While they would surely bask in the media glow and publicly bemoan the demise of campaign finance reform at the hands of Republicans, the death of Shays’ bill is probably fine with most Democrats. In 1994, a similar measure died in conference committee, killed by then Democratic Speaker Tom Foley and Democratic Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell. Not to mention the fact that the money-raising of President Clinton, Vice President Gore, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, et al. hardly comports with the hard-core purity of the good-government types over at Common Cause.

“It’s certainly interesting to hear Gephardt talk about campaign finance reform one day and then the next go to Las Vegas to get $250,000 from gambling interests,” says John Feehery, press secretary for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill. “There’s a bit of hypocrisy on that side.”

Just like the much-maligned soft money Shays’ bill would eliminate, when it comes to hypocrisy, there is more than enough to go around. You can start with Clinton, who championed the issue in his ’92 campaign but has done little else since then. “We have a ‘love-hate relationship’ ” with the Clinton administration, says Common Cause vice president and legislative director Meredith McGehee. “Mostly a ‘hate.’”

But the legislative maneuvering necessary to bring the bill up for a vote would essentially be seen as a middle finger from Shays in the face of the House leaders who schedule the votes. House Democrats have been making political hay out of the issue since April 13, when they began garnering signatures on a petition to force the vote, thus painting the GOP as anti-reform. Until now, Shays and every other Republican in the House had held off from signing the petition, thus ensuring that the number of signatures would never reach the 218 John Hancocks required to force a bill onto the floor for a vote.

Supporters of Shays’ bill fear that waiting until September will end up meaning that the House — which is normally consumed with appropriations bills immediately before the official beginning of the new fiscal year on October 1 — would shelve the bill.

Another possible scenario if the bill were to be debated in September has the House passing Shays’ bill (a distinct possibility as it passed in August 1998, by a vote of 252-179) and the Senate refusing to even consider it, claiming that it doesn’t have enough time to deal with the issue appropriately. Either way, supporters argue that a delay means death, which is fine for many Republicans.

“It was our plan from the beginning to have the House act first,” says Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who has been leading the fight for campaign finance reform on the Senate side, along with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. “That was for obvious reasons. The House actually passed campaign finance reform last year, while we never got around to it.” Feingold said waiting until September is not an option. “If the speaker puts it off until September, we’ll probably move well before that” in the Senate, he said.

The Republican leadership made it clear that any Republican cooperating with those pushing for an early vote on this issue wasn’t going to endear himself to his conference. Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, circulated a letter to his GOP minions that forcing a floor vote “undermines
the authority of the speaker and turns the floor of the House over to the minority.”

On May 5, 27 Republicans met with Hastert to urge that he allow a vote on the issue sooner rather than later. Shays, a lightning rod for conservative Republicans, has even backed off from the issue, staying mum in the press and letting moderate Rep. Marge Roukema, R-N.J., and
conservative Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., take the lead on the issue.

They remained hopeful that Hastert would change his mind, especially when they heard House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, make rumblings about a campaign finance reform vote before the July 4 recess.

But in an interview with the Associated Press released Tuesday night, Hastert rendered
his final verdict before he had spoken directly with Shays. As of Wednesday, Shays and his staff were still trying to assess whether Hastert’s message-in-a-wire-story was cunning or
clumsiness. Was he daring Republican moderates to sign the petition? Or is he still just new to the job?

Shays is reportedly upset, tortured with feelings of betrayal. He sincerely believes in his bill’s goals: Banning soft money, regulating “issue” ads as campaign ads, and improving Federal Election Commission disclosure and enforcement. But the seven-term veteran also knows that his party only has so much patience for his maverick ways. And with conservative author/pundit Ann Coulter flirting with the idea of challenging him in the 2000 primary, he may soon need his party’s help.

“Shays isn’t perceived as a team player,” says one GOP leadership source. “He feels he must reform the system no matter the destruction and damage to the party. He thinks he’s purer than pure. But we’re hopeful that he cares enough about the majority so he’ll work in a positive matter rather than a destructive one.”

But Feingold remains optimistic that Shays will stand up to Republican threats. “What do they expect him to do after he poured his heart and soul into that bill? Is he supposed to let the bill die?”

Somewhere out in Texas, at this very minute, an 89-year-old woman is marching across the continent in the name of campaign finance reform. Granny D, as the octogenarian is known, cites banning soft money as her trek’s raison d’etre — but she might as well be advocating the colonization of Neptune.

Shays knows the futility of this woman’s mission all too well.

Both Granny D and Shays must overcome deep-seated fears by Shays’ colleagues if their quixotic quests are going to be successful. A number of Republicans, for instance, think that Shays-Meehan would end up hurting Republican candidates more than Democrats. They say that interest groups frequently allied with the Democratic Party — including environmental organizations, trial lawyers and unions — wouldn’t be affected, while the Republican Party’s soft money coffers would be more severely limited.

“Shays-Meehan won’t level the playing field,” says Rep. Robert Ehrlich, R-Md., a rising star in the GOP leadership. “It will just better allow Democrats to promote the Gephardt agenda.”

But if the argument that the minority party’s campaign finance reform would
just skew things unfairly in the other direction seems familiar to you, that’s because when Democrats controlled the House last, they made the same accusations against Republicans when they proposed banning PACs altogether back in 1993.

Want to end the practice of “bundling,” where an advocacy group collects checks from its members and sends them all to a candidate in one big envelope? Well, hold on, because pro-choice women’s groups like EMILY’s List engage in that practice. How about ensuring that a majority of a
candidate’s contributions come from within his or her congressional district? Well, that hurts African-American and Latino candidates, who often run in less affluent areas and depend on the support of their wealthier brethren (not to mention PACs) to win.

The kind of campaign finance reform everyone believes in is the kind that’s going to hurt the other guy.

“When I go to talk to groups, I ask them ‘Who is for campaign finance reform?’ and everyone raises their hand,” Ehrlich said. “But then I explain each bill, and all the different issues in each one, and everyone has a different opinion. It’s like being for ‘small business’ or for ‘motherhood and apple pie.’”

Common Cause would prefer sweeping reform. “If it hurts somebody, we’d rather try to make sure that it hurts everybody equally,” says McGehee. But Shays-Meehan, she says, would at least be a step in the right direction, one that she argues hurts both parties by banning soft money. “Soft money hurts the average American,” she says. “There’s a direct correlation between the little bits of pork tucked into these bills and money that was given” to the men and women drafting the bills. “These are the things that directly hurt American consumers, the reason for the hike of prices of everything from peanut butter to milk. It’s not like this is some disconnect.”

So Granny D will walk until the soles of her shoes are gone, and Shays will decide whether he should live to fight another day, and in the end campaign finance reform will probably die one way or another. Fifty-two other Republican congressmen currently in the House voted for Shays-Meehan in August 1998, but few of them seem to be willing to force a floor vote on the measure now. As Shays ponders his decision, he can be forgiven for wondering why he feels so alone.

Smith, her short black hair expertly coifed, her cobalt blue business suit perfectly pressed, cocked her head to one side and paused for a moment before responding.

“Patty and I are the same age, we came out of a let-it-hang-loose time and, well, I guess some people never change,” Smith said, her voice sympathetic to the woman’s concerns. “They’ve cleaned her up a lot now, but when she was in the state senate, she was, well, very casual.”

Folksy, low-key and, yes, very casual, Patty Murray sold herself six years ago as “just a mom in tennis shoes.” She may still be a little too rumpled for some of her constituents. But on every issue except wardrobe, Smith, a firebrand with a fierce independent streak, is making Murray seem downright establishment. Mother, grandmother and Christian right populist, Smith refuses most PAC money. She’s backed by a cadre of loyal supporters known as “Linda’s Army,” and they view her campaign as a crusade.

The big news in this War of the Moms is that so-called women’s issues haven’t been much of an issue at all. Sure, Murray and Smith clash on everything from abortion — Murray is solidly pro-choice while Smith believes abortion should be outlawed even in cases of rape and incest — to the presidential sex scandal. While Murray denounced the president’s behavior, Smith was the first woman in Congress to call for his resignation. (“He got caught. He was like a little boy with crumbs all over his face,” she told Larry King.) But mostly they’ve been talking about the unglamorous bread-and-butter political issues important to voters in Washington and all over the country — issues like trade, campaign finance, education, Social Security and the proper role of the federal government.

“I know it’s feminist heresy, but I think this race is great,” says Elinor Burkett, author of “The Right Women: A Journey Through the Heart of Conservative America.” “That women are fighting over political issues means that feminism has worked. The fact that Linda Smith is getting up there and not talking about women’s issues shows there is an ideological war going on and it’s reminding us that women don’t just vote as women.”

Is this race, the only woman vs. woman Senate race this year and only the third one in history, really a triumph for feminism? Some Murray supporters aren’t sure. “It will be a good day when we have two pro-women’s-issue candidates, like a Christine Todd Whitman running against a Patty Murray,” says Cathy Allen, a Seattle-based political consultant and vice president of the National Women’s Political Caucus. “That would be a signal that we were equal. A candidate like Smith who is so extreme is not helpful to women.”

But Murray’s feminist backers cannot afford to be generous. Even though the most recent polls show the incumbent with a comfortable lead, no one — not even the Murray camp — will count out the influence of “Linda’s Army,” a grass-roots coalition of Perot Party reformers and Christian conservatives in the eastern and southwestern part of the state.

Even EMILY’s List, an organization that helps elect pro-choice, Democratic women, won’t count Murray in the win column. “Women voters are going to be important for Murray,” said Stephanie Cohen, communications director for EMILY’s List. “Women make up an important part of the Democratic base in Washington state. If they stay home, she could be in trouble, because Smith’s conservative base is motivated.”

“Linda’s opponents always try to label her supporters as Christians, but that’s just an attempt to demonize her,” says Erik Lokkesmoe, a Smith spokesman. Indeed, the latest round of Murray advertisements hits Smith for her “extreme” views on abortion, education and cuts to Medicare. “But remember,” Lokkesmoe says ominously, “she has never lost an election.”

While on most issues the candidates are fervently opposed, they do have some things in common. Both women are 48-year-old mothers of two, and both come from working-class families with their share of troubles: Abuse and alcoholism plagued Smith’s family, while Murray’s father was struck with multiple sclerosis when she was young. Both served in the Washington state legislature and had pet issues — for Murray, education; for Smith, tax reform — that catapulted them into national politics. But observing them on the campaign trail last week, it was their differences — both in personal style and ideology — that were most striking.

Smith, who hails from the southwestern Washington town of Hazel Dell, married her husband, Vern, a railroad worker, 30 years ago at age 17, and is a devout member of the Assembly of God church. She first proved her political mettle in 1994, when she staged a successful write-in campaign to get her name on the ballot as the Republican candidate for the 3rd Congressional District. She won easily and went to Washington, D.C., as part of the Republican revolution, where she ruffled feathers by lobbying for campaign finance reform and by voting to oust House Speaker Newt Gingrich. She is often vilified for her tactlessness (she once called Gingrich a “fat boy” ), her extremism (of President Clinton: “We’ve got a president with a character of someone we wouldn’t let your teenage daughter alone with”) and her rough edge (a recent Seattle Weekly cover depicted Smith as a dominatrix with her high heel digging into Murray’s rump). But of the two candidates she is by far the more compelling and telegenic. An attractive brunette in bold business suits, she is a confident orator, at home in front of a lectern, and is nearly unflappable when taking questions from reporters and voters.

Yet despite her genial polished facade, Smith is further to the right than most politicians and voters in the state. Even though in recent years Christian conservatives have made inroads on school boards and in local races, the Puget Sound area around Seattle, where the majority of the electorate resides, is liberal to moderate. Smith has a 100 percent approval rating from the Christian Coalition. On the issue of abortion in the case of rape and incest, Smith has said, “We don’t kill children because their father is a jerk.”

Murray, a petite blonde who favors pastels, is more tentative, less severe. One of her campaign slogans, “Quietly getting things done,” tries to make a virtue out of what many see as a liability. Ushered onto the national political stage to much fanfare during the “Year of the Woman,” Murray has been unable to garner much momentum on Capitol Hill.

“Patty Murray is not charismatic and she doesn’t attract a rabid following,” says David Olson, a professor of political science at the University of Washington. “Smith attracts and repels people. You either love her or hate her.” Adds Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an expert on Congress: “Among the women who were elected six years ago, Murray is very different, personality-wise. Carol Moseley-Braun and Barbara Boxer are very assertive, combative, in-your-face individuals and Murray is very low-key. Smith is deeply identified as a reformer and pursues her views whatever the consequences.”

Murray has struggled during her campaign to highlight her legislative accomplishments, which have been limited. “She was only in the state senate for two years before a feminist group picked her up and marketed her tennis shoes,” snipes Smith. “That’s kind of a fast trip when all of a sudden you’re with people who have run corporations or have been very competitive. She just got lost for five years.”

“I think she really was a mom in tennis shoes,” says Debbie Walsh, associate director of the Center for the American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University. “The challenge for Patty Murray is that while she is ‘one of us,’ you also want her to be ‘one of them,’ enough of an insider so she can bring things back to the home state. Candidates who run as outsiders or ‘just folks’ have to figure out what to do after the election.”

Murray herself admits it’s been hard to get much done with Republicans controlling the Senate, and says she’s worked hard to “reach across the aisle” to compromise with Republicans, including Washington’s senior senator, Slade Gordon. But last week Murray received a much-needed pre-election victory in the form of a
$1.2 billion appropriation to the budget bill to begin hiring 100,000 new teachers in order to reduce class sizes — an item that Murray, a former teacher, had been lobbying for for months.

- – - – - – - – - -

On the stump, both candidates refer to themselves as moms, invoke their children and claim to be the true candidate for working families. “Nothing is more important to me than my six grandkids, except maybe my two kids,” Smith is fond of saying. But the family-values mantra, so resonant just six years ago in campaigns across the country, is barely uttered. Abortion hasn’t been much of an issue, even though Murray, one of the staunchest supporters of choice, received a 100 percent approval rating from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.

“I haven’t heard a peep about abortion,” says author Burkett. “People think women of the right are concerned with the same women’s issues that liberal women are concerned with. But Smith is the queen of campaign finance reform. She’s a right-wing populist. We want to put women politicians in the woman box, but Smith belongs in the right-wing populist box. She’s suspicious of government.”

Yet at a press conference last week, Smith brought family values in through the back door and railed against her opponent for “raiding Social Security” in order to balance the budget, shortchanging children and seniors. Then she reached into a large glass jar, grabbed a wad of cash, and in a photo-opportunity flourish, crumpled it in her hand to represent the vanishing funds.

“It’s these kids you see here today who are going to be in trouble,” she said, pointing to two rosy, redheaded toddlers. “I will not violate kids or senior citizens. The only special interests I have are the families of this state.”

Murray fought back at an event of her own last Thursday, standing before a podium draped in red, white and blue bunting, with the Sister Sledge song “We Are Family” blaring in the background. She told a group of supporters at Seattle’s Planet Hollywood restaurant that on the same day she helped hire 100,000 new teachers, her opponent had accepted $100,000 from the very special interest groups she deplored. The message was clear: Linda Smith is a hypocrite.

Murray’s attack was prompted by Smith’s acceptance of a much-needed $100,000 infusion from the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. Smith, who religiously refuses PAC money, saying it would make her beholden to special interests, contends it’s kosher to accept funds from the national party, since she doesn’t know where the money came from, and thus can’t favor donors.

“We don’t think that will pass the smell test with voters,” says Rex Carney, spokesman for the Murray campaign. “She has made campaign finance reform her No. 1 issue. How can she justify taking this money from the party when it comes from the very interests she has complained about?” But the $100,000 sum is less than half of what the Republicans had allocated for Washington this election season. Because Smith so angered Republican leaders — including the head of the committee, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — by supporting campaign finance reform, the national purse strings were drawn tight.

Nationally, feminist analysts are watching the race to see whether the gains women achieved in the so-called Year of the Woman are enduring. Earlier this year some worried that they weren’t, when Murray, Boxer and Moseley-Braun were pronounced in trouble by many Washington pundits. Now, with Murray and Boxer leading in their races — only Moseley-Braun remains in trouble, largely because of problems of her own making — advocates for female candidates are a little less tense about Nov. 3.

The candidates themselves say this race has little to do with feminism, or motherhood, but instead reflects two women with different ideologies drawn to public office for their own reasons.

Asked by a reporter how being a mother influenced her politics, Murray laughed. She said she couldn’t separate being a mother from growing up in a family that had relied on government help to get through tough times. “When I was 13 my dad was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis,” she said. “My mom had never worked and she had to go on welfare while she went back to school. Without that safety net I wouldn’t have been educated. My government was there for me and I want to make sure that continues for other families.”

Smith, not surprisingly, insists being a woman has little to do with her politics, or her political success.

“I am [in Washington, D.C.] based on my own ability,” she said emphatically. “I’ve been a competitive, aggressive businesswoman, and then a competitive, aggressive political woman. It’s not fair to women as a whole to raise up any woman to a position based on the fact that they marketed their tennis shoes.”

But a week before Election Day, polls say the familiar “mom in tennis shoes” has the edge with voters over the “competitive, aggressive” Smith.

At a campaign forum at the Primera Blue Cross/Blue Shield in suburban Seattle last week, Dena Jordan, a research analyst and mother in her 40s, came out to hear both women on the issues. But it was Murray she connected with.

“She presents her views in a way that I understand,” Jordan said of Murray’s plain talk on education and health care. “I like the fact that she is a mom in tennis shoes.”

As a single mother of two young daughters, she embodies a combative mix of identities: a millionaire who has vowed to fight poverty; a political commentator who earnestly preaches the power of satire; a Republican who constantly quotes her progressive friends. Whether she’s cracking dirty jokes on “Politically Incorrect,” condemning Newt Gingrich for abdicating the leadership of the GOP, or sermonizing on the need to bridge the poverty divide, Huffington still relishes the opportunity to speak her mind.

She is also an author, most recently of “Greetings from the Lincoln Bedroom,” a first-person Alice in the White House fantasy of an overnight stay at the Lincoln bedroom. Traipsing through the news-driven scandals of the day, she meets a talking Socks, a peeping television, a hot-tubbing Newt and — of course — a commander in chief with wandering hands. The book has a gleeful surface — as if written in naughty spurts: “Hey, what if the television could see me undress?” But inside this bright tissue-paper wrapping, Huffington has planted the seeds for her “postpartisan” political agenda, an agenda she says she hopes will find an audience among those who have tuned out of old-fashioned, two-party politics.

During an interview at Salon’s offices recently, she was unpretentious, gracious and cheerfully answered any question thrown her way. Between cell phone calls about arranging her daughter’s birthday party, she talked about the “right-wing conspiracy,” Kenneth Starr, why she turned on Newt Gingrich and why the American economy is like the Titanic.

Initially when Hillary Clinton suggested that there was a right-wing conspiracy, many people on the left and the right thought that she was being paranoid. Now it seems that there’s some basis for her statements, what with Richard Mellon Scaife possibly funneling money to Starr’s key witnesses. Is there truth to the notion that the Clinton scandals are a political plot?

Absolutely. Increasingly, all these scandals are exposing the corruption of the political class. We have two political parties but one political class. The concerted efforts on both the left and the right to take out the other side is not unusual. But there are certain things that have nothing to do with Richard Scaife. The way that Hillary Clinton used the term was as if the “vast right-wing conspiracy” had created Monica Lewinsky and her husband’s alleged affair. And it’s not just whether there was any sexual involvement but whether there was an attempt to keep her quiet through giving her jobs, whether there was an attempt to suborn perjury. All these things are not products of any concerted effort — they either happened or did not happen. That’s what’s under investigation.

But corruption is not limited to the Clinton administration. When you have both chairmen of the two parties — Don Fowler and Haley Barbour — clearly lying to the [Sen. Fred] Thompson committee about fundraising efforts and nobody caring and nobody taking any steps to stop it, it’s just promoting people’s tuning out of politics; and that’s my greatest concern.

As someone who has been a political wife, what do you think of Hillary Clinton?

I really preferred Hillary Clinton when she was being strong, and
professional, and expressing herself, and really fighting to create a new role for the first lady. I am very concerned about this new persona of enabler-in-chief. It is worse than “stand by your man.” It is really like enabling your man. We have spent years trying to convince women that they don’t have to stand by abusive men. And this is a form of emotional abuse.

I don’t know what kind of agreement you can have with your husband where what he does extracurricularly does not have any effect on you. I don’t believe human nature is set up that way. It is clear that she is paying a huge price. That is her decision and that is her life, but the message that it is sending out to other women concerns me. I am the child of a philandering father. I saw the price my mother paid, and I was the one telling her, “You’ve got to leave him.”

What’s your take on the current state of the Clinton scandals? First, it looked as if he would be brought down by the Lewinsky affair; now, if the polls are anything to go by, it looks as if Kenneth Starr may go down first.

What surprises me is the extent to which we determine our responses to what’s happening based on polling results. It’s truly extraordinary that we treat polling as if it’s infallible, as though it’s the chicken entrails of ancient Greece. I, together with satirist Harry Shearer, have started a campaign against polling on our respective
Web sites that we’re calling “Partnership for a Poll-free America.”

Interesting! Last week Newt Gingrich went on the attack, and the next Salon obtains this confidential memo from Republican pollster Frank Luntz advising Republicans to speak out against Bill Clinton on the sex scandal.

That’s my problem with polling! Frank Luntz first told Republicans to say nothing. And they said nothing. Now he’s telling them to say something, and it just makes you so contemptuous about political leaders; it’s like they’re little marionettes literally being run by the pollsters.

The timing for Newt’s particular GOPAC speech was very interesting. The Republican base is so enraged with Gingrich and the leadership. On my book tour, I have been speaking to various Republican audiences, and the easiest applause line is: “Gingrich should be replaced.” That hasn’t made the news much. So his attack on the president is not a cri de coeur. If he believes it now, why didn’t he believe it for the last three months? What
has changed? What has happened is that the poll results have come back about how his base is responding.

In your book, you have Gingrich and Clinton acting like frat boys: drinking in the White House hot tub and then peeing into the bushes together. What’s your sense of the real relationship between the speaker and the president?

I think Newt really admires Clinton for his ability to survive. Because in the political class, the thing people most respect is the ability to survive as a member of the political class. It’s like a self-perpetuating oligarchy. Newt has learned a lot from studying Clinton. I think Gingrich admires Clinton and Clinton uses Gingrich. It’s a very dysfunctional relationship. But Clinton has natural charm. Even my children adored him when they met him at Hilton Head.

Do you think Ken Starr has gone too far?

I wrote a column about the logical fallacy a lot of us have been indulging in, which is that what you think of Ken Starr is really a separate issue from the inner sense of the guilt of Bill Clinton. Because that is going to stand or fall on the facts. The fact that he’s called Monica Lewinsky’s mother to testify is something that is routinely done with African-American mothers in inner-city crime cases, and nobody has ever raised a voice. But now it suddenly becomes an issue because we have a middle-class
mother we can identify with. There’s no question Starr did things he should not have done, like subpoenaing Sidney Blumenthal. But he knows what case he’s building in a way that we don’t. He can’t get what isn’t there.

He can if he gets people to lie.

If Web Hubbell was paid $700,000, it will be established whether it’s hush money or it’s not. That’s why you build a case that’s based on more than one source. We don’t know what went on behind the grand jury doors, we don’t know what Betty Currie or Vernon Jordan said. We do know that Vernon Jordan let it
be said through his friends that he’s not going to fall on his sword for the president. And he’s been pretty absent — he was not at the Washington correspondents dinner and he did not go to Africa, so clearly there’s something going on here.

You speak of America being a two-tiered society. What do you mean?

Basically, I have two very specific ideas that drive what I am saying. Both ideas are expressed by Lincoln when he comes to visit me at the end of the book. He talks about how, because of this shallow bipartisanship that dominates American politics now, we have basically neglected the fact that America has become two nations. The entire political conversation that we are having
involves one nation, in which you have both parties saying how great the economy is, how high the Dow Jones is, when 6 out of 10 people are not touched by the Dow Jones. The other nation is the one
left behind in crumbling inner cities, public schools where the children cannot learn and are not safe.

How do you reconcile being part of the privileged
class, being a very rich woman, and being very concerned about these
disparities?

By trying to walk my talk. I tithe 10 percent of my income, both my earned income and my investment income, to poverty-fighting causes.
There’s also a group I support called the Renewal Alliance that focuses on using government to promote citizenship and civil society. The centerpiece of the agenda is a charitable tax credit of $500 that any family owes to the IRS and allowing the family to spend it on a poverty-fighting cause of their choice. The hope is that a substantial minority would get involved in
their communities.

If you really believe in closing the gap between the rich and the poor, why not embrace redistributive policies of some sort?

Because they don’t work. I am a pragmatist. This is not the way to change things. The way to change things is for the critical mass of citizens to get involved in the solutions of social problems, both by tithing, and by giving time. Right now you have 1 percent of corporate income going to charity. And a lot of what the wealthy give is not to poverty fighting but to the museums, and to their own kids’ schools. The war on poverty did not succeed.

And it’s not just rich and poor, it is how we are bringing up children. The greatest threat that we are facing is that we have 15 million children at risk who, if we don’t do something, are going to enter a life of violence. Yet we have demonstrated through studies that the presence of a mentor, of a caring adult in the life of those children, can decrease by 50 percent the likelihood that they will enter a life of violence. That is something we can do, if we can find a way to get people involved. Political leaders are not addressing it as a problem. In my speeches, I
talk about this as the upcoming iceberg. One of the reasons that
the Titanic has been such a phenomenal cultural success is that
unconsciously, it is a symbol — I have always been a Jungian so I am interested in cultural symbols — and the Titanic is a huge symbol of what we are ignoring. The captains of the ship think it’s unsinkable. Both parties are talking about this economy as if it is unsinkable.

So much for the quieter, gentler Newt, who until recently had been circumspect, even statesmanlike, about the president’s alleged scandals. In fact, before last week’s outbursts, the speaker had appeared to be going through something of a makeover, described in his latest book, “Lessons Learned the Hard Way.”

During a recent interview in his Capitol Hill office, Gingrich — dressed in gray slacks and a blue and white gingham shirt open at the collar — came across as eloquent, easygoing, quick with a chuckle or an impromptu history lesson.

Still, he seemed to restrain himself more than once. You could almost see his jaw muscles working as he tried to clamp down on his tongue. Nevertheless, after the interview was conducted, he fired off a few verbal grenades as if he were still a defiant backbencher.

During the interview, he said little about the impeachment scenario, but spoke extensively about public opinion, morals, his political goals and religious beliefs, his reputation for meanness and who he would most like to play in a movie.

You draw a distinction in your book between public opinion and public judgment. Do President Clinton’s robust poll numbers in the face of the scandals swirling around him reflect the former or the latter?

[Pollster Daniel] Yankelovich makes the argument that public opinion is what you say when asked by a reporter about a topic you haven’t thought about. And most of the time you are repeating something you heard somebody else say. Public judgment is what you say after you and the people you trust have talked about [a topic] at length. The president’s health plan did very well in public opinion the morning after the speech; it did very badly in public judgment eight months later.

Public judgment tends to be much more complex and more introspective. I think the public has exercised both right now with the president. On one hand, the public has heard a lot of noise for a long time and refused to pay attention. “Oh that’s more of the same.” On the other hand, the president has asserted very forcefully his innocence and so far the public is willing to suspend its judgment, so long as his innocence is not disproved. I wouldn’t want to bet an enormous amount of money on those [poll] numbers.

Do you expect that there will be impeachment hearings?

I do not think about it. I wait for Judge Starr to brief us.

C’mon, you don’t think about it?

No, I rigorously don’t think about it.

Many have argued that the Lewinsky allegations, even if true, should be a private matter between her and the president. When should a politician’s private life remain private?

I think when it does not involve the violation of law and does not involve the gross violation of public trust it should remain private. I think we’ve had 35 years of soap operas and they’ve actually weakened the country. I don’t believe that America was in any way weakened, and I believe it was in many ways strengthened, by the fact that the press allowed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to have a private life. I believe that America fought the Second World War better because the press corps decided that there were zones in which they would not cover, such as private behavior. But I think over the last 35 years there has been a process of degrading the entire quality of public life that has been astonishing.

Has the average American’s attitude toward adultery changed since the 1960s?

No, I don’t think it has changed dramatically. “Peyton Place” was
written when I was in high school. I used to tell my students, if you
can find something that isn’t in the Bible, come tell me. Until then I will assume that you are repeating normal human behavior. No one ever showed up. The Old Testament is replete with every possible human weakness and every possible venality because it turned out that it was written about humans. We are governed as humans, by humans for humans.

Nicholas Mills, author of the “The Triumph of Meanness:
America’s War Against Its Better Self,” was asked once who he thought is the one person most responsible for fostering meanness in American society? He replied: “Newt Gingrich, who made meanness respectable by continually promoting the notion of ‘welfare queens’ to the middle class. Being tough on the
poor suddenly wasn’t acting cruel, but just doing something positive.”

The cultural style of meanness began, if anywhere, with “All in the
Family” — and a kind of viciously self-destructive, interpersonal
behavior that became the national norm. Cultural tone does matter.
We’re into a kind of humor that’s so malicious that one day I called the president and urged him not to go to another event featuring a
comedian, because I was embarrassed for the president, his wife and the country.

Starting with pure personal invective, I would say that the
gentleman quoted must have suffered from amnesia or missed most of the 20 years preceding my becoming speaker of the House to figure that it began when I became speaker. And I suspect that if he went back and read the things said about Dan Quayle, for example, he’d be astonished by how mean they often were. Or for that matter the things said about Ronald Reagan. In fact, what I have suggested consistently is that the word “compassion” means with passion at its root, and that Marvin Olasky is right when he says no bureaucrat by definition can behave officially with compassion although they can as private citizens.

What we have done in reforming welfare has, in fact, improved the lives of 2.2 million people who have left welfare for the private sector. The question that I would ask the man quoted is: Does he truly believe that New York City was better off when it had 1.2 million people on welfare than under Rudy Giuliani, when for the first time since 1967 there’s less than 800,000 people on welfare? Or does he think that the 400,000 additional people going to work, the civility, the cleanliness of the streets and the general demeanor is in fact an improvement?

You write that you could probably spend nearly every day answering the mean and distorted things that you’ve got to hear and read about yourself. What were the meanest and most distorted?

I can’t tell you. I eventually learned Margaret Thatcher’s rule. I
don’t read them anymore. I just block them out. When in doubt I go to the Smithsonian or the American Museum of Natural History or a zoo.

Are you considering retiring in 2002?

Sure. At the pace at which I do this job I can’t sustain it for more
than eight years.

Have you accomplished everything that you want to in the legislative branch?

We’ve got four and a half more years. No one person accomplishes
everything. My goals are a majoritarian Republican party, which is
inclusive and problem solving. A 21st century information age
legislative branch. Then I have four big national goals and two building block goals: a drug free America, dramatically less crime, creating a world standard educational system, dramatic change in retirement. And then, moving us toward an information age government that only costs you 25 percent of your income, not 38 percent. And having science as the central driving provider of knowledge, information and jobs for the 21st Century. If I can get those eight things done, if I can get them up and running in a way that is stable and understandable by 2002, then I’ve done my job.

Are you saying that you have no plans to run for president in 2000?

I am currently only planning to be reelected as speaker of this hall and I currently am assuming that I will run for speaker again in 2000, but I’m not excluding any other option. I’m essentially an idea-oriented political leader and I believe the ideas matter more than the personalities.

But wouldn’t there be more of a chance in the executive branch to generate and execute ideas?

Considering my background, who I am, where I came from, this has been the right job, because I needed at least three years in this job just to learn how to do it. Remember, no Republican had done this job since Nicholas Longworth in the 1920s. There were no role models. There was nobody to sit and talk with.

What lessons did you learn from the Republicans losing the presidential campaign in 1996?

We should have taken much more seriously the Democrats’ September 1995 ad campaign, which was the initial launch of what was to be 120,000 negative ads; and I think we should have been much more aggressive in figuring out early on that they were breaking the law to do that. We kept saying, “They’re going to run out of money,” but they didn’t because they broke the law. When you look back, it was the most illegal presidential campaign in history.

We also did not have an argument in 1996 that we were capable of winning, which would have defined the election on terms we could have won. That was a huge mistake. The central principal is
always the same, and Margaret Thatcher said it better than anybody:
“First you win the argument, then you win the vote.” Every time we
defined an argument and won the argument, we won the election. Every
time we hide from the argument, we lose the election.

But don’t you think the framers of the Constitution would be appalled at how much time politicians devote to raising money, rather than arguing over the issues?

Yes, and I think that the framers would point out that it’s entirely an artifact of $1,000 campaign [contribution] limits which have not been indexed since 1974. Common Cause first created the problem and now complain about the problem they created and want to make it even worse by restricting free speech. We should have indexed the donations to Super Bowl TV commercials. Look at what it costs today for congressional races to buy a 30-second commercial. Now, you tell me which side is more obscene: those who charge that amount of money while editorializing piously against the cost of campaigning or those who raise the money to buy the ads? I think we should be honest about it. The information age is expensive. It ain’t going to get cheaper, because you have to compete with Nike and Coca-Cola to get your message though.

If you could add one article to the Constitution, what would it be?

If I couldn’t change the courts’ mistaken interpretation of the
religious liberties laws, I would be for a constitutional amendment to require the government not to infringe upon your right to practice religion. This was a country in which God was in the public arena, not a country which drove God out of it.

You are a religious man; you go to church –

I’m a person of faith more than I go to church.

You are also a devotee of science who wanted to be a paleontologist as a kid. Do you believe in the theory of evolution?

I think that a God that can raise a carpenter from the dead could also create a universe that’s understandable in rational terms. In fact, if you talk to subatomic physicists, they are saying more and more frequently that some of their findings require them to have faith.

You are also a historian. As a historian, did you ever notice similarities between the Confederate Constitution and the Contract With America, which both espoused states’ rights and lower taxes?

That’s a new one to me (laughs). As a Pennsylvania-born son of a
career soldier, the idea that I sat down late one evening and took out the Confederate Constitution (laughs more) … That’s good. That’s creative.

If you had access to a time machine, which historic event would
you have most liked to have influenced?

If you could see one historical event, you would want to be there when Christ ascended; however you wouldn’t influence the event because God preempted you. If you believe single events can change history, and they probably can, then you would like to be in a truck running over Adolph Hitler in 1920 as he crosses the street. No other single event, except doing the same thing to Stalin and Mao, would have quite the same impact on the history of the human race.

If you could have any job in the world besides speaker, what would it be?

Any job in the world? Probably one of two: chief general collector for the American Museum of Natural History or field observer at the San Diego Zoological Society.

Why?

Childhood emotions. I love the American Museum of Natural History.
There you get Barnam Brown and Roy Chapman Andrews and the great
tradition of collecting. It would be such a thrill to stand in their
shadows and go out occasionally and collect. San Diego is probably the greatest zoo in the world. Every time I go to their wild animal park I am overwhelmed, and I think going on field expeditions with them would be just remarkable. If I retire in 2002, Marianne [Gingrich's wife] and I have talked about spending half the year collecting and half the year writing and teaching.

If you could cast yourself in any movie role, what would it be, and who would play opposite you?

(Long pause) The psychiatrist played by Robin Williams in “Good Will Hunting.” If you could play opposite one actress, you would want to play opposite Katharine Hepburn, just for the experience of having been onstage with one of the greatest actresses in American history.

If an extraterrestrial landed in Washington, D.C. — let’s say it was
attracted by Al Gore’s 24-hour earth channel — what message would you want it to beam back?

If you saw “Men In Black,” you know that I am conflicted in answering this question. The message I’ve sent back so far is, “Still studying, be patient.” On bad days I’ve sent back, “Less hope, be more patient.” On no day have I sent a message that said, “Good times to come.” All I’ll say is that I have no memories earlier than being in New Mexico in 1948. But I don’t want you to interpret from that — and I will reject out of hand, and we have no controlling legal authority that suggests — that you can define me as an alien for that answer.

With the exception of Hillary Clinton, it appears, no one spends more quality time with the president than Jordan. Numerous media reports identify Jordan with the sobriquet “presidential friend,” as if that is his official position. But what precisely does FOB One do when he’s not duffing with Clinton on the links?

In his spare time, Jordan conducts business at the law and lobbying firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Field, pocketing $1 million a year. Yet Jordan maintains he neither practices law nor lobbies for the firm’s clients, which represent a fair slice of corporate America. So how does he earn his keep? A little bit of this, a little bit of that. “He puts people together,” says one former senior Clinton White House aide who used to interact with Jordan. Who does he put together? “I’m not really sure,” the aide notes. And to achieve what? “Not sure about that, either. Deals, I suppose.”

Jordan does not file any disclosure reports that reveal his sources of income or that indicate who pays for his unique services. He and his wife sit on 17 corporate boards, apparently a record for a husband-wife team. His roster includes Dow Jones, American Express and Bankers Trust. All told, he receives $500,000-plus a year from his directorships. If he’s a man with an agenda, it’s a hidden one. In Jordan’s line of work, one shouldn’t have to spell out quid pro quos — it’s in bad taste. But when a man has such access to the president — and delivers important favors for the president and his staff — it is fair to ask what he might wish in return, even if a payback isn’t explicitly requested.

A recent Wall Street Journal article illustrated one way in which the former civil rights leader operates. When an acquaintance asked Jordan to help her 24-year-old son find a job, Jordan invited the young man to his office and called Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who called Kurt Campbell, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, who referred the job seeker to a defense company, which hired him. This may be, as the Journal explained, standard operating procedure for Jordan. But it also shows how Washington operates on favor-trading. Now, does the deputy assistant secretary owe the defense firm a favor in return? Does Talbott hope to receive some assistance from Jordan down the line? This is what a fixer like Jordan does, he greases the wheels — not necessarily out of public interest, but for his own purposes.

One of the more stunning aspects of the Lewinsky affair is how gracefully Jordan has managed to skate through it, so far. For weeks after the initial scandal broke, he kept out of the media line of fire, and even during his grand jury appearances he was handled with the utmost gentility. How did he arrange that? “That’s just Vernon,” says a Clinton aide with a chuckle.

That is, Jordan is a favorite son of the Washington establishment, and that includes its media denizens. As the initial revelations poured out and White House correspondents were talking excitedly of a “White House meltdown,” Chip Reid of MSNBC told viewers that he had spent the day canvassing the nation’s capital and that he had found a consensus among the town’s high and mighty: It’s possible that President Clinton would have an affair with an underling and then suborn perjury, but Jordan would never do a thing like that. Not our Vernon, the town’s ultimate gatekeeper.

While Clinton has a well-known distaste for the Washington social
establishment, the president’s aides concede that Jordan has plenty of pull
with him. After all, Clinton asked him to oversee the presidential
transition after his 1992 victory. (And when Jordan was helping to select
administration appointees who would have to deal with tobacco matters, he
was sitting on the board of cigarette manufacturer RJR Nabisco.) But these
aides routinely deny that Jordan does anything so brash as to lobby the
president on behalf of a particular client.

Yet Jordan does exert influence on policy. A year ago, a White House aide
who was handling the administration’s brief on campaign finance reform
informed me that White House staff members were concocting some
hard-hitting initiatives on this front. To truly take on this matter, I
replied, Clinton would have to be willing to alienate corporate
contributors and close friends like — I picked a name out of a fedora –
Vernon Jordan.

“Vernon,” she said with a smile. “Yes.”

“What about him?” I asked.

“He called me,” she said. Now, this aide was no lowly intern, but she was
not one of the heavier weights in the White House. Yet she was receiving a
call from the First Friend, who wanted to talk about policy.

“And?”

“He told me he thought it was not a good idea.”

Not a good idea for the president to push campaign finance reform? “And,”
I asked, “he just assumed that because he’s Vernon Jordan he could block a
presidential initiative in this area?”

“Yes,” she said, with a nervous laugh. But — after a pause — she assured me
that Jordan would not be able to kill the initiative.

Maybe not. But a full-fledged campaign finance reform initiative never
materialized, and though the president said he supported reform, he did very
little to champion the cause in the past year. No arm-twisting, no campaign to pressure members of Congress. And on the day the McCain-Feingold reform bill — a modest measure — met its final death, the president
was out of town.

The lack of White House vigor on the reform front may not be directly attributable to Jordan. Nothing in
Washington ever is. But he made a call, talked to the person in charge,
made his views known. And the companies that sign up with Akin, Gump know
that.

How many similar calls has Jordan made since Clinton took office? We do not
know. How else has he tried to influence administration policy? We do not
know. We know more about what Monica Lewinsky did during high school than
what Vernon Jordan does daily in Washington. But his affairs matter much
more than hers.