It's Really About Time

It's really about time, isn't it? The President, speaking in Russia last week, said the time had come to move on from the Lewinsky scandal. The scandal has taken up a great deal of his time, after all. And his time is our time, since we elected him to run the country. Stevie Nicks and company would remind us, "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow. Yesterday's gone." And the President would like us to think that way as well.

But the division between yesterday and today and tomorrow is not quite as neat as he would have us believe. Time changes people, but it does not change them immediately or completely. The President says he made a mistake with Monica S. Lewinsky, but that we should now move forward. Perhaps tomorrow will bring a new Bill Clinton, one who won't have an affair with a 21-year-old intern on the country's time, in the country's house, and one who doesn't lie to the electorate. Perhaps yesterday really is gone. I hope so, but I don't believe it. Here's why:

We know now that Clinton did lie to us, and he lied to us for over two years, first by omission and then by angrily denouncing the allegations and denying all wrong-doing. He acted like a scolding teacher, telling the American people to "Listen up, because I'm only going to say this once." As if he thought we weren't listening. As if he thought we were children.

Forget the legal semantics, the question of perjury. He lied to us. All of us. And for no other reason than to save himself. But this is a democracy, not a monarchy. The President is smart and often well-intentioned, but he is not unique--he is not irreplaceable. When he finally had to face the music on Aug. 17, in grand jury testimony and then in his public address, Clinton didn't seem to realize that our patience had run out. His speech was a non-apology. He did not say "I'm sorry" or "I was wrong." Of his relationship with Lewinsky, he said only that "[i]t was wrong."

He did not say, "I lied." He said, "I misled people." Instead of asking forgiveness for betraying his wife and daughter, his staff, his Cabinet and his constituency, he fought back at the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, devoting the second half of the speech to an angry attack, shifting the blame.

Five minutes of contrition might not have made up for months of deceit, but five minutes of evasiveness and anger certainly didn't. And his more recent attempts at contrition have rung hollow in the wake of his first failed speech.

Early on in the speech, Clinton said, "I am solely and completely responsible" for his relationship with Lewinsky. Yet he accepted responsibility only for his "part in all of this," as if he were a minor player in a serious drama beyond his control.

He ended by putting the onus back on us, asking us to "turn away from the spectacle," "repair the fabric of our national discourse," "return our attention to all the challenges and all the promise of the next American century"--a series of thinly veiled imperatives, the scolding teacher again blaming us for having shown an interest in scandal, as if we had fueled the investigation. As if without us or Ken Starr, there would have been no problem.

"Now it is time--in fact, it is past time--to move on," Clinton said. He seemed to be saying, "what's done is done." He seemed to be saying that a newly attentive and purposeful president would be focusing on the problems of today and tomorrow and that we as a nation should stop worrying about yesterday.

But Clinton's yesterdays have too often conflicted with the nation's todays and tomorrows. Certainly, it would have been difficult for him to admit the truth about Lewinsky when the issue surfaced in January. But better to be embarrassed and truthful than embarrassed and so obviously dishonest. We can count the days of the investigation in weeks and months; we can't, unfortunately, count the hours spent with Lewinsky herself and then with lawyers and aides on spin control. I'm not sure I want to know.

I'm not a fan of Ken Starr, not by any means. But his strange and excessive doggedness does not excuse the President for allowing him to find something when he went looking for it. Here is a president whose intelligence, energy and seeming seriousness of purpose endeared him to us, drew us in, made us believe he would help us and the country as a whole. And now, for the last eight months at least, he has failed us. At best, he has wasted our time. At worst, he has betrayed our trust.

The repeated infidelity, the mixture of presidential power and prestige with personal failure, the blurring of the line between fiction and reality--it is all almost too much for us to absorb, and so we hope it will go away.

But it won't, not just because Starr has sent 36 boxes of evidence to Capitol Hill, but because he'll lie to us again. At the heart of the Lewinsky matter is the simple fact that time and again Clinton has put himself and his desires ahead of the country and its needs. And that is the worst thing a president can do.

I regret having to repeat what I wrote in this space once before: I wish he would resign, if only to stop the bleeding. He was right about one thing in his speech to the nation, "This has gone on too long." It is about time. Time for him to go. Susannah B. Tobin '00 is a classics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column will appear bi-weekly.