills a paramour during rough sex and then aids in the cover-up. In the summer's hot title Exclusive, the President of the United States murders the baby his girlfriend refused to abort. In the film Escape from L.A., the Chief Executive orders the assassination of his own daughter, while in the movie version of Primary Colors, John Travolta is slated to play the lyin', cheatin' and stealin' First Stud. By today's standards of popular culture, Richard Nixon was a saint. Jail to the Chief.
If you believe Bob Dole, President Clinton has singlehandedly besmirched the highest office in the land and is the primary cause of the public's distrust of government. Last week, in the wake of Dole's final debate with Clinton and with less than three weeks to go until Election Day, Dole made the centerpiece of his campaign not his 15% tax cut but Clinton's moral fitness. "We're just starting to get tough," he told an audience in Riverside, California, noting that for the next 19 days he would highlight what he called "the sleaze factor" in the White House. "Never has America seen a politician," Dole said, "who brags so freely about promises he never kept, votes he hasn't earned, goals he never accomplished or virtues he never displayed."
But in the debate, despite his handlers' touting of his aggressiveness, Dole was curiously ambivalent, the reluctant prosecutor. Less than 10 minutes into it, in response to a touchy-feely question from a schoolteacher lamenting the lack of civility in public discourse, Dole said, "There's no doubt about it that many American people have lost their faith in government. They see scandals almost on a daily basis." He then glancingly cited the 900 FBI files that turned up in the White House, without explaining the potential abuse of power they represented. And when he did raise questions about the Democrats' sloppy handling of foreign contributions, Dole lapsed into disjointed senatorial shorthand: "Campaign finance might help, might help contributions coming in from Indonesia or other foreign countries, rich people in those countries, and then being sent back after the L.A. Times discovers it-- $250,000." Dole's invocation drew little response from the earnest San Diego audience. Their attitude seemed to be, if this was his use of the bully pulpit, he seemed more like the pulpit bully.