BY HOWARD WILKINSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
It doesn't happen often, but politicians do, from time to time, apologize for bad behavior.
But there has never been anything in American history even remotely resembling President Clinton's recent string of apologies and requests for forgiveness for his conduct with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Since an Aug. 17 speech in which the consensus was that he was not contrite enough, the president has been engaged in an almost nonstop apology -- to Senate and House Democrats, to his Cabinet, to Florida Democrats (twice in one day), to Ms. Lewinsky and to the American public in general.
It has been unprecedented, but, then again, no president has ever found himself in a position where he had to apologize for his sex life.
"This is extraordinary, this recitation of apology after apology," said John Alexander, a presidential historian at the University of Cincinnati.
"President Kennedy apologized after the failure of the Bay of Pigs; Richard Nixon never really apologized for Watergate, at all," Mr. Alexander said. "We're in uncharted waters here. There's never been anything quite like this in the presidency." Over the years, individual politicians have issued mea culpas for a variety of personal failings; some have been been forgiven by the voters, others have not.
Cincinnati's most celebrated case of a politician with a personal failing seeking forgiveness and getting it came in 1974 when then-Councilman Jerry Springer was found to have paid a prostitute with a personal check.
He resigned his council seat, but his very public apology apparently satisfied voters, who returned him to council in 1975. He went on to become mayor two yers later.
One of the present members of the House Republican leadership, Rep. John Boehner, R-West Chester, owes his seat in Congress at least in part to a sex scandal involving his predecessor, former Rep. Donald E. "Buzz" Lukens of Middletown.
In 1989, Mr. Lukens was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor for having paid a 16-year-old girl $40 to have sex with him.
After the conviction, Mr. Lukens asked the voters of his 8th Ohio Congressional District for forgiveness, but they did not give it. He was defeated by Mr. Boehner, then a state legislator, in the 1990 GOP primary. Mr. Lukens ended up resigning his House seat later that year after being accused of fondling a Capitol elevator operator and he was later sent to prison for accepting a $15,000 bribe.
In the nation's capital, Mayor Marion Barry was sentenced to six months in prison for cocaine possession. The mayor apologized to District of Columbia voters, who later re-elected him as mayor. But none of these cases comes anywhere near the scale of the Clinton situation, where the president of the United States is not only forced to apologize for scandalous personal behavior but is facing impeachment and removal from office.
Damage control work?
Many political analysts have suggested that the president's recent spate of apologies is aimed at repairing the damage the scandal has done to the president's popularity among the public, because it is believed the Republicans in Congress would be less likely to press an impeachment case against a popular president.
Mr. Alexander said it is difficult to judge the president's apologies in the context of anything else in history because no president has ever been in this position before.
"It's a different world now," Mr. Alexander said. "The bar has been lowered on what the press will and will not report about presidents and their private lives. Most other presidents would never have had to deal with this."
