Tuesday, April 1, 2008

"None of your business."

Chelsea Clinton, daughter of Bill and Hillary, is currently campaigning for her mom. Much of her duties include visiting colleges around the country and getting the young voters excited. There's been some talk that this election, like the one in 1992, has galvanized the younger generation, and who better to send than young fresh Chelsea. She seems, from the footage I've seen, to be a well-spoken and intelligent young lady. Public speaking seems to run in the family.

In a recent stop, she was asked by an audience member if she thought her father's affair from when he was President would negatively impact her mother's candidacy. She replied "that's really none of your business". She didn't snap at the person, she didn't scream, cry, growl, or flip him off. She was polite, but firm: back off. In another campaign stop, another student posed the Lewinsky question, and was again met with a polite but firm “none of your business”.

It reminded me of an interview from 1992, when Phil Donahue asked Bill Clinton if he had ever cheated on his wife. Bill smiled and said "no, but if I had, it'd be none of your business." It's nice to see the family view hasn't changed much. But it raises an interesting point. Was Clinton's affair (or affairs, if you believe the gossip) any of the American public's business? Do we, as citizens, have a right to know what goes on in the personal lives of our elected leaders? Certainly in this Information Age, we crave our fix of data like junkies, and the once-a-day half hour with Walter Cronkite simply does not sate our bloodlust as it once did. In the age of 24-hour streaming news, it raises the question: where does the press draw the line?

There is the axiom in journalism that reads “if it bleeds, it leads”. Nobody goes to an air show except to see a fiery crash, and no one cares what’s happening with famous people (including politicians) unless it’s a scandal. Legislation to nationalize healthcare for all citizens? Yawn. A 60-year old Senator diddling 18-year old male pages via text message? Now we’ve got our lead story.

I take small comfort in knowing that it wasn’t always this way. Kennedy was one of the great philanderers of his day, but you’ll not find much about it in the newspapers of that time. It suggests to me that it was a classier time for journalists, albeit duller. These days, Edward R. Murrow would be lucky to handle the crop report on the local news in Des Moines.

Certainly human nature hasn’t changed. We’re the same sex-crazed gossip mongers we’ve always been. Only now it’s acceptable for legitimate journalists to focus more on Monica Lewinsky’s famous blue dress than on genocide in Africa. There’s an economic angle to be considered as well here: in checkout lines and waiting rooms across America, more people are reaching for People and Us magazines than U.S. News and World Report. We want to know about the train wrecks, the rehabs, the messy divorces of our cultural royalty. And in recent years, cultural royalty has come to include Presidents. Ever since Richard Nixon asked us to sock it to him on “Laugh In”, President have been willing to debase themselves on national TV for a little attention. Clinton blew the sax on Arsenio Hall’s show. Saturday Night Live has given Obama and Clinton more of a ratings boost than CNBC. The problem is that this sort of attention morphs our leaders from statesmen into celebrities. We were all titillated by who Marilyn Monroe was sleeping with, but when JFK was that man, suddenly we were all willing to take the high road. It simply wasn’t dignified to speak of our President in such pedestrian terms. This was the leader of the Free World, and respect must be paid.

But no longer, it seems. As celebrities, eager to show their sense of humor and humanity in general, our political pantheon has collectively stepped down off the pedestal that once granted them immunity from such gossip. In their eagerness to demonstrate that they were “one of us”, they exposed themselves to being treated like one of us – susceptible to gossip and slander.

All Presidents have been attacked by their opponents for a variety of reasons, but only in recent years has the general public gotten in on the act, demanding access to the most privy aspects of our leaders’ lives. No longer content to ogle the First Lady’s choice in dishware and window treatments, we consider ourselves entitled to the gory details of their sex lives, especially when adultery is the soup du jour.

Personally, I think it should be considered beneath a President’s dignity to address such issues. This goes for presidential candidates as well. As legitimate journalism encroaches incrementally into the private lives of these very public people, a line must be drawn eventually. A boundary must be established that tells the media “this far, and no further”. We cannot count on the media, or the public, to ultimately censor themselves and comport with discretion and dignity. In this age, the lowest common denominator in our society is given equal footing, and in some cases preferential treatment. I think Chelsea’s reply was a long-overdue cry in the desert, a wake-up call to not only the media but to our society at large: you’re not entitled to answers when the question is none of your business.

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