January 24, 1998 THE GLOBAL VIEW By ALESSANDRA STANLEY (The New York Times)
MOSCOW -- From Tokyo, where it was headlined as the president's "bottom-half problem," to Moscow, where a newspaper blamed "the righteous wrath of diehard feminists," the world reacted with dismay and bewilderment to the sex scandal endangering Bill Clinton's presidency.
Newspapers and television shows across the globe have been avidly reporting the allegations against Clinton, but almost uniformly, it is American society that is on trial, not the president's conduct.
France, a country used to presidents with mistresses, and even children by those mistresses, viewed the scandal with amused contempt. "Wanting to know everything about a man is an essentially totalitarian practice," Jean-Francois Bege wrote in an editorial in the French daily Sud-Ouest. "It is this puritan tyranny which sometimes imbues the beautiful American democracy with an unfortunate resemblance to police states."
But the notion that Clinton could be seriously damaged -- and could possibly face impeachment -- for having an affair and lying about it struck foreign observers as more than absurd. To some, it was even a threat to world order.
"The problems of the Middle East, the Balkans or Asia will not be solved without the United States and a president who enjoys respect," an editorial in the liberal German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau scolded. "A president who is laughed at by the world will hardly be able to move anything. All of Clinton's accusers should quickly come up with proof, or be silent."
In Britain, where political sex scandals are the daily bread of tabloids and respectable newspapers alike, there was gleeful front-page coverage of the most sordid details about Clinton's alleged relationship with Monica Lewinsky, leavened with worldly condescension on editorial pages.
"That 'droit de seigneur' White House tradition of serial infidelity, as established by John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, may be as gross as it is foolish," said an editorial in The Guardian, invoking the sexual imperative of feudal lords. "But it is not yet the stuff of impeachment."
That was perhaps the harshest condemnation of Clinton. In Russia, where President Boris Yeltsin's weakness for vodka is well known, shrugged off and rarely reported, there was even a tinge of admiration for the American president's alleged vigor.
"People here watch and think, well, there may be something wrong with it, but on the other hand, he is a real muzhik," said Sergei Markov, a political analyst on a television talk show, using the Russian word for "real man." He added, "They think this is the guy we need to rule the country."
There was plenty of mockery. The Spanish newspaper El Mundo, for example, ran a cartoon of Clinton peeking furtively up the skirt of a blindfolded woman holding the scales of justice. But mostly, foreign commentators reserved their scorn for the government investigators who pressed the charges and the media that broadcast them.
Vladlen Sirotkin, a professor at the Russian Academy of Diplomacy, blamed American feminism and political correctness. "There is something called 'sexual harassment': It is when you look at a woman, and then you have to marry her, like in 17th-century Russian villages," he explained to television viewers. Sirotkin hinted that a conspiracy might be afoot. "In America, they stopped assassinating with a rifle and optic sight; now they kill with sexual harassment."
Mostly, however, foreign capitals viewed the scandal in Washington through the prism of their own preoccupations. In the Middle East, the timing of the initial revelations -- they broke midway between Clinton's meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat -- became fraught with meaning.
Israeli newspapers made much of the fact that Lewinsky is Jewish.
The Jerusalem Post noted that her father, Dr. Bernard Lewinsky, is a member of the Sinai Temple, "an upscale West Los Angeles Conservative synagogue," and that Lewinsky attended the temple's religious school.
For the Palestinians, the revelations were a blow, because they had counted on Clinton's support, and full attention, in their feud with Netanyahu. Some even suggested a plot. "Why did it come at the end of Clinton's meetings with Netanyahu and before his meeting with Arafat?" Ashraf al-Agrami, a columnist for the daily newspaper Al-Ayyam, asked.
Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, provided his own answer. "The Zionist lobby and world Zionism creates disasters for anyone who may cause it problems," he said.
Italian newspapers, consumed with the pope's historic visit to communist Cuba, gave the Clinton scandal less attention than it might ordinarily draw, though a few papers struggled to convey the flavor of the details spewing out of Washington.
Commentators across Europe took pains to distinguish the current scandal from the one that forced Richard Nixon to resign, even though many foreigners still believe Americans overreacted to Nixon's transgressions.
"It would be an unpardonable error to put the two scandals on the same plane," Ennio Caretto wrote in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera. "The faults of Mr. Nixon were far more serious, nor does Mr. Clinton deserve to be judged as a Mike Tyson of politics and sex."