A friend and I had a long talk about Bill Clinton the other day. She thought his affair with Monica Lewinsky was a private matter. I disagreed.
My reasoning was that as a presidential candidate and then as president, Clinton has always portrayed himself as a family man. “Family man” has become his public persona, so anything that happens to affect that persona is in the public realm.
Had his public persona been that of a liar and an adulterer, which he has proven to be, the Lewinsky affair would come under the heading of private life, the president simply doing what was expected of him acording to the public view of him.
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It is for this same reason that I have always felt the details of the Charles-Diana-Camilla triangle to be in the public domain.
For years, the Queen has put herself, her husband and children forward as the epitome of family life. Anything, therefore, which affects that family life comes into the public domain, put there by the Queen herself.
The lesson is, if people in public life want to have a private life, they had better be very careful what areas of their life they allow to be public.
You can’t portray yourself as the ideal family person one day, then the next say what affects the family is private.
What is public and what is private in the lives of our elected officials needs a lot more thought than we have been giving it, especially in light of a recent study which shows that most Canadians believe it is acceptable for a politician to lie to protect his or her privaacy but will not tolerate lying about public matters.
To gather data for the book, A Question of Ethics: Canadians Speak Out, the five authors, three from Ontario, one from Quebec and one from Saskatchewan, compiled a list of more than 80 questions which were answered in a phone survey by a randomly picked group of 1,400 from across the country.
The results show that the public resents the media’s attempts to pry into the private lives of politicians.
Women were less tolerant than men about breaches of ethics, more inclined to support the notion of lying to protect private lives.
Older Canadians had strong feelings about right and wrong, Generation Xers were in the opposite extreme while Baby Boomers were the most wishy-washy.
It’s my feeling that, if a politician will lie about one thing, he or she will lie about another. It’s the principle of the thing.
