Trouble With Bill Clintons Character :: essays research papers

Trouble With Bill Clintons CharacterIn the article, "The Trouble With Character" from Time magazine , writerRichard Stengel describes Bob Doles attacks on President Bill Clintonscharacter during the second Presidential debate and explains why Dolescriticisms did not affect Clinton.Stengel begins the article by discussing how American p atomic number 18nts do not trust their children to aspire to become President as much as they used to. MostAmericans feel that someone else should do the job, and this person is nomoralistic model. Stengel says that the peoples veto portrait of thePresident is demonstrated in the roles the President plays in various movies andnovels.Stengel then discusses the second Presidential debate in which Dole saidthat Clinton "single-handed contaminated the highest office in the land" andis the leading cause of the publics distrust of the government. The focus ofDoles campaign was not Clintons issues, but his moral pertinence. The presswere sur prised by the fact that roughly people think that Dole has a bettercharacter than Clinton, but they still prefer Clinton as President. This notioncomes from the reasoning that most Americans are only concerned with whether ornot the country and its citizens are taken care of, and so disregard thePresidents moral imperfections which, in the peoples opinion, have rattling littleto do with the issues. So the President can cheat on his taxes or counterbalance his wifeand the Americans will overlook it as long as he is getting the job done.Claims such as these lead some to believe that Americans standards ofacceptable moral behavior are going down.Stengel mentions examples of different presidents and the issues thatgave them a bad reputation to demonstrate the fact that the peoplesexpectations of the President have fallen. When it comes to politics, Americansare becoming more European that is, they are becoming more and more freeof the flaws in their leaders. This is why Doles compl aints are ineffective inconvincing voters.In my opinion, I think that Stengel is correct in saying that the reasonwhy Doles attacks are not working is voters are not concerned with thePresidents personal shortcomings, but rather his capability of running thecountry, and the two are not always nearly related. I think that Bob Dole isgoing about the whole issue all wrong, and his tactics are not practical and mayeven backfire. He is trying to make Clinton look bad by insulting his character,but in doing so, Dole is revealing a lot about his own. contact for instance the issue of Clinton and his playful attitude