Word: scandalous
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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From its very first days this scandal has divided the nation between those who want to leave Clinton alone and those who want him to pay, between those who think everyone lies about sex--that he has been persecuted just because he is President--and those who think this fate goes with the job. Presidents aren't like kings, but they aren't supposed to be like the rest of us either. The office confers a mystic expectation, a combination of Roosevelt's brains and Johnson's clout and Reagan's grace, that helps Presidents persuade Congress and the people...
...moment Clinton confesses to anything, he loses some magical powers; his decisions during the past seven months have already cost him some actual powers as well. The shrapnel from this scandal is now embedded in the polity, the culture and the law, and it will take more than the passage of time to dig it out. The wreckage spreads across the whole field of battle: his moral authority, his ability to respond to a crisis, his room to negotiate with a Congress that might soon be his judge, and his ability to get the advice he needs...
...rest of us, there is no going back. Boundaries have been broken and precedents set about the personal privacy of public figures that are already down in permanent ink. We may hate that this is so; we may curse every sex scandal to come along for the next generation; but whenever the next one does, it will have a new historical marker: "Not since the Clinton scandal...
...Lewinsky scandal "is like the Hope diamond," says Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. "It attracts people and destroys everyone that comes into contact with it. The President's moral standing is destroyed, the political process is suspended and the press, instead of filtering out the fire hydrant of information in the information age, is like a dog urinating...
...many reasons, some of them fiercely personal, why people hate this story so much. It makes it hard to watch the news with our children. It leaves garbage in the living room. Every story gets viewed through a dirty prism: How much is our foreign policy shaped by domestic scandal? Did the tobacco bill fail because the President couldn't afford the fight? Cynicism is a political poison we've been absorbing into our bloodstream for a generation. But this time cynicism is just the beginning...