Vancouver Province
for February 1, 2001

So it’s out with the old, in with the new and oral sex is no longer fashionable in the Oval Office of the White House. At least not with people not your lawful spouse – and then, presumably, only after hours.

The Republicans, who won in November only because the United States Supreme Court decided that what had hitherto been a matter for the states, namely how people voted, was now a federal matter and that all the votes needn’t be counted, gleefully proclaim that Dubya will restore dignity to the presidency.

Excuse me, but I thought the president was supposed to govern well and look after the United States interests abroad. Since when was he elected to be the repository of the morals of those who proclaim to have them? (One is tempted to wonder just how many of those who bleated about Clinton actually had but one spouse to whom they had always been faithful but I digress.) Moreover, leaving aside Mr Clinton’s difficulty with his pants zipper, since when was a politician expected to tell only the truth? Is it now the rule that any man confronted with evidence of hanky panky is to make a clean breast of it, so to speak, to the little woman? Or is it just presidents to whom such injunctions apply?

I realize that nowadays it’s out of fashion to consider the facts when there’s sex to slaver over, but let’s look at President Clinton’s record.

During his eight years incomes, in real terms, were the highest in recent history. Business boomed. The enormous debt run up by Ronald Reagan and George Bush I has been massively reduced with the government now producing huge surpluses.

Crime rates, unwanted pregnancies and other social evils Mr Clinton inherited are down. Indeed the editors of the Wall Street Journal, scarcely dreamy eyed lefties, said this "The relentless cultural decline that at the beginning of the 1990s seemed like a fact of nature ground to a halt and, miraculously, reversed direction while Bill Clinton was president."

I would be the last to claim that the Clinton years were devoid of bad things but compared with all presidents of recent memory he looked after the public purse well and made things better for the average American. Perhaps Dwight Eisenhower was the last to be able to say that.

On the foreign scene Mr Clinton deserves full marks in two areas.

In Ireland he and his policies did much to lower the heat. In the Middle East, as in Ireland, he made the considerable accomplishment of keeping communications alive. I have my reservations about the Americans and British using Nato as the tool for dealing with the Balkans but, agree with him or not on the long term, there is no doubt that the Clinton administration has done much to cool things down at this point.

It is said, of course, that he was responsible for the terrible gut wrenchings of the impeachment process against him. Maybe. But I would argue that this was the result of a media frenzy about sexual shenanigans that in more civilized places would scarcely bring more than a careless yawn. He was a naughty boy I grant you, but so were Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Kennedy – the difference is that while in those days the media considered the president’s sexual life to be private it now holds that the public has a "right to know" everything, whether the conduct reported on has any effect on the administration of the nation’s business or not.

As the ability to judge the Clinton years becomes more balanced with time, I suspect that while the Lewinsky affair, and other goings on, will be part of the evidence he’ll be judged as a man who for all that was a pretty good president. I also suspect that this judgment will take into account a media which has distorted its role of keeping politicians’ feet to the power and has become a high powered, multi billion dollar industry no longer aimed at protecting high principles - but at the gutter.

What history will also record was that when the people spoke, in the mid term elections of 1998, they emphatically declared that while the media and Congress cared about crotchy canoodling in the White House, they did not.

And that, as they say, is the bottom line.