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.''