Governor Bill Clinton - 24 January 1992

Whether or not he gets to be President, whether or not he gets the Democratic nomination, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas is a man you're going to hear a lot of and quite possibly for a not very nice reason. We'll come to that when, however, we've said a little about the state of which he's the governor, Arkansas. It's spelled like Kansas with Ar in front. Why then is it pronounced "Arkansaw"? Good question.

Although the first European who visited the place was a Spaniard, de Soto, 400 years ago exactly, it was the French who first made a settlement in the late 17th century, at a place named after the resident Indian tribe, the Arkansas tribe. The French called it Arkansas Post and we have no doubt that the French pronounced it "Arkansaw". The English, the Scots-Irish and the other later settlers simply copied roughly the French pronunciation. It's a minor but interesting point that the Arkansas river roses far to the north of the French settlements and the later emigrants who came through there were Germans and Irish and New Englanders who looked at the name, Arkansas, and so called it. And so, to this day, the Arkansas river flows through the state of "Arkansaw".

The state is in the south, in a region called by geographers West South Central. It's just about the area of England, much forested land, 18 million acres of it, bounded on the east by the Mississippi river. To the west, there are open plains, temperate enough to grow wheat, strawberries, peaches and the like. Further south, damp and hot enough through the long summers to sustain sizeable crops of rice and cotton. So agriculture, manufacturing of, as you'd guess, all sorts of timber products and tourism are its main industries. Tourism, Arkansas? Yes, indeed. It has two famous hot springs resorts. One is a national park, where if you have a prior interest in hot water, you can watch it bubbling or seething at 147º Fahrenheit. It has some splendid caverns, good hunting in the mountains and along the delta for ducks and geese and other waterfowl moving south. Because Arkansas is in a region that eons ago contained the shoreline of primeval seas, it has a great wealth of fossil remains, especially of early giant lizards.

Enough. I thought you'd better know something of the location and character of Arkansas because if Governor Bill Clinton should become President, then the alternative winter and summer White House would be presumably close by the capital which is the legendary birthplace of Carol Channing, Little Rock.

Now, to the matter. As you'll have heard or read, the presidential campaign runs its first fever up to the date of the first primary which is in the New England state of New Hampshire. The date is February the 18th. New Hampshire is a small state, ranks 40th in population, has only two Congressmen, as against New York State's 35, California's 50. Two votes, so you can see how little weight New Hampshire carries in either convention.

But the New Hampshire primary sets a thunderous reverberation across the country because it's the first heat of the election, the first beauty contest, the first chance the voters, even of a small state, have to say in each party, who they fancy most for president. The astonishing truth about this very tiny country election is that it doesn't make potential presidents but it can break them and it has done so many times.

In 1988 the present Senate minority leader, Senator Dole was beaten in the New Hampshire primary by George Bush and after that he never had a look in. And only 20, my goodness, 24 years ago, an anti-war, anti-Vietnam war northern liberal, a Democrat senator from Minnesota opposed the incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, for his party's nomination in the New Hampshire primary, a very headstrong thing to do. But Senator Eugene McCarthy got 42% of the vote and within two weeks Johnson announced he would not again seek the presidency. So we always get excited about the New Hampshire primary because dramatic things can happen, wholly out of scale with the size or political importance of the state itself.

Now in the latest poll, President Bush, in spite of the general grousing about his lack of leadership and his gently whining air of not understanding what all the complaints are about – President Bush is running way ahead of his most colourful and articulate opponent, the former Nixon speech writer and present television commentator, and at all times witty, downright bully-boy curmudgeon, Patrick Buchanan. On the Democratic side there are going against each other in New Hampshire – and from now on every other place there's a primary – five men, and of these the polls increasingly show one to be a stand-out. He is, as you guess, Bill Clinton. I gather Bill was his given name, as Jimmy Carter's was Jimmy.

(By the way, this is a good moment to do something I've been meaning to do for years, which is to beg visiting Englishmen not to go around America blabbing about Christian names. What's his Christian name? There are no Christian names in America. It is not a Christian nation or a Muslim nation or a Buddhist nation. There is no state church. Accordingly, Americans even when baptised in whatever faith, receive a given name which is followed by a surname. Understood?)

So Bill Clinton appears, at the moment, to be the Democrat's man. Of course there's lots of time between now and the Democrats' midsummer convention.

However, I bring him up to talk about an issue which could, perhaps before the convention, defeat him and all his hopes. I'm not going to talk about unemployment, jobs, abortion, childcare, or any other of the shopping list of issues which is published every week in the magazines and every night on television. This is an issue which will only be important, in fact vital, if it destroys the candidacy of Governor Clinton or, for that matter, of any other presidential possible.

The issue lies in the reply to a single question which was put to Governor Clinton last week and it's pretty clear will go on being put to presidential candidates from now on. The question was: have you ever had an extra-marital affair, Governor?

You may remember it was a question put not too many years ago to the man who was, in the moment he answered it, the man leading the Democratic nominees, Senator Gary Hart, quite likely to have been the Democrats' man. He hesitated, he got angry, he was flustered. He did what turned out to be a fatal thing, he implied, if not sanctification, at least spotless purity. He defied the press, he challenged them to stake him out wherever he spent a night and see for themselves, a lamentable suggestion.

They took him at his word and mounted a disgraceful day and night vigil outside his home. Of course he was impeccable but one journalist who 40 years ago would have been known as a gents' room journalist, discovered the record of a recent rendezvous, a weekend jaunt on a boat in Florida and not only the name of the girl but a disastrous, humiliating photograph of Senator Hart with the laughing, nubile lady on his knee, on a boat which bore the cruel given, not Christian, name of Monkey Business. It was, you may recall, the end of Gary Hart's political career. A pity, he was a considerable politician with strong hints of statesmanship.

So, how did Governor Clinton respond? He said, have you ever had an extra-marital affair? He said well, if I had, I wouldn't tell you. As a coda or ballast to this wayward response, both Clintons have said, with plainly non-political sincerity and warmth that their marriage, like any other, has had its ups and downs but is a good marriage, has been for a long time and means to stay so. I should have thought that was the end of it but now comes a fervent missionary piece in the New York Times, of all non gents' room journals, demanding – it's always demanding – that Governor Clinton give a simple yes or no.

The authors of this demand, a man and a woman, both professors of what's known in academic circles as political science, though there can hardly be a human activity less scientific, they say, a male politician's record of philandering, not there's an assumption there, says far more about his basic attitudes to women than any number of policy papers. Can women trust him to see sexual harassment as a serious problem? I come in here to say that I should think that a husband who had slipped – as the Americans say, jumped the reservation – would, if he cherished his marriage, be acutely sensitive to sexual harassment. However the key pronouncement of this remarkable piece is this: "Governor Clinton is not electable so long as questions remain about his personal past". Goodness. Goodness has little to do with it but I discover that a current New York Times poll reports that only 23% of the public would not vote for a presidential candidate who'd been unfaithful to his wife. Of course that doesn't mean that 77% would make a point of voting for a sinner. If that was so, there'd be a rush of presidential candidates for the boudoir with pictures.

But seriously, should an old frailty affect a man's public performance? I think of the grand old man of British liberalism, Mr Gladstone: I have known 10 prime ministers, seven of whom were adulterers. Of course he said that in private. I think of my sainted father, who kept till the day he died, the touching delusion that, apart from two lawful begotten children, his hero, Lloyd George, was a virgin. How much should a private lapse cancel out public competence? In the months ahead I'm afraid it will be gone into again and again and again.

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