Pubdate: Sun, 14 Feb 1999 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Copyright: 1999 Mercury Center Contact: http://www.sjmercury.com/ Author: Richard L. Berke, New York Times GLASS HOUSES FOR POLITICIANS Campaigners Brace For Scrutiny WASHINGTON -- The aftershocks of impeachment are already being felt by politicians who fear the nation is entering an era in which their private lives will draw more intense scrutiny and embarrassing disclosures than ever before. Dozens of candidates and strategists at the local, state and national levels express concern that the political climate wrought by the White House scandal has set the tone for a sullied discourse in the elections of 2000. Already, there are examples of how information about politicians' personal lives, the kind once deemed private, threatens to be injected into campaigns: Three Republican presidential contenders -- former Vice President Dan Quayle, former Gov. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas -- have felt obliged to declare publicly that they have been faithful to their wives. Influential conservatives have vowed to raise, and keep alive, questions about candidates' private lives. William J. Bennett, the conservative author and former education secretary, is warning Republican presidential prospects, ``If adultery is part of your baggage, forget it.'' And the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, whose Traditional Values Coalition claims a membership of 40,000 evangelical churches, said he would insist that presidential candidates answer his questions about their sexual pasts. More Intrusion Several politicians said what they viewed as an intensified intrusion into their private lives had led them to think twice about running in the first place. Bush, for one, said worries about what might be dredged up about his past, accurately or not, and the repercussions for his family weighed heavily as he pondered whether to seek the Republican nomination. Steve Forbes, the millionaire publisher who sought the presidency in 1996 and will again in 2000, said: ``There's going to be a lot of muck thrown at those who run. The president has defined the standard downward.'' It has become standard fare for reporters, even from some major news organizations, to unapologetically quiz candidates about their sexual histories and possible use of drugs. In a recent interview, Bernard Shaw of CNN told Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, ``You had an affair during your first marriage,'' and then asked: ``Should a politician's private acts be part of public discourse?'' (McCain's response: ``Let me say that I am responsible for the breakup of my first marriage. I will not discuss or talk about that any more than that.'') Candidates are already plotting how to contend with aggressive inquiries into their private lives. An outside adviser to Bush said he suggested the governor hire an opposition-research team to ferret out any negative information about him that opponents could find. But Bush, in an interview, said such a move was unnecessary because he had already hired such a researcher during his two runs for governor. ``We looked into the record that people would look into,'' he said. At the local level, politicians are undeterred about making an issue of elected officials' private lives. In Utah, the state attorney general, a Democrat, recently sent affidavits to the state's five Republican members of Congress, asking them to attest under oath that they had been faithful to their spouses. (The lawmakers refused to sign the pledge but publicly declared their marital fidelity.) In interviews across the country, politicians, strategists and academics denounced what they described as excessive attention to candidates' personal baggage, and said it would discourage prospective candidates from running for office, further alienate the public from politics and make it even more difficult for candidates to discuss substantive issues. ``The political culture has changed, and so has the news culture,'' said Rep. David Obey, D-Wis. ``What is now dominating is winning at all costs. There are almost no issues that are off limits. There seems to be no real constraints on people's willingness to hurt somebody else. That goes for politicians and the press alike.'' Loss Of Privacy Dick Cheney, a former defense secretary and House member from Wyoming who decided not to seek the Republican presidential nomination four years ago, citing the toll it would take on his family, said campaigning now seemed even less appealing. ``There's a total loss of privacy that goes with being a candidate for public office these days,'' Cheney said. ``It's hard to watch what's happened with Clinton and not think it's gotten worse.'' Several politicians who are seeking the White House said they were wrestling with how to react to questions about their own private behavior and that of their opponents. Politicians said they were not sure whether, in the post-Lewinsky era, voters would demand of their candidates a more upstanding private life than Clinton's -- or whether voters would be so weary of the whole scandal culture that they would forgive politicians' transgressions, as they seem to have with President Clinton. Some strategists warn, in fact, that candidates who declare their personal ``purity'' could turn off voters by appearing too moralistic. In November's elections, Gary Mueller, a Democrat who challenged Rep. Jerry Weller, R-Ill., signed an ``affidavit of integrity'' in which he swore he had never had an extramarital affair, abused his wife, had any homosexual encounters, experimented with illegal drugs or been charged with a felony. But Mueller, who lost the election, was attacked from several quarters, including an editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times that described him as a ``sanctimonious political opportunist trying to impose a sexual code of conduct on politics.'' Republicans and Democrats alike said a turning point that underscored a new, ugly political climate came on a Saturday in December shortly before the House voted to impeach Clinton. The Flynt Factor Rep. Bob Livingston, R-La., stunned the chamber when he announced he would quit the House rather than succeed Speaker Newt Gingrich. He had been prompted by Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, to disclose that he had engaged in several adulterous affairs. ``This notion about what's going on with Larry Flynt and others and this business about trying to destroy candidates over what might have gone on in their past has dampened a lot of people's enthusiasm for the process and for entering the process,'' Bush said in an interview. ``I've been through this process before. I'm used to it to a certain extent. But my worry is, people make mistakes in their lives.'' Bush's press officer, Karen Hughes, said reporters' inquiries had grown so excessive that ``I've been asked whether he killed somebody -- a journalist asked me that from a major Texas newspaper.'' Douglas Sosnik, a senior adviser to Clinton, suggested that politicians were also at fault for a coarsening of the political dialogue. ``I can't imagine how anyone in America can watch us in Washington and not think that the whole system is broken,'' Sosnik said, ``whether it's how we finance our campaigns, how we conduct our campaigns, how we govern -- or even on a human level, how we deal with one another.'' Several politicians despaired that the win-at-all-costs politics and focus on personal lives had grown so offensive that they feared that people would no longer want to enter politics; already, figures show that younger people are becoming less likely to vote. ``I frequently get asked by my students, `Why should we put ourselves through this?' '' said former Rep. Mickey Edwards, R-Okla., who is a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of government. ``These are people who care about issues. But the political world just seems very unattractive. More and more of them want nothing to do with politics or government. They go into consulting or management or into non-profits, where they can work for good causes.'' - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake