Upon hearing the news, President Clinton banged a drum to an uneven beat, and strummed a guitar that he cannot play, and chewed a cigar that his wife will not let him smoke. Paula Jones' response was even more typical of the person she is: she wept, we are told, and then announced to reporters gathered at her condo, "I want to go work out."
Don't listen to the naysayers and skeptics, the professional doom-mongers and moralizing tut-tutters; this is still a great country, and Paula Jones has proved it to be so. There was a time when only domestic fat cats and foreign tyrants could bring a presidency to the brink of destruction. But Paula Jones has democratized the calculus of scandal. She earned $12,000 working for something called the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission--surely the bureaucratic equivalent of the Maytag repair service. One spring day, as she manned a registration desk at a conference, fate brought her into the line of sight of her Governor, who allegedly divined beneath her frothy perm a "come-hither" look. A state trooper appeared at her side, imploringly. She rose from her chair and stepped into the roiling currents of American history. It is a Horatio Alger story for our time. It could have happened to anybody wearing mascara.
This is a different country because of Paula Jones--and maybe a better one too. Already the vocabulary of popular culture has been immeasurably enlarged. In the fuddy-duddy New York Times, it has become acceptable to see oral sex on the front page--the words, I mean. Barroom rakes can be grateful for half a dozen new pickup lines, each with presidential cachet. "You make my knees knock." "I like your curves"--or, alternatively, "I like the way the hair falls down your back." And when all else fails: "Kiss it." Lawyers of the future will know to reach at once for the trademark wordplay of Robert Bennett, growling at plaintiffs, "This is tabloid trash with a legal caption." Even our knowledge of medicine has deepened. Everyone now knows that Peyronie isn't an Italian luncheon meat.
Our politics too have been clarified by Jones. Her first public appearance was with a group of conservative activists that even Lee Atwater once dismissed as the "Third Hand Society," so called because of their odd, slightly extraterrestrial appearance. Suddenly these outraged defenders of Clarence Thomas were exquisitely sensitive to the pain of sexual harassment. And when Jones filed her case--employing an absurdly expansive reading of the Constitution's "equal protection" clause so beloved of left-wing legal gadflies--their advocacy never wavered.