COMMENTARY: Are we an insane people?

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) UNDATED _ The ineffable Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, the House Majority Whip, must think […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ The ineffable Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, the House Majority Whip, must think three-quarters of the American people are insane.


At least one may draw that conclusion from his remark that the polls showing overwhelming public support for President Clinton are insane. Since between two-thirds and three-quarters of the American people support the president, depending on which survey item one considers, DeLay must mean their support is insane.

Thus, the incredible split between the inside of the Beltway _ as Washington is known _ and outside the Beltway, or the rest of the country, continues. The Beltway is convinced the public is going to rise up against Clinton sometime soon. But support for the president has been rock hard since January. It has survived every new”scandal”for eight months.

To anyone who has studied American public opinion this is an impressive phenomenon.

The media feeding frenzy after Clinton’s testimony to the grand jury was the most vicious and dishonest journalistic phenomenon I have ever seen.

Commentators, columnists, editorial writers and reporters have done everything in their power to turn the public against the president but without the slightest effect.

Now there are attacks on the public for its immorality. William J. Bennett, national scold and self-annointed expert on virtue, warns us of our obligations. Thomas Sowell, the Clarence Thomas of African-American columnists, warns us that our generation will be judged on how quick we are to condemn the president.

Who cares what Bennett and Sowell think?

Who cares what an editorial writer writes?

The media can change the minds of the public when the public does not hold a position tenaciously. But on Clinton’s private life, the public’s position is tenacious: adultery is between him and his wife and is no one else’s business.

The paradox is astonishing _ at least to those who don’t understand Americans. The public is sophisticated enough to distinguish between private life and public life. The elite are not. The public is disgusted with the perversion of national discourse by obsession with the sex life of the president. The elite revels in it. The elite media look and sound more and more like the National Inquirer.


But, say the media, the issue is not sex. It’s perjury and obstruction of justice. This is the biggest lie of all. Legal technicalities are being used to pry open the private life of the president.

The truth is, as any lawyer who has spent a career in civil litigation will tell you, someone who has apparently told a falsehood in a civil litigation deposition is never _ repeat, never _ dragged before a grand jury.

If Bill Clinton were not president, no one would pry into his relationship with Monica Lewinsky or anyone else. It is often said the president is not above the law. In truth, the law has treated the president differently than it would any other citizen. It has deprived him of the privacy it would not take away from another citizen.

It might be proper to hold a president to a higher standard of morality; it is not proper to hold him to a harsher law. Clinton has been deprived of equality under the law. The only one he should have apologized to is his wife.

The combination of the abuse of the law to destroy a president by Ken Starr and the feeding frenzy of the media have done grave harm to the image of America, to the presidency, and to civility and privacy in our society.

Paradoxically, as we have grown more tolerant _ less Puritan, Victorian, and Calvinist _ in our judgments about personal behavior, we have also turned the sex lives of the famous into a free-fire zone of publicity.


What happens next? Starr will send his report to Congress and there will be one more feeding frenzy. But the public will continue to support the president and he will go off to Ireland where they think, quite rightly, he is a hero in their struggle for peace.

The most disgraceful of the Beltway elite are the Democrats. Can they not see what the data from the surveys means?

The American people are fed up with Ken Starr and his prurient probe. They want it to stop. How can they make it stop? By voting Democrats back into control of the House of Representatives and shutting up DeLay. Don’t the Democrats have the courage and the intelligence to see that they can win the election in November by running against Ken Starr?

Or do Democrats think the polls are crazy too?

DEA END GREELEY

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