By Mary Mostert, Analyst
August 5, 1998
Monday, August 4th, 1998 was quite a day - one that may be long remembered. Dow gains of the last five months were wiped out in one day as stocks plunged nearly 300 points. Bill Clinton was again blocked in his effort to keep White House attorneys, secret service personnel from having to answer Kenneth Starr's questions before the grand jury. And, once again, Saddam Hussein was not cooperating and the UN disarmament investigators gave up and came home.
Every show on radio and TV was consumed by discussions of what it all meant. Most noticeable was the confusion and discomfort of Clinton apologists whose were trying to decide what Bill Clinton should do next. Occasionally someone would come up with what appeared to be a totally new idea for them - perhaps Bill Clinton could tell the American people the truth and they would forgive him.
He tried his version of that back in 1992, after all, and it worked like a charm. Only, then he didn't actually go so far as tell the truth. What he said was that he had "caused his family pain" and left each person to figure out what it was he meant by it.
Several times I heard references to Filegate, Travelgate, abuse of power, mentioned, but it was usually promptly squelched. Chris Matthews on Hardball had several Democrats on to talk, one of them former Mayor of New York Ed Koch. Koch's characterization of the situation was, "Mistakes were made but this is not one of the fundamental problems before the nation."
It amuses me to hear those who have long defended totally decadent life styles calling a decadent life style a "mistake" now that it appears to have gotten the president in trouble. Last week his life style was not a "mistake" but simply none of anyone else's business. Any one suggesting last week that Bill Clinton's repeated misuse of women for his sexual pleasure was reprehensible was promptly pounced on for their primitive thoughts.
There has been a remarkable change of attitude since Monica Lewinsky was given transactional immunity and hinted that her testimony will not be supportive of the president's.
When I heard Ed Koch say, "Mistakes were made but this is not one of the fundamental problems before this nation," it dawned on me that his comment was a perfect example of THE fundamental problem before this nation.
Bill Clinton didn't make a "mistake." He deliberately CHOSE his behavior. He and Hillary are so good at manipulating the public, however, he was able to get away with it. But, it took a great deal of energy to keep what he was doing secret. Apparently it took more and more abuse of power to keep everyone who knew what was going on under control.
As the New York Times says in an editorial today, "Yet Mr. Clinton's entire public record -- on the draft, marijuana, Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, Monica Lewinsky -- is one of avoiding full and factual disclosure even when that was the smart play.... In its latest trash-the-critics operation, the White House has said that the mere act of calling on the President to tell the truth means that Mr. Clinton has been unfairly prejudged."
What are the problems that Clinton is trying to get the nation interested in so they will forget about Monica Lewinsky? A major one is government child care. Another "problem" he wants the federal government to solve is after school activities for children -because most of them do not have a parent at home when school is out. He wants to greatly expand and improve public school buildings to help provide "after school" care, including health care, for America's youth.
Why are these part of the "fundamental problems" that Ed Koch says are before the nation? We didn't need universal government child care before 1998. Hillary would tell us that we need government child care because there are so many mothers in the work force and our social fabric has totally changed. Families have disintegrated. The nation has largely adopted his and Hillary's view of the world - abortion on demand, women working at a career as someone else, working at minimum wage, raises the children.
We have been told over and over that the American people don't care what Clinton does, as long as the economy is booming. The obvious confusion on the part of many Democrat Clinton Defenders yesterday seemed to hint they are unsettled if, as it appears, the bull market is over. Is it, then, the signal for America to care again about honor and integrity in its leaders?
It certainly seemed that was what people were hinting. It is as though there is a notion, widely accepted in our society, that morality doesn't matter as long as the economy is booming. One Democrat analyst, KiKi Moore, sent up a trial balloon to blame Kenneth Starr for the drop in the Stock Market, saying if he had not been investigating the president, there would be no problem.
There seems to be some kind of philosophy harbored by people who consider themselves "liberals" that their brand of immorality somehow improves the economy. As one economic commentator observed, "It is the people who have been investing in the stock market, and, when they see their 401 K plans dwindle as the bear market grows ...what will be their reaction.
One of America's most interesting economic writers, Howard Ruff, wrote about what he called the "sin-tax" back in the late 1970s, twenty years ago. His financial newsletter, "The Ruff Times" gives people advice on how to manage their financial portfolio to make money in good times and bad. For those wishing to have a good economic future he had one key piece of advice "I suggest that you do anything and everything within your power to strengthen your family unit. ...I am prepared to forecast that if society proves unable to recover from the future economic ills, it will be because the inner structure has deteriorated to the point where family units will not be able to stablize society."
While that was written twenty years ago, it is an almost perfect description of what has happened in nation after nation in the last couple of years. In almost every nation, including our neighbors to the North, Canada, currencies are losing value
Ruff's "sin-tax" was the public cost of solving problems cause primarily by sin - babies born to single mothers or father abandoning their children to be raised on the public dole. He believed the best way for any nation to maintain a stable economy was to adopt policies designed to strengthen families. Ruff put his warning in simple, blunt language: "The family is the means by which the values of one generation are passed on to the next. It determines whether succeeding generation will be neurotic, criminal, unstable and a threat to society, or whether it will be strong, progressive, moral and emotionally and spiritually stable. ...Any economic system functions within the context of its social structures, and the family is the basic structural unit of our society. Out of it will come our presidents, athletes, philosophers, saints, shores, drug addicts, murderers and medical researchers. In short, the structure of the American family will determine the wisdom, judgment and emotional stability of the next generation."
Just as financial disaster generally follows a divorce, the costs incurred when a nation disintegrates can be observed all around us these days - from Africa, to the Balkans, to Indonesia. With 66% of pregnancies in America ending either in abortion or the birth of a baby to an unwed mother - we are living in a time when families are not even being formed.
So, does the nation have a stake in the behavior of an immoral president who abuses the power of the presidency to deceive the public? I think so. The Founding Fathers believed Americans would choose the best and most moral citizen to lead them to become even a better people. It appears America has, instead, chosen one of its least moral - who has spent six years pushing an immoral agenda - abortion on demand, the homosexual agenda in our schools and public offices, the abuse of power in one situation after another, institutionalized lying.
We have been living a lie for six years. The voters knew Bill Clinton had serious moral problems. In fact, it was so obvious that someone coined the phrase "character doesn't matter." And a majority of the voters bought into the notion. Actually, character is by far the most important thing to look for in a leader, for without character, none of a leader's other characteristics, policies, or politics matter.
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