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A L S O+T O D A Y
I'm sorry, Tinky Winky Free at last Word from the White House
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MORAL MAJORITY | PAGE 1, 2
Just think of the look of constipated conscience that Joseph Lieberman seems unable to wipe off his puss, or the stentorian tones affected by the Foghorn Leghorn of Senate tradition, Robert Byrd. (How, a friend of mine recently wondered, do the journalists who interview Byrd keep from laughing in his face?) Referring to Lewinsky, both the left and the right have often sounded like outraged Victorians defending imperiled maidenhood. (Almost no one has mentioned the sexism inherent in treating an adult woman -- even a young one -- as though she were a child offered candy if she'd get into a stranger's car.) Even among the most vocal of Clinton's defenders, and some of the most eloquent under fire, like the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, there were frequent references to how appalling and reprehensible his behavior was. I suppose they had to refer to the affair somehow. But the president had already given them the perfect phrase during his grand jury testimony: "the most mysterious area of human life." Despite Clinton's undeniable caddishness in referring to Lewinsky as a stalker, I keep coming back to what his voice and manner betrayed as he spoke of the affair during his testimony, as something he remembered fondly, something he refused to turn into political capital by taking the opportunity to heap loathing upon it. But that is exactly what Democrats have done by talking about how crucial it is for the Senate to censure the president. Feinstein does not strike me as a stupid woman. But I listen to her calling for censure and I want to grab her and ask, Don't you get it? Don't you see that this willingness to make political judgments on the morality of private behavior is what got us into this mess in the first place? But apparently neither she nor any of the Democrats who supported her move to censure understand that. Partly, it's a function of their position. They are adopting the same public stance as the Americans who tell pollsters that they disapprove of what the president did. They think this affirmation of conventional good/bad morality is what's expected of them. But they need to listen to what's underneath the poll numbers expressing disapproval, they need to hear people struggling to find a way to reconcile the truth of their experience with their social disguises. It made perfect sense that Clinton's brief remarks following Friday's votes were directed to the public. They have really been the only parties communicating over the course of the last 13 months. Many in Congress and the press have simply ignored what the public has been telling them, or taken it at face value, which (especially for a journalist) amounts to the same thing. For me, the moment that summed this up better than any other occurred last Sunday on CNN's "Reliable Sources," when Newsweek's Ann McDaniel talked about how Clinton didn't reach out to the power structure when he arrived in Washington and thus didn't find too many supporters when he got in trouble. There was a blissful arrogance in McDaniel's reduction of Clinton's support to Washington's movers and shakers. The patent absurdity of talking about the lack of support for a president with a 70-percent approval rating didn't occur to McDaniel. If it had, the entire concept of politics as an exclusive club would have come crashing down around her, and in much of the press (like the gasbag indignation that has wafted off the New York Times editorials for months now) there is simply no indication that that's going to happen. No matter how trivial its origin, the meaning of the Clinton impeachment trial was finally anything but. It presented us with a vision of just how easily we might be cut out of the political process. And now, with talk about the public's short memory already a staple of punditspeak, we're being told in effect: "OK, you've had your time in the spotlight, things have turned out the way you wanted them, but we all know that you're so shallow that none of this is going to mean squat a few months down the line, so why don't you just get out of the way and let us go back to writing you out of the equation." A stale air of desperation had crept into the debate long before Friday, whether in the House managers' lining up to don their martyr's robes or the seen-it-all insider stance that press commentators have fallen back on when it became clear that they couldn't predict the public's reaction. There's a sense that the party has moved on without them, leaving them all bathed in flop sweat.
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