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THE VANILLA STORY | PAGE 1, 2
So this weekend we got the chance, as the spurned suitors implored wistfully for weeks, to "look into her eyes" at last. What did we see? The managers characterized Lewinsky after their preliminary meeting as an "impressive," self-possessed young woman. We were meant, one assumes, to take that as a compliment. But it seems now to have meant something else, for the woman we see in the deposition -- an impressive, canny subject, refusing to be trapped, asking to see her earlier testimony in context -- was, her interlocutors said, not at all the young woman they knew. (Caroline, no!) What had they expected? What most of us did, I suppose. An impressive young moron. What they got was a canny professional witness of Kenneth Starr's creation: a cool, charming spinner. And why were they so surprised? Over the past year and 20-odd interviews, she's had a crash course in realpolitik worth three degrees from the Kennedy School. Remember, by the way, the laugh we all had over Monica's job search? One doubts that she's still interested in a life of flackery, but any employers who turned her down must be kicking themselves now. Hey, if you're a cosmetics company trying to defuse an animal-testing controversy, who do you want in your corner? You can have the spit-polished Barnard grad with 1,500 SATs: I'll take the middling Lewis and Clark grad who left a team of hostile Washington lawyers looking like tongue-tied country flatfoots. What was ultimately interesting about Lewinsky was not her looks (though, despite her documented and understandable stress-eating, she looked pretty damn fine), her clothes or even the substance of what she said. It was that she had mastered that art of cautiously dispensing sincerity that separates public figures from mortals. We've been told, after all, that the face we were finally going to see in action was one that transparently showed any emotion behind it -- the face we remember grinning absurdly, foolishly wide at Bill along those rope lines. She was emotional, impetuous, given to crying jags and mood swings. But it turns out that spending 14 months as a nightly monologue is a damn good finishing school. While that core of emotion and whimsy burst out occasionally -- a bug-eyed grimace here, a "vanilla story" locution there -- when she needed to be, she was ice. The Monica Lewinsky we would finally see, we had been told, would likely be a nervous, scatterbrained girl, "much younger than her 25 years." Whatever your birthdate, my friend, the Monica Lewinsky we got was far, far older than you. So: winners? Losers? From a political standpoint, the day was probably a push (which benefits Clinton) -- as of course it was bound to be unless the president burst into the chamber to confess shooting Vincent Foster after raping a Jane Doe. Nonetheless, Jeff Greenfield of CNN gushed over the managers' argument after their closing and Nina Totenberg of NPR lauded the White House team for "jumping all over" it in the response. Both sides have repeated what amount to closing arguments over and again since the beginning of the trial, yet with every iteration the analysts seem to be hearing it for the first time. From the public-image standpoint, the managers did little to erase the strident image encapsulated in the first line of Asa Hutchinson's little time-line placard: "Dec. 5: Witness list -- Lewinsky!!" There's the rocket-scientist House strategy in miniature -- if we just tack one more exclamation point on, the public will finally wake up!! For their part, the White House team came off again as little more than another segment in the long train of expert shit-shovelers who have followed the Clinton circus parade for years. Dale Bumpers' nauseating phrase, echoed by Nicole Seligman Saturday, that the managers "want to win too badly" captures Clinton's whiny sense of entitlement to a tee. What? How much, pray tell, is the prosecution in a case supposed to want to win? But there are bigger stakes here than the political one (it's not as though Alan Greenspan were being impeached). Let's not forget, the Senate Republicans aren't the only ones looking for an exit strategy; the White House is not the only one drawing up a post-trial road map. Saturday was the first day of the rest of Monica Lewinsky's public life. The political figures in this event are pretty much running out the clock; the people with a significant stake in Saturday's events were, in no particular order, Monica Lewinsky, Andrew Morton and Barbara Walters. The lovelorn Republicans suggested Lewinsky's reticence must have to do with the lingering spell of that hound dog on Pennsylvania Avenue, and that may be true. But legal and political and emotional motives aside, who says Monica was uncooperative solely for the president's sake? If she has a brain -- and at last we've been forced to recognize she does -- then she damn sure should be holding something back for her post-impeachment victory lap. Having garnered a $600,000 advance for Morton's "Monica's Story" and a comparable sum for an interview with Britain's Channel 4, likability and mystery are money for America's sweetheart. And she walked away with both, neatly breaking Ed Bryant's little heart and mentally checking her date book. For her efforts, she will get to dish out a new and sweeter vanilla story one pricey scoop at a time, and there can be no greater satisfaction after a year as a national punch line than getting seven figures to tell us all to lick it.
James Poniewozik's Under the Covers column appears in Salon every Tuesday.
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