GEORGETOWN DOYENNE SALLY QUINN is Washington. Which is why when Mrs. Benjamin Bradlee deigned to advise a beleaguered congressman a week ago Sunday in the Washington Post, everyone listened. “Gary, Gary, Gary,” she admonished Rep. Condit. “Most people don’t care whether you or any other congressman has an affair. We would have no Congress if we cared a lot. And besides, we have been through so much with Clinton that the last thing anyone is going to get exercised about is the extramarital sex life of a politician.” How Gary Condit came to be the object of such attentions some must still be wondering. On the face of it, there’s little in the background of the six-term congressman from the Central Valley of California to mark him out as a candidate for the police blotters and scandal sheets. Born in 1948 to a Baptist preacher of modest means, Condit grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. By the age of 18, when his father moved the family to the rural town of Ceres, California, Condit already had a son by his high-school sweetheart and wife. A daughter would follow eight years later; both now work for California governor Gray Davis. He attended the California State University junior college in Stanislaus County, and worked variously as a roughneck in an oil field and a tool-and-die machinist. He seems to have entered politics for reasons less of ideology than public service. At 24, he won a seat on the city council of Ceres. At 26, he was elected mayor. Two years later, he joined the county board of supervisors. And in 1982, at 34, he moved up to the state assembly. He made national headlines in the late ’80s as a member of the “Gang of Five,” a cabal of moderate Democratic state legislators who staged an unsuccessful coup against liberal House speaker Willie Brown. Then Condit’s political career got a jump-start from another scandal. In 1989, Condit won a special election to replace Tony Coelho, the U.S. House majority whip who was knee-deep in allegations of financial impropriety. Condit has been reelected by wide margins ever since—most recently, by 67 percent in 2000, when George W. Bush carried the increasingly conservative district. In his early years in Congress, Condit refused to stay in lock step with the Democratic majority, and sniping occasionally appeared in the press questioning his party affiliation. With the Republican Revolution of 1994, the moderate Condit had a chance to be a major player. Although he helped found what became the conservative Blue Dog Democratic caucus and remained a go-to person for bipartisan legislation, he never became a well-known power broker and made little personal impression. Both the American Conservative Union and the liberal Americans for Democratic Action give him moderate marks—half good, half bad. Other than modest homes in D.C. and his district, his financial disclosure forms show no assets or investments. His nickname is Mr. Blow Dry. But below the public radar, it seems that Condit was enjoying an Indian bachelorhood. He drove a Harley. The neighborhood where he chose to buy a condo was trendy, arty Adams Morgan. “I just ended up there, and it’s a terrific place to be,” Condit told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1996. “Everything is 93 percent predictable” back in Ceres, he said. But “Adams Morgan is very different. I enjoy it a lot.” Condit began to enjoy a lot of things a lot. At 50, he went with then-representative John Kasich to Rolling Stones and Pearl Jam concerts—at the latter of which he threw himself into the mosh pit. According to a long-time aide, Condit attended a 50,000-strong Hell’s Angels birthday bash for a convicted cop-killer. It now emerges that he was enjoying other things, as well, that belie his Nazarene façade: Thai and Chinese food, Ben & Jerry’s low-fat chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, body-oil massages, and ladies of all stripes—an intern, a barely legal preacher’s daughter, and a flight attendant among them. His favorite D.C. bar is a joint named Tryst; his favorite tie-rack is his headboard. Needless to say, the private Gary Condit has caught most people by surprise. And yet, given these revelations, official Washington—Democrats and Republicans alike—reflexively lent Condit a hand. Take Dick Gephardt. “I have enormous respect for Gary Condit,” the House minority leader said June 15, by which time it was obvious Condit was misleading the police and the public by denying his adulterous affair with Chandra Levy. “I think he’s a wonderful public servant and a wonderful human being.” Even after credible reports of more philandering and suborning perjury, colleagues like Republican Chris Shays went out of their way to praise Condit on the Sunday morning talk shows. “He’s a great man, and I love the guy,” Shays told one, calling Condit “a close friend and someone I have a lot of respect for.” Said Jack Kingston, Republican from Georgia, “He’s an honorable man.” The list goes on. Explaining her colleagues’ impulse to circle the wagons, Anna Eshoo, Condit’s fellow California Democrat, told a reporter, “None of us here, Republican or Democrat, kick people when they’re down.” Tell that to Newt. To date, only Georgia representative Bob Barr has demanded that Condit resign for disgracing his office. Even those not elected to public office are tongue-tied. A host of conservative organizations have yet to weigh in on Condit. “If we were to focus on the inappropriate relationships that are probably true or may be true for members of Congress, it would be a full-time job,” says Paul Hetrick of Focus on the Family. Of course, there is a world of difference between playing the chambermaid looking for dirty sheets and condemning already obvious impropriety. So why the hesitation? As Sally Quinn made official in the Post, inside the Beltway it’s wrong to be judgmental. The gravest sin is not to dally with girls half your age but to frown on those who do. “It’s almost as if Clinton ultimately won that debate, that it’s somehow inappropriate to comment on these gross moral failings,” says Gary Bauer of American Values. “The biggest secular sin in the country today is to proclaim the behavior of someone else as either right or wrong. That is getting more ingrained among average Americans, but it long since won among elites.” It’s only when directly asked that the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition will comment. “If the accusations hold to be true concerning the kinky sex and the adulterous affairs—” he starts, then tries again. “I can understand he might have had one, but not multi. And I can’t even justify having just one. But it’s easier to forgive one slip, like David and Bathsheba. But he’s got a whole harem of Bathshebas.” Sheldon, who thought he knew Condit for 20 years, now calls for the congressman’s resignation. The enlightened position Quinn propounds—that sex doesn’t matter—is only an evolved version of Clinton’s defense—that sex is private. The implication is that the media and others should feel ashamed for calling attention to these affairs. The problem, though, is that without their attention, the case of the missing intern languished. The D.C. police trod lightly because of the nature of the case, and had the young woman’s family not fueled coverage, the case might have gone nowhere. Just what Gary Condit’s role was in the disappearance of Chandra Levy, if any, we do not now know, but one thing is certain: In post-Monica Washington, if you want to keep the critics and investigators at bay, have a tawdry affair. Sam Dealey is a writer in Washington, D.C.
