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“Moral concerns” have sky-rocketed in intense importance in the last few months. When they are asked, voters indicate that they aren’t so much worried about sex, but they are very worried about lying, especially lying under oath.This is an inherently unstable situation. Sooner or later, voters will try to find some way to make their evaluations of the President as human being, and the President as a president, cohere. At that moment, his own party will try to “encourage” him to leave, because he threatens to take the party down with him. If everything a president says is subject to ridicule and reinterpretation because he has become untrustworthy, he simply can no longer govern.He may limp along in office but he will be much more than a lame duck; he will be, in our parlance, a dead duck, of little use to anyone. Presidents pronounce on everything from the Russian rouble to school safety, from balancing budgets to how to get more balanced meals for poor children.

But everybody is talking about it everywhere one goes – whether at professional conferences of political scientists or in taxi-cabs to airports. For it is our business.The President of the United States is more than a head of a party. And the CEO model some of the president’s defenders have been pressing on us will not work, not unless one believes that our civic life comes down to what the stock market is doing. The complex, and to many foreign observers, utterly bewildering American system, presumes a kind of affective bond between a president and the American people Once a president is elected, he is our president. We may not have voted for him but, if he occupies the White House, then he is ours. We are called upon to respond to his appeals, especially when he commits American blood and treasure in times of war and crisis.

But even those who do not agree with his policies must assume a level of integrity and decency on a president’s part He is literally part of our lives for at least four years. A small army of staffers was enlisted by the President of the United States to facilitate these assignations, and an even larger number to cover it up once things turned sour. Surely one has crossed the boundary into the public domain on every possible scale here – ethical, legal, and political.Furthermore, there are deeper ethical questions involved that are cheapened by being dismissed as “puritanical” ravings. Here, I have in mind the ill use of various persons – secretary, friends, loyal supporters – all brought into an orbit of deceit, lies, cover-up, perhaps even criminal wrong-doing – such as securing cushy jobs for “the woman in question” in exchange for her silence in a law-suit.How can this possibly be construed as merely private, as the President claimed in his ill-tempered and ill-fated address to the nation on August 17? Bill Clinton made it public, and did so from the very first moment Monica Lewinsky carried out her sexual duties in the President’s place of work, and the symbolic home of the entire American people.How, then, are the American people responding? Many appear to want the whole thing to go away, or so they say. Is that the end of the argument? There are those who claim so Consent becomes a magic wand.

With one wave of the hand, all nagging questions and problems are effaced Still, nagging questions remain, or ought to. Was this wise? Was it decent? Was it reckless? Was it damaging to all involved, consent or no consent? Now take matters one step further. The relationship, or exchange of what appears to have been distinctly non-mutual sexual services, involved employer and employee and took place in his – the employer’s – place of work, which also happens to be one of America’s civically “sacred” sites – the Oval Office of the White House.One could hardly imagine a more public place to carry on intimate transactions. This was no discreet affair with the two principals doing their utmost to keep a low profile and to try to protect the sensitivities of all involved Hardly. There does seem something radically disproportionate here: the most powerful man in the world and a young woman, a few years older than his college- age daughter, engaged in a putatively equitable exchange It strains credulity.Still, they consented.

It follows that those radical feminists who insist no woman can ever truly give “consent” to a sexual relationship with a man, especially a powerful man, because men are always and everywhere powerful and women powerless, perpetuate a dangerous stereotype of woman as hapless victim. Why shouldn’t this pertain in the President’s case? For a number of reasons.One of the things we have learned from three decades of feminism, and should have understood on grounds of simple morality and decency all along, is that a good many offences can be papered-over with the claim that what went on is “nobody’s business” but that of the participants involved Sometimes, indeed, this is the case. Those who hold to this view, one that is harder and harder to maintain in light of ever mounting evidence, insist that anything to do with sexuality (unless it involves an actual crime) is, by conceptual fiat, in a protected “zone of privacy”. That and more: the ideology of radical feminism, if implemented, would invite a society of hyper-scrutiny in which nothing was ever hidden from public view and judgement.So let’s assume, as I think we must, that Lewinsky, a 21-year-old intern on the White House staff, and Clinton, our 50-something President, both “consented” to the relationship One might want to cavil just a bit. Indeed, if anything, conceptual schizophrenia lodged, in part, in a determination not to appear “judgmental” about a person’s sex life – “judgmental” now being a dirty word among us – prevails.