Friday, Jul 4, 2008
A Republican congresswoman asks why her Democratic sisters are letting President Clinton off the hook.
Mar 3, 1998 | After weeks of strategic silence, Republicans are finally speaking out publicly against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. At a gathering of Southern Republican leaders in Biloxi, Miss., over the weekend, speaker after speaker flayed the president for his behavior in connection with the alleged affair, attacking everything from his suspected lying to hiring private investigators to dig up dirt on the staff of independent Whitewater counsel Kenneth Starr. Former Vice President Dan Quayle set the tone with a barbed joke about a new crime bill: Three interns and you're out.
But long before the party decided to break its silence, Anne Northup, a freshman Republican congresswoman from Kentucky, was speaking her mind. For Northup, a former Louisville schoolteacher and mother of six, including two adopted black children, the Lewinsky case is less a political imbroglio than a classic workplace scandal, pitting the powerless against the powerful.
But Northup hasn't ignored the political dimensions either. Her target, however, has not been the president so much as Democratic women's groups, whom she accuses of hypocrisy over the Lewinsky affair after all the protests they raised over the sexual misconduct charges raised against Sen. Bob Packwood and Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Not coincidentally, she notes, both of these targets were Republicans.
Northup recently spoke with Salon about sex in the workplace, the silence of her Democratic sisters and the possible impeachment of the president.
In view of the uproar over the allegations against Bob Packwood and Clarence Thomas, how do you explain the double standard of Democratic women regarding the allegations against President Clinton?
I always suspected that the organizations that purport to speak politically for women use the issues when they're convenient and politically expedient. And this time, they've proven it. Now, I know how difficult it is for them. I can remember when Richard Nixon was going through his troubles, and I can remember feeling as a Republican that I didn't want to believe that he had done the things he was being criticized for. But I must say that today, the silence from Democratic women is absolutely deafening.
Speaking as a woman, not as a Republican, what are your thoughts about the Monica Lewinsky affair?
First and foremost, this is a workplace issue. I've been in a workplace like this before, where the guy who had all the power was constantly after young, provocatively dressed women. And what it does to a workplace is profound. What it says is that having that swagger and that wink is what makes a real man. It puts pressure on other men to behave the same way. In the end, the guy with all the power loses moral authority over the entire organization, and everyone feels there are no rules.
How does that environment affect women employees?
They all get the feeling that their careers depend on being coy and seductive rather than working hard and bringing their talents to the workplace. And it always ends up affecting the powerless person. If halfway through the relationship, Monica Lewinsky had said, "You know, Bill, I'm having a crisis of conscience. Let's not have oral sex anymore but just be good friends," do you think she still would have gotten access to the White House? I don't think so. Her access depended on her accommodating his needs. But most important are all the other women whose jobs become affected: the secretary that has to cover, that has to lie to the wife. Everybody else has to become an enabler, and it affects their jobs too.
There are some questions that women's organizations should be demanding answers to without waiting for it to be all over. What was it about Monica Lewinsky that got her a permanent job at the White House? Was it her exceptional work? Was it her talent? What about the other women and men who were interns? What chance did they have to get permanent jobs at the White House? Why was Monica Lewinsky transferred out of the White House? Again, this reflects the typical scheme of things when a very powerful person has an affair with a powerless woman: When trouble happens, it's not the man at the top who gets transferred, it's the woman. What sort of pressure was President Clinton's personal secretary, Betty Currie, put under when she was called in on that Sunday after Clinton was deposed by Paula Jones' attorneys? Did she have a lawyer present? Those are the questions the women's organizations should be asking.
The question I would like to ask the women's organizations is this: At what point do they become convinced that they couldn't support the president? I understand that because they support his policies, they have to trade that off against his private behavior. So if you ask them if he would lose their support if he had an affair, the answer is going to be no. What about an affair with a 21-year-old intern? They'd probably say no. Well, what about if he lied under oath? They might say no. What if he asked her to lie under oath? Again, they might say no. What if he promised her a job out of town if she lied under oath? What if other women's careers were affected by the affair? Would he lose your support then? I want them to tell us at what point they would not be able to support him any longer.
PHOTOGRAPH: AP/WIDE WORLD
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