I was sitting in the Senate press gallery last Monday afternoon, waiting for the final day of the impeachment trial to begin, when suddenly the future became real to me — the pall of the post-Lewinsky world. Before me lay a copy of Congress Daily, an indispensable, exhaustively reported, excruciatingly boring chronicle of congressional goings-on. “Auto Choice Revs Up for Comeback,” read the headline, followed by this lead sentence: “Buckle up, because, ‘auto choice’ is headed back down the legislative pike.”
I don’t know which depressed me more: the thought of writing about auto insurance reform, or the thought of a writer trying to make auto insurance reform interesting by using seat-belt metaphors. But this is the future that awaits political writers, as the Lewinsky scandal becomes merely the stuff of our pleasant but fading recollection. Auto insurance reform. Nuclear waste clean-up legislation. Financial services modernization. Up next: the reallocation of oversight responsibility for motor carrier safety from the Office of Motor Carriers to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Vroom, vroom.
So it was with a great deal of regret that my colleagues and I filed into the press seats for this final show last Monday. Never again would we see all one hundred senators arrayed silently before us — at least not until the impeachment trial of President George W. Bush a few years from now, and by then the composition of the Senate will have changed. (Strom Thurmond, to take an obvious example, will be dead). The senators have come to be deeply familiar to those of us who sit in the gallery and stare down at them for hours every day. From my perch directly above him, I can close my eyes and count the number of strands in Chuck Schumer’s comb-over. (Eleven.) And when he grabs one of the many candy bars he keeps in his desk drawer, and his face darkens, and he hungrily rips the foil wrapper, I know without looking how many chews there will be before swallowing. (One.) And I know he’ll eat all the Hershey bars before he starts working his way through the Kit Kat. And when he’s sated, I know which finger he will use to pick his teeth. (Pinky.) It’s like we’re married or something.
Maybe this doesn’t sound exciting to you — maybe you think that you’d rather write about auto insurance reform any day than watch Chuck Schumer snack. But in truth, the sort of intimacy I’m describing with the great and powerful is rarely granted to a political reporter. I could trial Bob Kerrey for a month and never get to see him as I’ve seen him at his desk these past few weeks, hunched over a large bound notebook, filling page after page in an intense, tiny scribble, raising his head only occasionally to catch a bit of testimony or to sweep aside some flakes of chocolate that have flown over from Chuck Schumer next door. I admire Kerrey very much, but it must be said that this notebook of his has all the signs of a crazy man’s epic work — like a six-million-word “History of Me” the coroner might discover under the bed of a deceased eccentric who hasn’t stepped outside in twenty years. Kerrey does not observe margins, for example. He covers each page to its edge, from top to bottom. Sometimes he starts writing up the side. On some pages he’s pasted mysterious clippings. I called his office the other day to see if I could find out what gives with the notebook, as any competent reporter would. Surely it’s a hidden key to his inner life. But the press guy never called me back. And I’m not sure I want to know.
In their closing statements, the House managers were effusive in their praise of the senators’ attentiveness. This was shinola, however. After the first week of six-hour days, discipline started to break down. By last Monday, senators roamed the aisles freely, exchanging pleasantries instead of sitting quietly as the lawyers droned. For much of the afternoon, Joe Biden insisted on leaning against the back wall, arms folded, head cocked, weight shifting from foot to foot, like a juvenile delinquent in West Side Story. He looked as though he was just daring the chief justice to ask him to sit down. “I’m just hangin’,” Biden might have hissed. “You got a problem with that, Baldy?”
And then it was over. The closing statements concluded, the chief justice left, and only the final vote, at the end of the week, remained. Monica was history. History was history. Some senators stood to introduce legislation. The clerk read: “S. 387. A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code to provide an exclusion from gross income for distributions from qualified state tuition programs . . . ” and I came away, shuddering at the future.
ANDREW FERGUSON
