Fifty-six percent of voters rated him at the bottom. And in a note that must be particularly galling to Clinton, his rating was far worse than that of Richard Nixon, the president who resigned rather than face impeachment and a man whom Clinton has always reviled. Nixon came in a distant second on the immorality index with 14 percent. Most of the disparity between voters' judgment of his character and of his job performance is due, quite simply, to the booming economy. The poll finds that 73 percent of voters feel that because the economy is in such good shape, people will look the other way as long as Clinton is reprimanded for his misconduct.
People make that calibration, and they'll do that for every other public official from now on.
At least for today, the president seems to be a national CEO and little more. Privacy It was a year in which Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr pushed Monica Lewinsky's mom to tears, forced Secret Service agents to tell all, pried into bookstore purchases, pumped Lewinsky's therapist for information. Privacy isn't just a luxury. Privacy is necessary to human flourishing. Certainly, privacy had been in trouble for years in America's confessional culture, where people brawl on television after revealing embarrassing intimacies and where callers phone talk-show hosts to reveal their most intimate problems.