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. But the Clinton-Lewinsky saga dealt privacy another devastating blow. Perhaps there can be no turning back. From this point on, conservatives and progressives, Democrats and Republicans, will view private life as fair game in ways that I think neither side will be happy with and certainly not comfortable with. Yet the Clinton scandal did at least seem to sensitize everyday people to questions about society's loss of privacy.