Giving the tabloids their due

But now Clinton has found his true vocation, as the first American President who has given tabloids their due. The language which till now was the preserve of morning rags and eveningers like the Dallas Morning News, which had to withdraw its story about a Secret Service witness to Presidential trysts, has now crept into mainstream papers. When Maureen Dowd in The New YorkTimes puts Oval (as in the Oval Office) sex in the same bracket as oral sex, you know you’re in Murdochland, or if you’ve watched the latest Bond, Carverland. It doesn’t help when the President of the United States, allegedly the most powerful man in the world, has to go on public television with his wife to say he did not have sexual relations with “that woman”. Of course, Americans are no strangers to lying, crying Presidents. They’ve seen Richard Nixon saying “I am not a liar” but at least that involved a theft from the Democratic National Committee office. Since then they’ve seen continuing exposes of John F. Kennedy’s famed sex drive, with the latest self-appointed undertaker Seymour Hersh falling flat on his facts. But they’ve never seen anything like this a President whose anatomical details are part of the global information network, whose taste in poetry is questionable (Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a gift, even to an intern!) and whose linguistic jugglery (“I did not have an improperrelationship with Monica Lewinsky”) even beats that of the broadsheets, which have run out of euphemisms.

Tabloid editors, harried globally by the accidental death of their chief patron Princess Diana, ought to stand up and thank Clinton. For not only does he protest only slightly when pictures are taken of him dancing half-naked with Hillary on a Caribbean beach, but he actually says he likes the results (he must be relieved it was with his wife). For a paperdom starved of goodlooking photo-ops, the drama being played out in Washington is heady stuff. Pictures of Lewinsky moving out of her Watergate apartment, of Hillary attending a black-tie dinner in New York attired in a chic black dress, and speaking to children at an inner-city school, carefully dressed in sunny yellow, and most of all pictures of Clinton hugging Lewinsky in a sea of White House faces, her every gesture rewound for significance.

But one supposes when the line between entertainment and politics blurs, this is bound to occur. Whenthe film, Wag the Dog, conjures up a war with Albania to deflect attention from a Presidential sex scandal or when in Absolute Power a President accidentally kills a woman he is sleeping with, it doesn’t appear too far from the truth. After all, Richard Nixon did go to China when Watergate was breaking all around him. And Kennedy was supposed to be involved with Marilyn Monroe, whose death remains a mystery.

When Clinton poses with Al Gore for Vanity Fair’s Annie Leibovitz, it is in the company of media moguls and business czars. When current hot star John Travolta plays Clinton in a movie based on the thinly-veiled truth, it allows entertainment to become newsy. And when former Presidential speechwriter James Carville goes on national television to declare war with Kenneth Starr, news becomes entertainment. Even more when Hillary reprises her Tammy Wynette act for the second time on NBC Today, an appropriate tabloid-like forum for a tabloid-like crisis.

And yet, what is funniest in this is that Americansare not upset with Clinton for his infidelity but for his mendacity. For a people bred on George Washington’s solemn declaration “I cannot tell a lie”, that is more important than Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky or even Kathleen Willey. Perhaps people do get the government they deserve.