Papal visit, presidential bull by columnist Rob Morse San Francisco Examiner, Jan. 28, 1999 Pope John Paul II met with Bill Clinton and didn't whack his hand with a ruler. That's the take most news organizations had on Tuesday's meeting of the world leader of Catholicism and the world's most famous sinner. That didn't surprise me, because the pope is concerned with higher moral issues than those that concern hypocritical home wrecker Henry Hyde. What surprised me was the stark political contrast between these two world leaders. On all but one very important issue, the Democratic president is the conservative, and the pope is the progressive. In every way but one, the pope has the same political program as the Bay Guardian and the Nation magazine. In every way but one, not counting his own impeachment, Bill Clinton is a Republican fellow-traveler. The pope is against the death penalty. The president is in favor of it. He's even used lethal injection as a tool for election. While he was running for president in 1992, then-Gov. Clinton denied clemency for a brain-damaged cop-killer named Rickey Ray Rector, and even left the campaign trail to go back to Arkansas for the execution. The pope is against the bombing of Iraq. The president is ordering the bombings, which have had excellent political timing, but sometimes poor accuracy. This week 11 civilians were killed by errant bombs. The Clinton administration said it was Iraq's fault. At least they didn't try to redefine "killed." The pope backed the worldwide treaty banning land mines, signed by 122 countries. The president refused to sign it. The pope wants the United States to lift sanctions against Cuba. The president won't. The pope has lectured against the evils of "exploitative capitalism." The president has fought for big business and a global economy that sends jobs across borders to the cheapest labor. The pope has fought against "every form of violence," including "the violence of poverty and hunger." The president threw the poor off welfare. The pope has spoken out against "the culture of selfishness." The president is the poster boy for selfishness. Clinton risked his family and the Democratic Party for a few goatish moments with a nubile intern, and then convinced his cabinet members to repeat his untrue denials to save his hide. The pope and Clinton do agree on a few things. Like the pope, Clinton and his wife have called on young people to use abstinence as a mainstay against unwanted pregnancy. Clinton himself has another method of preventing pregnancy, but however you define it, it's not abstinence. That brings us to the one big issue that gets the pope defined as a conservative, and Clinton defined as a liberal: abortion. It's also the issue that has kept Clinton from being forced to walk the gangplank onto Marine One and fly away to his place in history and continuing prosecution by Ken Starr. Clinton is in favor of women's right to abortion, so we liberals, leftists, feminists, civil-libertarians and suckers can't allow the anti-abortion fanatics on the right to drive him out of office. Thus we have the sight of feminists defending a president who cheated on St. Hillary by messing around with a 21-year-old intern in the Oval Office. Thus the cognitive dissonance among all us liberal Clinton dislikers. We know he's a sleaze in many ways, and now we have to defend him even though he had sleazy sex with a subordinate almost as young as his daughter. He did it while Ken Starr was trying to find any reason to nail the pasty presidential skin to the wall. We have to defend Clinton because his enemies are bigger jerks than he is. They want to chain women to the Hotpoint, put gays in religious re-education camps and teach social Darwinism, but not Darwinism. That's what they'd do right after they finish wrecking our political system, and outraging our sense of fairness, just to ruin a president who represents everything they don't like. To them, Clinton represents the '60s. For me, Clinton simply represents old-fashioned amoral electoral politics, the kind we repudiated in the '60s. The Republicans won't be able to nail him because he's better at that game than they are. If anyone represents the '60s, it's his fanatical opponents. They're like the Weather Underground, willing to blow up anything to make a symbolic point, even if they destroy themselves. I'm not a Catholic or a Clintonite, but I find much to admire in both the pope and the president - yes, the president. Anybody who can survive what Clinton has been through for the last six years has the kind of moxie it takes to be president in bad times. Too bad the Republicans had to invent bad times for him, and for us. It's nice that Clinton and the pope got together in these times, but here's what really ticks me off. Clinton actually used sin to promote himself. "People still need to hear your message that all are God's children, all have fallen short of His glory," he told the pope. This is a president who once outraged the Vatican by taking Holy Communion even though he's not a Catholic. Maybe he should try the confessional too. How many Hail Marys do you have to say for using God's name for shameless self-promotion?
