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As to Clinton, confessed sinner, the choices are harder; for in him the public and private are utterly fused. It is one thing to engage in a private affair between consenting adults. It is another to have a 22-year-old intern performing oral sex on the President while he talks by phone to a Congressman about the fate of Americans stationed in Bosnia. It is one thing to turn the Lincoln Bedroom into a campaign ATM machine, another to turn the Oval Office into a hot-sheet motel. It is one thing for the President to invoke the cleansing powers of repentance. It is another to suggest that he deserves to serve out his term so that he can help teach our children about integrity and show by example that "God can change us and make us strong at the broken places."
Before it is all over, the really hard test won't be whether legal scholars reach some consensus on whether Clinton's conduct met the standard for high crimes and misdemeanors; or whether Republicans would rather a weakened President Clinton serve out his term than an energized President Gore; or whether the commentariat declares that Clinton is a dead man. The hard test is whether in 50 years Americans will look back at 1998 and say that we raised the bar for public office so high that only saints need apply, or that we dropped it so low that moral authority fell out of the job description.
Ken Starr's long journey down the dirt road takes the reader past things most would rather not see, to places they would rather not go. The most shocking aspect of the report was the sheer quantity and raw quality of sexual detail. Starr's grand jurors received this evidence drop by drop, day by day; last week it came in a torrent over the wires in an instant, flooding the circuits of conscience and calculation and taste. Starr takes readers through the entire history of Clinton's relationship with Lewinsky, from their first flirtations during the government shutdown in the fall of 1995, when the interns had the run of the West Wing because the grownups had to stay home. Lewinsky ran into him in the hall on her way to the ladies' room. She lifted her jacket to show him her thong underwear. He asked if she wanted to see his private office. And an affair was born.
With that begins the narrative of 10 sexual encounters, which, according to Lewinsky's testimony, included oral sex, oral-anal sex, phone sex and much mutual groping--through phone calls, or in hallways, on Easter Sunday, while Hillary was out of town--a catalog aimed at demolishing Clinton's claim that his sworn denial of sexual relations was "legally accurate." Starr's version left members of Congress expressing a desire to take a shower after they read it.