WHO IS THE LEADING CLINTON APOLOGIST on television? None other than Geraldo Rivera, who has spent 1998 mauling Kenneth Starr and swathing the president in sympathy. And who is television’s foremost Clinton attacker? Almost certainly Chris Matthews, who rides the president relentlessly, appalled that the man is still standing. Rivera and Matthews are the antipodes of prime-time scandal coverage. And they perform their acts on the same network, an hour apart, with identical zeal.
Rivera, of course, has been a star since the 1970s, when he was ABC’s investigative bad boy. After a decade in the swamps of “tabloid TV,” he is now host of Rivera Live on cable’s CNBC. Matthews, on the other hand, rose to fame as Tip O’Neill’s chief political lieutenant, when the Massachusetts Democrat was flaying Ronald Reagan as the enemy of decency and peace. Now Matthews holds forth on his nightly Hardball, dissecting Clinton and scolding Democrats who dare make excuses for him. Neither Rivera nor Matthews seemed destined for his present role.
Rivera is as wildly pro-Clinton as any White House spin artist, a suaver, hairier James Carville. He summed up his view of the scandal on the Tonight Show: “It’s all about sex. Whitewater? They tried it, came up with nothing. Travelgate? Nothing. Filegate? Nothing. All they have is this purported semi-neo-almost-quasi sex,” followed by a few harmless fibs. “What man is not going to lie about it?” Besides, it is only “Hillary’s business, not the grand jury’s business.” Starr, he has sneered, is “vile.”
Rivera has worked diligently to recast himself as a serious political journalist, but he is still a compulsive entertainer. On a recent show, he featured a little song that began, “Twinkle, twinkle, Kenneth Starr, now we see how crude you are.” (It continued with a line about “kissing the treacherous Tripp.”) He has made minor celebrities out of Hillary-style conspiracy theorists and denounced mainstream news publications for “suckling leaks” from the independent counsel. As for the notion of the Lewinsky affair as a “crime,” even an “alleged” one — why, “I wanna barf.”
When discussion turns to matters carnal, Rivera is apt to go into what scandal matriarch Lucianne Goldberg calls “full scrotal torque.” He chronicled his amorous doings in his 1991 memoir Exposing Myself, an account that makes the president’s record seem almost Puritan. Amateur Freuds suspect that Rivera sees in Clinton a kindred spirit, chafing at the strictures of square society. Rivera has instructed his audience, “There is law and there is life. In life, a handsome, married man of a certain age, home alone behind closed doors with an obviously infatuated and attractive young woman, would clearly be creating the appearance of a brief clandestine liaison, also known as a quickie. But law is not life” — and Clinton, Rivera maintains, is guilty of nothing worth prosecuting.
This is why the White House awarded Rivera a sugarplum during the president’s visit to China. Press secretary Mike McCurry arranged for Rivera to have an exclusive interview with Clinton. As McCurry put it to TV Guide, “When it comes to the scandal stuff, Geraldo has been as open-minded as you would want a journalist to be. We notice things like that.” So “open-minded” is Rivera, in fact, that when Monica Lewinsky concluded an immunity deal with the independent counsel — causing the White House to reel — he declared, “The president benefits.” The ex-intern, you see, had at long last “triumphed over Ken Starr.” Such is the wisdom on Rivera Live.
Chris Matthews, meanwhile, is unlikely to be huddling with the president any time soon. Night after night, Matthews inveighs against Clinton, decrying hypocrisy, warning against complacency, and laughing openly at Democrats who recite the administration line. He has no tolerance for what he terms “flackery.” And his capacity for outrage seems inexhaustible. In great rushes of words (the guests on Hardball are mainly decoration), Matthews chases a single, overarching theme: The president has done wrong; it is not a matter of left and right; he should be held accountable.
Matthews does not have the resume of a typical Clinton antagonist. He grew up in North Philadelphia, the grandson of a Democratic committeeman. After college at Holy Cross, he joined the Peace Corps, serving in Swaziland, then ventured to Capitol Hill, where he worked one shift as a policeman, another as a congressional aide. He later signed up with Ralph Nader, ran for Congress himself (losing in the primary), took a job with Ed Muskie, and wrote speeches for Jimmy Carter, before assuming his post with O’Neill. In both 1992 and 1996, he voted for Clinton — a fact he does not regret. “He’s more like me politically than anyone would believe,” Matthews says, “though we wound up where we are for very different reasons.”
Matthews contends that the struggle over Clinton reflects “a fair amount of Kulturkampf.” In Clinton, there is “a ’60s sensibility,” a disrespect for tradition “that you glimpse in things like renting out the Lincoln Bedroom, staffing the White House with kids, cultivating an environment of insolence.” Clinton harbors “a lack of reverence bordering on contempt,” and he fails to understand the importance of “representing the nation as head of state.” Matthews — in his populist mode — discerns a shameful alliance between “wealthy Republicans who are comfortable and self-satisfied and uninterested in morality” and “the cultural Left”: “Just as it suits the Frank Riches and Charles Grodins to defend all manner of behavior as long as it’s related to sexual life — which they hold sacred — it suits rich Republicans to keep their eye on the Dow.”
So too, Matthews does not conceal his horror that a president would engage in sex with an intern, noting that he himself has interns, who admire him and depend on him. Does he expect that the experience of 1998 will radicalize him, perhaps driving him into conservative arms? He is at times troubled by “the company I keep,” but takes courage from fellow journalists Tim Russert, Maureen Dowd, Michael Kelly, Mark Shields, and even Mary McGrory — “all moderate Democrats” — who have “raised their voices, to varying degrees, against Clinton.” Matthews says that his position derives solely from “a love of truth, and the belief that every journalist has some commitment to screaming the truth, if he’s lucky enough to find a glimmer of it.”
For its part, CNBC is delighted with its dueling scandal jockeys, planning to give Rivera an additional half-hour each night. The young network’s primetime ratings have almost doubled since the Monica Era dawned, and the public — no matter what the polls indicate — has not lost its appetite for the story. If anything, according to CNBC officials, Americans are growing hungrier.
Geraldo Rivera has profited nicely from what he regards as much ado about nothing. And Chris Matthews has profited nicely, too — from his noisy ado about something. Rivera has argued that “this is nothing but a sex and a sex-lie case.” Matthews could not disagree more strenuously — because “ultimately, we are talking about what kind of country we want to live in.”
Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
