Clinton's contadictory polls - 6 February 1998

I suppose it's not possible that in 50-odd years, I've managed for very long to avoid talking about "the American people".

Of course, but whenever I do use it, I do so with reluctance because I simply don't know what the phrase means. I do know there are 265 millions of them, that they spring from over 150 foreign countries, that they live in about a dozen radically different climates, hence their landscape and their livelihoods are different and that the vast majority of them are citizens, or hope to be.

To jump from these bare but vital statistics to the pretence that they rise as a large human body and respond altogether with a burst of anger or a flood of grief, is obviously ridiculous. But "the American people", "the British people", are dependable standbys of journalists who don't like the truth to be complex and who don't have time to stay simply with known facts.

In the present tissue of complexity, which three weeks ago we dubbed the White House crisis, there is a desperate shortage of proved fact and a wealth of rumour, hearsay, lying, evasion, enough to make a lot of people cry, hold, enough, and settle for some flip conclusion like the president's private life is his own business or so long as the economy goes roaring along, who cares.

These are only two of the superficial reactions which many people, many journalists and publicists, but so far no politicians, have adopted as escape hatches from a think tank.

The one puzzle that practically everybody agrees on is the strange contradiction in the national polls between two relevant questions, "Do you think the president is lying when he says he did not commit adultery with Miss Lewinsky?" Answer – above 50%, yes, he's probably lying. Second vital question, "How well do you think the president is performing in his office?"

Answer – an astounding 68% say he's doing fine. Higher approval for a man as president than the sainted General President Eisenhower ever attained. Almost as high as was enjoyed by President Bush after his 100-hour Desert Storm war, Remember that? Not quite triumph enough for 70% of Americans today who are also boggled to know what to do about that.

First, in the case of President Clinton versus Miss Lewinsky, the core of fact is very small and can be recited in a minute or two. Three weeks ago a special prosecutor set up by Congress to look into possible crimes in the executive, that is the presidential branch of the government, extended his long-running probe into a failed land deal and then into illegal contributions to the president's reelection fund.

The prosecutor heard that a former young White House aide, now 24, one Monica Lewinsky, had been secretly taped by a friend – a friend? – and then legally by the special prosecutor, who was looking into the charge, brought long ago by one Paula Jones against the president, of sexual misbehaviour.

The prosecutor thought Miss Lewinsky might be useful as a character witness in the Paula Jones case, so he had her secretly taped. It is alleged, so far, not proved or asserted, that Miss Lewinsky, on one of these tapes, said the president had had a sexual affair with her in the White House and then tried to persuade her to deny it if she came to be questioned under oath. The president denied the accusations.

At some point Miss Lewinsky was removed from her White House job and transferred to the military headquarters, the Pentagon. That job didn't work out, but now a very close confidant of the president, Mr Vernon Jordan, sought and got for her a job with a famous cosmetics firm.

Mr Jordan has so sworn. He says it was an entirely innocent gesture. He often helped young staff members and was not trying to buy her silence.

Well that's not very much to go on, but from the first whisper of Miss Lewinsky's alleged accusation, the media descended in clouds as dense as vultures on a wounded animal and were so quick to develop that one allegation into all sorts of fancied and lurid consequences, that within 48 hours even a former adviser to the president and a reputable one, was talking about possible impeachment.

I'm sure I don't have to expand on the rumours, the contagion of them was so irresistible that even the most serious papers in the land caught the disease and some of them have been trying to shake it ever since.

There are several conspicuous ways of explaining the paradox of the polls. Commentators who believe in fundamental good sense of – you guessed it – the American people, tend to say that most of them think there isn't enough positive evidence, enough information, to warrant the extreme step of getting rid of a sitting president.

Another theory is that the American people have grown so cynical that they don't trust politicians, including the highest, and many people, taped and quoted by the network's roving microphones, especially young high school and college students who know very little history, say, well look, every president did it.

The point about "they all did it in the past" line – and it's used just as often about infidelity in the Royal Family – the point is that for better or worse there was, until very recently, say the 1970s, a taboo in the American and British press, a taboo never talked about, never sworn to, so taken for granted among all us reporters, that we would have thought somebody slightly batty or prurient who went on about a president's or a prince's mistress to the point of wanting to go into print about it.

The press in both countries have had waves of fashion in exercising and flouting this taboo. The late 18th Century and early 19th in London was a very gamey time and George IV, the king, was the worst victim. In the 1890s there was a riot of scandal sheets which the named parties simply ignored. Most of this century reporters and/or insiders at court, in Washington, in the newspaper business, kept it very much to themselves.

Well, as Duke Ellington said, there have been some changes made, and with the ballooning of the press corps everywhere into the media mob, many of them joined the profession under the impression that the rooting out of sexual scandal was their main task. So the possible or suspected peccadilloes of those in high places are now the daily bread of, you might say, most journalists.

Now about the paradox of the polls. The most sophisticated, not sophistical, explanation comes from people who say the French have it right. They are not so naïve or puritanical as to confuse statesmanship with private hanky-panky – look at Mitterand's funeral in the presence of his widow, his ex-mistress and an illegitimate child. What goes on behind the bedroom door has nothing to do with the public or his job. "How about the wife?" is rarely asked.

However, a powerful dispatch in the current New Yorker magazine from a man who knows France a whole lot better than his readers says in France this old pattern of arranged marriages and open affairs is as passé as everywhere else and the idea that adultery is OK if you don't talk about it no longer washes.

He sharpens his point by saying what strikes the French as crazy is the American insistence on arbitrating all social behaviour – love, sex, politics – in the single chapel of the law. A point, a religious trust in the law courts in this country, which I think is well taken, when you think of the man who even thought of suing his city football team because it was losing too many games and therefore was subject to a charge of fraudulent advertising and emotional distress.

I don't think he won but it was a close thing and the woman who did win – how many thousands – because a cup of coffee she'd taken from a drive-in restaurant was hot and spilled on her lap. And, as I talk, a famous talk-show hostess is being sued by the Texas cattle industry for having heard about mad cow disease, perhaps unfortunately hinted, you never know where it'll strike next and in a clearly chuckling fit of pretended anger said, "I'll never eat another hamburger". It's a fact that the Texas cattle industry subsequently lost millions. Post hoc, propter hoc?

And a professional golfer, who plays on a minor circuit tour, is suing the Professional Golfers' Association of America about their firm rule that no golfer playing in their tournaments may ride in a motor cart. This man has a circulatory disease in his legs which makes walking painful. He claims he comes under the American Disability Act and an exception should be made in his grievous case.

This case has been greatly publicised because it introduces a question that could strike at all professional sports. Should the rules of a game be written by the game's ruling body or should they be set, adjudicated anyway, by the courts?

And I think of the doctors, obstetricians, who are terrified of their job so much as to leave it because of the American mania for facing a disappointing operation by suing the surgeon for malpractice.

A friend of mine said to me, every American mother expects her baby to be absolutely 100% physically perfect from top to toe – God help you if it has a cough or a wart – so I quit.

With each new, more outlandish case, I think again of the greatest American judge who never went to the Supreme Court, the venerable Judge Learned Hand, who used to say, "There is no one respects, I dare to say, reveres the law more than I, but my advice to intending immigrants is try to live out your life in America without resorting to litigation".

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