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During the 1992 presidential campaign, the "character" issue for Bill Clinton hinged on charges, aptly summarized by Bush's political director, Mary Matalin, that he was a "pot-smoking, draft-dodging, womanizer."' Near the end of the campaign, Bush personally raised questions about Clinton's patriotism. On the Rush Limbaugh show on September 21, 1992, he inveighed against "Clinton's total failure to come clean with the American people" concerning the draft.2 The next month, on Larry King Live, Bush suggested that Clinton might even have engaged in disloyal acts when he traveled to the Soviet Union while a student at Oxford. The Republican candidate thought it strange that Clinton went to Moscow one year after the Soviets crushed Czechoslovakia and did not remember whom and what he saw.3
During the first months of the Clinton presidency, the character issue revolved around the proprieties of both of the Clintons in relation to the Whitewater land deals prior to their coming to Washington, the mishandling of the replacements in the White House travel office, Craig Livingston's blanket request for FBI files on past administrative aides, and the handling of papers in Vince Foster's office after his death. In 1994, however, the focus shifted to the president's sex life and his purported inability to "come clean" about it. David Brock's article in the American Spectator quoting Arkansas state troopers who said they had aided Clinton in a series of sexual escapades and the subsequent filing of Paula Jones's suit against the president placed the president's sex life at the top of the news.4 Journalist Joe Klein made the leap from the president's alleged sexual promiscuity to his modus operandi at the political level in an article in Newsweek in May 1994:
It seems increasingly, and sadly, apparent that the character flaw Bill Clinton's enemies have fixed on-promiscuity-is a defining characteristic of his public life as well. It may well be that this is one case where private behavior does give an indication of how a politician will perform in the arena.5
Eventually, however, a majority of the American public would make a distinction between the public and private character ofthe president. Although many had questions about his private morality, his job performance ratings in the polls remained high throughout the first half...