WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
LIMBO DAY ONE
The New York Times and CNN are reporting that Starr will issue his report Friday, but by midmorning ABC is spreading the word that this is the day. Immediately the rumor mill goes into high gear, about everything from Bill Clinton’s taste for macadamia nuts to the likely composition of the Gore administration. As private phone conversations escalate from lively to hysterical, the politicians become increasingly pious and deliberate. Gingrich, Hyde, and Gephardt are leading a bipartisan meeting, and it’s as if the press corps is a bunch of records spinning at 45 rpm while the pols are turning at a stately 17. Until the contents of the report are made public, everyone is going around in circles, just at different speeds.
Then comes word that the boxes are on their way to Capitol Hill. A motorcade of boxes! Washington erupts as if this were the most exciting thing on earth. Pat Buchanan says on TV, “You cannot get much more drama than this in the nation’s capital,” which, if true, is a sorry comment on the dull lives we lead here.
People are on the phone, watching TV, and surfing the Internet (the vulgar ones have found the Stain Monica’s Dress game) all at the same time, asking one another: Do you think the reports are in plain brown wrappers? Will the people who handle them be wearing those head-to-foot white suits, like workers in a nuclear-power plant? When the boxes are switched to the second van, it looks for a moment as if the bottom of one box will give way, strewing papers everywhere. What tension! But the transfer is completed, and the documents are locked away. The fate of Hillary Clinton’s husband is being stored in a building named for Gerald Ford. Somewhere in the netherworld, Richard Nixon is loving this.
The excitement over, the Washington gossip community gets back on the phone to trade rumors and search for news nuggets. Reporters, activists, and staffers are circulating dirty jokes about what’s in the report. “God, I love this f — story,” a TV newsman confesses. A Hill aide busts into a conversation cluster and remarks with faux sobriety, “This is a moment of national crisis. There is no room for levity.” Everybody bursts out laughing.
CNN, thinking it’s found an actual event, switches to live coverage of the House floor. Unfortunately the debate is about migratory birds. CNN, which can’t cut away too fast without looking like it made a mistake, lingers. Somewhere in the White House, a strategist is telling Clinton to go to Capistrano to apologize to the swallows as part of his Contrition Tour ’98.
Meanwhile, on the Senate side, Robert Byrd, father of a thousand West Virginia highways, is suffering an acute case of Lieberman envy. He’s waxing philosophic about the times and the mores and Bill Clinton’s moral failings. Hearers wonder whether the classics-quoting pork king will find a way to mention Pericles or Caesar crossing the Alps. As it transpires, he doesn’t match the rhetorical grandeur of Sen. Moynihan, who’s been going around town saying this is a “crisis of the regime.” The phrase is brilliantly portentous and vacuous. Also literally untrue. This is no crisis of the American regime, since the Constitution provides for impeachment.
News of Clinton’s Florida speech is seeping back. The most moving bit is the sentence, “I’ve tried to do a good job taking care of this country even when I haven’t taken such good care of myself and my family.” Presidents who love too much. . . . Meanwhile, on the Metro, the commuters are not talking about the high drama of the day. They’re talking about Mark McGwire and their own lives. Out of touch.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10
LIMBO DAY TWO
The media are filled with confident and wildly divergent reporting about what’s in the Starr report. Who should know better than the Democrats, who are having a conference at the Mayflower Hotel for their business donors? Loretta Sanchez, the California Democrat who beat Bob Dornan, lets us know that everything is going great for her party. According to her, Democratic campaign leader Martin Frost told House Democrats this very morning that they’ve already as good as won 6 of the 11 seats they need to take back the majority. Sanchez testifies that the Democrats are popular and getting more so. The people are with them on the issues, but the Republicans are trying to distract people from what really matters. “I spoke to some of my Republican colleagues. They are praying and hoping that the issues don’t come up,” she tells the audience. If this is the way Republicans really talk to her, I’ll agree to be locked in a room with Bob Dornan for an hour.
Mark Penn, the very smart pollster who briefs Clinton every week, tells virtually the same sunny story, but in more sophisticated form. Clinton’s job approval is as high as ever, at 70 percent. Approval of congressional Democrats is high at 57 percent. On the generic ballot, Americans prefer Democratic congressional candidates to Republicans by 41 percent to 32 percent among all voters and 39 percent to 35 percent among likely voters. Listening to Penn, you’d be amazed any Republican could be elected.
Political wonkery is interrupted by the news the Idaho Republican zealot Helen Chenoweth has admitted she had an affair with a married man that ended 14 years ago. This is a figure all of polite Washington can giggle about. Everyone wants to know which militia he belonged to. It turns out he was her business partner, and their affair was outed by the media. The scene is beginning to look like one of those Last Judgment paintings. All the old adulteries are rising from obscurity. If there were a reporter with any brains, he’d call every member of Congress and say, “I’m working on a story about your private life,” and then pause to see what each one confessed. As a Heritage Foundation observer notes, it could be like a Moonie wedding in reverse — a mass divorce in one of the congressional caucus rooms.
Today’s rumors are mostly about who is going to get indicted by Starr over the next few weeks. The press corps, however, has more urgent concerns. Its members are all terrified that some competing news organization will get the report before them. The medium-sized newspapers are hypersensitive, as always, about preferential treatment being given to the big boys. The story is that the report will be put on four Internet sites, which will all promptly crash. Forget about Y2K. Another option, used for past document releases, is to ship the report straight to Kinko’s, where reporters can pay for their copies. Section 595b of the Independent Counsel Statute settles it: “The IC is to deliver his report to the 19-year-old guy at Kinko’s, who will proceed to spill pizza sauce upon it.” The Cato Institute will no doubt approve of the privatization of the Congressional Press Offices.
Meanwhile, just to show the serious work of the American people is being taken care of, Republican Bill Thomas of California has introduced H.R. 4522 prohibiting the IRS from taxing baseball fans who catch record-breaking home-run balls and return them to the hitter. Look for a government shutdown over this.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11
D-DAY
Is it out yet? Is it out? Everyone is watching the vote on the rule on C-SPAN. Then we hear that Hyde and Conyers are walking over to pick up the report. Purple scissors cut open the boxes, and out come the big three-ring binders. The scramble is on to get the report on the Internet. People are trading Web sites. Only the internal congressional site seems to be functioning well. So crowds gather instead around office televisions.
First comes the “news” — the actual impeachable stuff. David Shuster of Fox and Lisa Myers of NBC seem to be doing the most sophisticated job of getting the information out. Up on Capitol Hill, reporters are surging around members’ offices looking for copies. Slowly the nuggets are emerging: The president asked Dick Morris to poll on whether he should tell the truth. The president fed Betty Currie the line about how Monica was stalking him. The president was involved in the Lewinsky affidavit denying their affair. The phone traffic agrees: The perjury charges are rock solid. The rest of the stuff is not quite as strong.
But then around 2 p.m. the tone of the TV coverage and Beltway chatter changes. People have scrolled down to the sex. Candy Crowley reads it out over the air: “On one occasion, the President inserted a cigar into her vagina. On another occasion, she and President inserted a cigar into her vagina. On another occasion, she and the President had brief genital-to-genital contact.” Over at CBS, Bob Schieffer is reading the report on the air too. He comes to the beginning of the sex part and seems to stumble. Dan Rather tells him to take a deep breath. Away they go. Over at ABC they are too dainty to read the graphic material. Now, too, the White House “prebuttal” is out. Reminds me of a French Rugby coach who explained his team’s rough play by saying, “We wanted to get our retaliation in first.”
This is a bad day for America’s forests. In office after office, the report is being copied and copied. Phones start ringing as people read each other the startling parts. I call an editor at a New York-based magazine on entirely innocent business. “Uh . . . what . . . uh . . . Oh, sorry, I was reading the report,” he answers.
The private matters go on page after page. This, few were prepared for: the detailed, blow by blow, minute by minute, narrative of the pair’s intimate moments. Media people face enormous deadline pressures, but they can’t stop reading. Says Monica: “We would talk about our childhoods. Talk about current events. I was always giving him my stupid ideas about what I thought should be done in the administration. . . . We’d usually end up, kind of the pillow talk of it, I guess, . . . sitting in the Oval Office.” Says the report: “After phone sex late one night, the president fell asleep mid-conversation. . . . According to Ms. Lewinsky, the president said that ‘he had never been treated as poorly by anyone else as I treated him.'”
Late in the day, phone traffic is heating up, with people checking out one another’s perceptions. The TV news is all heavy breathing, but the phone gossip has it that parts of the report are comparatively weak, like the abuse-of-power section. Some find the report underwhelming. Democratic Hill staffers tell each other that the worst is over. The bottom has been reached. Conservatives are concentrating on the moral stuff. Most are absolutely appalled. The sickness of the relationship. Clinton’s odd morality — his weird rules about what he can do, when, with Monica.
The great question is how the masses will respond to the sex narrative. Will the Democratic congressmen read it and be sickened or read it and be outraged that Starr laid it all out? Look for people to fall into utterly different camps, the moralists and the amoralists. The culture war lives.
David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
