America's good father

America's good father:
Clinton skilfully peddled fantasy of first family as moral beacon- until now:[Final Edition]

Once again Canadians are snickering about their puritanical neighbours to the south. "What's the big deal?" many are asking about the sordid allegations that the president of the United States had an affair with a White House intern. Even if Bill Clinton did not attempt to obstruct justice or suborn perjury, his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky - if true - represents a severe affront to the sensibilities of the American people and a tacit admission that this president is not qualified for the job.

Clinton first "met" most Americans in an extraordinary post- Super Bowl 60 Minutes interview in January 1992. During that interview, with his wife, Hillary, loyally standing by, he acknowledged causing "pain" in his marriage but denied Gennifer Flowers's allegations that he had carried on a 12-year affair with her.

Now it appears that Slick Willie was craftily disputing some of the details of Flowers's story, not the central charge. And yes, much of Clinton's 1992 campaign was centred on the very Canadian notion that the country's leader should be judged by his programs and policies, not his morality and marital status.

Nevertheless, part of Clinton's "New Covenant" was a compact with the American people that whatever indiscretions he had committed were in the past; he implicitly promised that he would not demean the presidency or humiliate his wife by committing adultery while in office.

As president, Clinton has systematically paraded around as "the good father" and ideal husband. He and Hillary Rodham Clinton have danced, smooched and horsed around on camera for all the world to see. Mrs. Clinton's book It Takes a Village boasted that she and the president had weathered difficulties but were teaching the country that marriage should be a resilient institution, especially when children are involved. Throughout the six years, the Clintons also have flamboyantly demonstrated how protective they are of their daughter, Chelsea, living proof of their loving marriage.

During the 1996 campaign, Clinton not only continued to aggressively market his wife and daughter, he also followed author Naomi Wolf's advice and played the role of good father to the American people. His appeal to the soccer moms, his paternalistic, small-scale policy initiatives aimed at improving middle-class Americans' quality of life, blurred his role as good father and great leader - with great success.

In marketing his family commitments to demonstrate his love for the American people, Clinton was giving Americans what they wanted. Ever since its founding, and despite its many imperfections, the American republican experiment has been obsessed with virtue. The founding fathers believed that a virtuous citizenry and a virtuous nation needed virtuous leaders. The unique institution of the American presidency, combining head of state and head of government, invested a great deal of symbolic significance in one individual.

Serving as half king, half prime minister in a young nation lacking a traditional aristocracy, George Washington understood that the American president had to comport himself with dignity. Over the years, the president became the high priest of America's civil religion, with the White House serving as America's holy of holies, a sacred shrine where the leader lived and worked under one roof.

That is why the notion of prostituting the Lincoln Bedroom to raise campaign funds, let alone turning the president's private office into a den of iniquity, is so disturbing.

Since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal expanded the role of the federal government in Americans' lives, the presidency has become more powerful and more symbolically significant in American life. With the rise of the national media, the president has also become the nation's celebrity in chief as well. As the most famous man in America, his wife, his daughter, even his cat and dog, become role models for the nation.

Ironically, in the last 30 years, even as the media has become more intrusive and the public more cynical about morality, the yearning for presidents - and presidents' wives - to set a high cultural and moral standard has grown.

In fact, in this topsy-turvy age of moral relativism, the presidential couple serves as an essential traditional ballast, a beacon of public morality amid the amorality rampant in Washington, Hollywood, New York. That yearning for tradition accounted for Barbara Bush's enormous popularity, and helps explain why so many Americans forgave Clinton his earlier sins and chose to believe the public fantasy Bill, Hillary and Chelsea peddled so effectively - until now.

Having paraded as a paragon of public morality and family values, having taken a job that requires fulfilling that role, Clinton should have been able to control himself.

If, as it appears, he could not, he has indeed breached his covenant with the American people, a covenant not based on hypocrisy, anachronistic puritanism or naivete, but rather one central to the American dream, the American yearning for the best from its leaders and the best from its citizens.

While sometimes unrealistic, this desire for virtue has often brought out the best in Americans and should not be trashed simply because this president - and too many of his predecessors - was not up to the job.

Gil Troy is chairman of the history department at McGill University and author of Affairs of State: the Rise and Rejection of the Presidential Couple Since World War II.