The new Puritans.

I've long wondered why so many people on the right hate Bill Clinton so much. After all, he has advocated Republican-style policies on many fronts. Domestically, he's abolished welfare, expanded the use of capital punishment, and endorsed a balanced budget through deep cuts in social programs while maintaining a bloated Pentagon. On foreign policy, he went to the mat for NAFTA, rammed through the expansion of NATO, refused to sign the treaties abolishing land mines and establishing a world court, lobbied for the arms companies, and bombed Iraq, the Sudan, and Afghanistan.

So where's the rub? It's not about economic policy. It's not about foreign policy. It's not even about punishing the poor or making life miserable for prisoners.

No, the rub is on social mores. Whereas a past generation of Republicans saw FDR as the Antichrist for his economic program, a new generation of Republicans sees Bill Clinton as the Antichrist for his social attitudes. Bill Clinton is a stand-in for all that the right wing still hates about the 1960s.

As Linda S. Kauffman argues in Bad Girls and Sick Boys, "Bill Clinton's connection to the 1960s explains why his detractors are so vehement. Gary W. Aldrich's Unlimited Access: An F.B.I. Agent Inside the Clinton White House is a case in point.... He objects to White House staffers who wear black, or short skirts, peasant blouses, loud ties, and earth shoes. He criticizes Hillary Rodham Clinton for favoring `tough, minority, and lesbian women, as well as weak, minority, and gay men.'"

"The sun is setting on the last son of the sixties," Senator John Ashcroft, Republican of Missouri and a putative Presidential candidate, told the Christian Coalition to great applause in September.

Why does Clinton embody the sixties? Because he didn't fight in Vietnam, he supports abortion and women's rights, he's comfortable around African Americans, he's comfortable around gays and lesbians, and he enjoys oral sex--which is still outlawed in twenty-one states, as Barbara Ehrenreich noted last month.

As a faithful right-winger, Ken Starr set out to prove not only that Bill Clinton was a perjurer, but that he was a pervert, too. After reading the Starr Report, Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard, reportedly said that the acts Clinton and Lewinsky engaged in are not things that a husband and wife would do.

The new Puritans would tar and feather Clinton. Since November 1992, they have gnashed their teeth that this creature of the sixties is ruling the country, and they will do almost anything to smear him.

But the far rightists and the new Puritans are not winning the day. A large majority of the American people don't want to see Bill Clinton impeached. This baffles the pundits in Washington, who ascribe all sorts of ills to explain it: apathy, a cheapening of moral standards, or economic self-interest.

I doubt it's much of any of these. I think most people have had enough of Ken Starr--and enough of the scandal. They don't want Peeping Toms with subpoena power peering into their windows to see whether they're in the missionary position. And in the desuetude of democracy, they don't want to see one of their few remaining levers of power--a plebiscite every four years--taken away from them because of a house-and-garden variety sin. They understand that there are more important things in the world than having an affair and lying about it. They understand that this is not the stuff of impeachment. And they want the country to move on.

In this issue, several of our columnists weigh in on the scandal. On the serious side, Howard Zinn places Clinton's sexual lies in the context of other Presidential falsehoods and finds them insignificant by comparison. June Jordan explains why she and many other African Americans believe Clinton is getting a raw deal. And, on the lighter side, Kate Clinton and Barbara Ehrenreich find inventive ways to spoof both the President and Ken Starr.

I hope you appreciate the ensemble.

The real social problems of this country do not have anything to do with Clinton's sex life or with the panoply of rightwing bugaboos. They have to do with poverty.

This month, our Washington Editor, Ruth Conniff, fled the confines of the nation's capital to do one of the things she does best: report about real people caught in a web of social injustice. Her cover story illustrates how interrelated many of these problems are. Because we don't have affordable housing for all Americans, many families have to move around several times a year. This takes a terrible toll on their kids, who are more likely to fall behind in reading, flunk classes, and be maladjusted than other kids. One school that Ruth visited spells out the career path for many of these kids. That path ends with "imprisonment and death."

There must be a better way.