Private Lives: How Relevant?

By Michael Kinsley

Here we go again. Last week two New York City tabloids, the Post and the Daily News, suddenly front-paged some old allegations about past extramarital activities by Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, the media-crowned Democratic front runner. And thus, with a heartfelt squeamishness that outsiders will find hard to credit, the American press takes up some unfinished business from four years ago: deciding what to publish about presidential candidates' private lives.

The Gary Hart follies of the 1987-88 campaign left the issue unresolved. But the particulars of that episode established a standard few future candidate sex scandals could hope to match: the misbehavior was current. The perpetrator was virtually caught with his pants down. He had specifically invited scrutiny of his private life: "Follow me around, I don't care." And the behavior was deemed to be specifically relevant to pre-existing questions about the , candidate's "character." Since Hart was widely suspected of philandering, evidence that he actually did philander was admissible to the public debate. Evidence of philandering by a candidate not previously suspected of it presumably would fail this odd test.

Many journalists hoped the Gary Hart standard would stick and thereby excuse them from further contemplation of this distressing subject. They hoped especially for an unwritten rule that only ongoing goings-on count. But it's probably not going to be that easy. Nor should it be.

Musings on this ripe topic often muddle three distinct questions: First, what level of proof is required of stories about marital infidelity? Second, should such stories be suppressed, even if provably true, out of respect for the candidate's privacy? And third, are past extramarital affairs (to take the meat-and-potatoes issue here) relevant to a candidate's qualifications for office?

Question One is simple, in theory. Sexual allegations should meet the same standard of proof as allegations on any other subject. By their nature, sexual allegations are often furtive and hard to prove. That is a perfectly good reason not to publish them.

But there is a genuine dilemma. Rumors can become so thick and widespread that not to report their existence -- even if they cannot be proved -- becomes a kind of dishonesty. The Washington Post once got in trouble for publishing a rumor without proof it was true, and defended itself editorially on grounds that, well, it's true there was a rumor. Much chortling and indignation at that. But it's not a worthless point. Past profiles of Clinton, in TIME and elsewhere, have reported vague rumors about marital infidelity as exactly that, and rightly so.

The specific accusations published last week have been peddled for more than a year by a disgruntled former state employee Clinton had fired. The purveyor has zero evidence, and Clinton and the women allegedly involved all deny it. But the stories were published in the Star, a supermarket tabloid, picked up by the two New York papers, and thus became fair game for everyone else.

It is easy to sneer at this process whereby the daintier elements of the press can enjoy sex while still claiming to have preserved their virginity: they simply wait for their less fastidious brethren to report something, then report -- with distaste -- that it has been reported. But it's harder to know how to avoid the problem. The fact that a story claiming that Bill Clinton has had six mistresses appeared on the front page of the New York Post is of legitimate news value to the readers of the New York Times. At some point the Times must have faith that its readers, if offered the same evidence, are as capable as its editors of dismissing such stories as unreliable.

But why should such stories be published even if they are true? The question here is not whether past sexual adventures are relevant to a candidate's fitness for office. That's Question Three. Question Two is who gets to decide Question Three. And the answer is: the voters, not journalists, should decide. I may think that a candidate's past or even present sexual activities are completely irrelevant compared with his views on the federal deficit (which the Star has chosen to ignore). In fact, that's pretty close to what I do think. But what right do I have, as a journalist in a democracy, to decide that for others?

Obviously, if there was general agreement among the voters that a candidate's sexual history is politically irrelevant, it would not matter much to candidates what the New York Post chose to publish about their sexual histories, or even whether or not what the Post published was true. What makes this subject so thorny for politicians and journalists alike is precisely that they fear it is political dynamite and will indeed affect how people vote. And if people wish to vote against a candidate because he has cheated on his wife (even if his wife doesn't care and is, in fact, part of the conspiracy of silence), the press should not be in the business of playing censor and denying them information for fear they'll misuse it.

So the proper test for the journalist is not whether he thinks the information is politically relevant, but whether he thinks it would be politically relevant to a significant number of voters. Obviously this isn't an exact science. My own sense is that the current line is somewhere between a dalliance or two many years ago and more energetic misbehavior recently. More forthright testing of that line might produce some pleasant surprises for those journalists who fear that their fellow citizens are too prudish for the country's good. At the least, it would force the citizenry to decide how much they really care about a candidate's sexual history, and might thereby hasten the day when journalists could, with a clean conscience, stop reporting such matters.