The sense of letdown that threatened to set in before President Clinton’s inevitable acquittal Friday was already starting to lessen before the vote was even taken. Janet Reno’s long-overdue announcement that the Justice Department was investigating Kenneth Starr for ethics violations had something to do with it. And, though the White House has denied it, so did the press reports that Clinton is targeting the Republican House managers for defeat in the 2000 congressional elections. We know that neither case is going to provide a wholly satisfactory result. Starr won’t wind up in the orange jumpsuit he so richly deserves, and a number of the Republicans of the House Judiciary Committee will still be polluting the country’s political life after the next election. But the danger that was always lurking in the country’s wish to put this whole thing behind it, the danger that the real villains would simply walk away without being named as such, doesn’t seem quite so strong.
The phoniest notes of the last few weeks have been the Capra-esque groaners about how this whole process reaffirms the strength of our system, the functioning of which, we’re told, triumphs over even the most bitter partisanship. In Friday’s New York Times, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe paints a picture of the impeachment trial as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Most of the people I know have felt like they’ve been watching “The Wrong Man,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film (a true story) in which Henry Fonda plays a nightclub musician accused and nearly convicted of a string of hold-ups he didn’t commit. Tribe ends his piece by saying of Clinton’s acquittal, “I believe history is more likely to view it as a verdict that kept the Constitution’s process of impeachment and removal intact so that they might serve their crucial mission if and when we face a genuine threat of tyranny.”
Yes, but as in the Hitchcock film, the more pertinent point is that a trumped-up accusation was able to proceed without any violation of constitutional process. “The Wrong Man” turns on the moment when a juror is so eager to convict that the judge has no choice but to declare a mistrial. Fonda is freed by a fluke: He’s out on bail awaiting a second trial when the real thief is caught. Clinton’s fate turned on the public’s perception of the basic unfairness of the proceedings against him, a perception that a majority of representatives and a not-insignificant number of senators were willing to ignore. The terrifying thing about how close we came to a right-wing nullification of two presidential elections is that it was all done in the guise of democracy by elected officials so bull-headed they called the very name House of Representatives into question.
Still, there are at least two things to celebrate here. One is the apparent self-destruction of the right wing and its willingness to take the entire Republican Party down with it. The other is something that would have seemed unthinkable a year ago when the Monica Lewinsky story broke: the relative sophistication of the public’s insistence that private sexual behavior is not a gauge of how well an elected official does his job.
As always when it comes to America and sexual morality, what’s going on here is complicated. Alongside Clinton’s high approval rating and the majority’s belief that he should remain in office has been an equally high disapproval of his behavior. Those high numbers may be partially due to the impossible ambiguity of the question “Do you approve or disapprove of the president’s behavior?” What behavior is it referring to? The allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice, or Clinton’s dalliance with Lewinsky? And if it’s the latter, just what do people disapprove of, that he cheated on his wife, or that he fooled around with an intern considerably younger than he was?
But I think the real reason for the strength of both Clinton’s approval ratings and the disapproval of his behavior (which I take to mean his sexual behavior) has to do with what some commentators have rightly maintained is the way the public recognizes its own shortcomings in Clinton. There are plenty of people who’ve strayed in their own marriages and know that it’s still possible to love your spouse, who don’t think of themselves as bad people and who believe that whatever happened is their own damn business. But even those people still feel a need to maintain the expected public stance that holds that good people just don’t fool around. It’s not that the public is incapable of both disapproving of Clinton’s behavior and deciding that it doesn’t warrant removal from office. It’s that Americans tend to be more direct than that — if they were truly disgusted at what he did, Clinton would be gone.
What’s being played out here is the classic disjunction between what Americans know about sex and the chaos it wreaks, and what they allow themselves to acknowledge. What was being played out by Dianne Feinstein and the other Democratic senators pushing for censure — even with acquittal an inevitability — is exactly what Phil Gramm characterized it as: covering their asses. While we largely have the prudish zealotry of the Republicans to thank for Clinton’s acquittal (as well as their own hara-kiri), one of the most troubling aspects of this whole process has been how even Democrats have accepted the assumptions of the right about what constitutes morality.
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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.
Those of us who watch the impeachment trials have been shocked — shocked! — by the appearance of our congressional leaders. Have they no pride? No decorum? Have they no mirrors?
I do not refer to the jaunty Gilbert-and-Sullivan-inspired stripes on Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s costume. These stripes are poignant in their innocence. They’re perfect for this sober, solemn, somber game of impeachment. They make a fine foil for those superannuated boy faces screwed up to look all grave while they play Let’s Be Saddened, Let’s Intone Shakespeare Quotes and Let’s Sign Our Names to Some Paper With a Special Pen!
But what, in all that’s true and sacred, could our congresspeople be thinking with those inane hairdos? How are the American people supposed to endure these dishonest congressional coiffures? How can we trust these men and a handful of women to manage our country when even their hair is completely beyond them?
Take, if you dare, Trent Lott. What the hell is happening on the top of our majority leader’s head? Is it a wig? It’s gotta be a wig the way it perches there in its rigid glory, right? If so, it’s a cheap one, and we can congratulate our leader on his thrift. But what if it isn’t? What if it’s real and therefore an actual hairdo choice? Can we trust a man who chooses to look as if he’s wearing a greased cat?
We avert our eyes, but unfortunately they accidentally light on Tom Daschle. Daschle has always been a cute man, an impish man, a man with naturally wavy hair. Yet I would lay heavy odds that Tom now has a big ol’ dye job.
It’s the orange tint that gives it away. Orange on a middle-aged man means he’s been playing unsupervised amongst the Clairol. Reagan and Bush both affected a Raggedy Ann orange, perhaps hoping to look lovable when, in fact, their hair seemed to be spontaneously combusting.
“Ronnie doesn’t die his hair, he’s just prematurely orange,” Gerald Ford once said.
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Actually, Daschle has another problem. His hair is so minimally rusty one might not have suspected dye, except that his eyebrows don’t match. They are oddly pale, grayish. Why has he not noticed this? Why has his staff not told him? Would it kill them to leave him a little note?
It is quite possible that Daschle’s eyebrows have been kidnapped by Sen. Don Nickles, whose eyebrows are downright copper, whereas his hair is a dullish brown that appears to be unattached to the scalp. It is a most startling look.
A charter member of the Lott hair club for men is the sanctimonious-mouthed Bill McCollum, of whom a friend recently said, “I’d like to slap that guy around until his hair cracks into sharp little chunks like Turkish taffy.” And I’d like to watch.
Another Lott devotee is Gordon Smith of Oregon, one of those baby senators who are all excited to be getting on television for no reason — and who really should make a little effort if he wants to be asked back.
Finally, we must pay homage to the 13 red strands on the head of our dear old Strom Thurmond, just because LBJ said, “When he dies they’re going to have to beat his pecker to death with a baseball bat to get the coffin lid down.” (But someone really must talk to Charles Grodin, whose hair color, last I saw it, had faded to a frightening salmon pink.)
And now, advice for our national leaders:
Olympia Snowe? Stop doing it at home, honey, it’s flat and lifeless. You can afford a colorist. Get Dianne Feinstein’s.
Byron Dorgan and Joe Lieberman? Boyfriends, no one in the history of the universe has ever, ever been fooled by a combover.
Kay Bailey Hutchinson with the Darth Vader helmet? Has anyone told you what Aqua-Net does to the ozone layer?
Ed Bryant and all you other dudes who think that a great big pouffy thing on your forehead makes you look Kennedy-esque? You look more like Ted Koppel, who also thinks he looks Kennedy-esque, but who in fact looks like topiary. Also, you might want to check your heads from another angle besides head on, since a bald spot behind that big pouf just compounds this hairdo felony.
Henry Hyde? Do you use a blue rinse, or purple?
I implore all congresspeople to come clean about their dubious hair. How can we ever even begin to believe you if we cannot even believe your follicles?
Somewhere between Christmas Eve and New Year, I managed to spend 96 consecutive hours without uttering the words Lewinsky, impeachment or Starr. It was the first such intermission in 12 months, and as a result, the turn of the year really did seem to offer a new sense of possibility.
Until the last several days, even Washington seemed to briefly share that hope. It appeared that the Senate might tear away the degrading politics of the past year as easily as if Monica Lewinsky were just a pin-up on the 1998 calendar page. Trent Lott, despite his own job as a far-right water-carrier, seemed to have little stomach for a drawn-out impeachment trial. The compromise proposed by Sens. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., offered a face-saving way out, an opportunity for the congressional impeachment faction to take its best shot while sparing the country a long, pointless regurgitation of the Starr Report.
But with the apparent failure of the Lieberman-Gorton compromise, the Senate is now headed for some version of a full trial, with the impeachment faction once again driving the car. And the all-Monica-all-the-time media is full of speculation: How many witnesses? How will Chief Justice William Rehnquist rule? Should the whole deliberation be televised?
Each of these is the wrong question. Even whether the president will be convicted or not may be the wrong question. The only question that counts is simple: Can the trial that opens next week somehow redeem American politics and avenge “the rule of law,” which the right endlessly talks about but has been busily trying to subvert?
This is not an idle question. Trials exist to determine guilt, of course; but they are also morality plays that dramatize society’s deepest commitments and fears. And in recent years, televised trials have assumed ever more importance as the stand-ins for real public debate over significant issues. The Clinton impeachment trial is the endpoint of an arc that began with the O.J. Simpson trial, which became a lens through which to view racial perceptions of the justice system; an arc that has included, along the way, the Oklahoma City bombing trial, the Unabomber, the Louise Woodward “nanny killing” trial. Each touched some broader chord than the simple facts of the horrific offenses involved.
Television may be to blame for our obsession with show trials. But so are a couple of generations of national politicians, including Clinton, who’ve made law-and-order policy and the fast, dramatic conviction of criminal defendants front-and-center in electoral rhetoric. Trials are now the national pastime, and Clinton’s impeachment is the ultimate show trial — certainly the Trial of the Century, assuming it doesn’t spill over into the 21st.
Henry Hyde and his impeachment-managing comrades have accused Democrats of trying to short-circuit the trial by suggesting that senators ditch the whole proceeding after a few days of preliminary argument. But who’s doing the short-circuiting? In any courtroom in the land, “due process” means that a defendant gets to challenge a prosecutor’s indictment before any evidence or witnesses are brought to the table. Every day, for instance, hundreds of cases get tossed out on “summary judgment,” a judge’s decision that an indictment or lawsuit doesn’t qualify for full trial. Summary judgment is an essential check on the power of prosecutors and lawsuits. The impeachment equivalent would be a version of the Gorton-Lieberman compromise, a quick vote to see whether the evidence presented to date merits a trial.
To the impeachment faction, of course, Clinton’s “trial” means only the courtroom show and the predestined hanging afterward: the Salem Solution. But in American law — as opposed, say, to the People’s Republic of China, or Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia — spectacle is trumped by process. Trials have credibility with the public precisely because the punitive powers of judge and jury are constrained by that group of rules and rituals known collectively as “due process.”
Indeed, one of the most disturbing arguments — heard from Democrats as well as Republicans — is that the president should not rest his defense on what Sen. John Breaux, D.-La., called “legalese”: such supposed technicalities as challenging Starr’s motives, or questioning the constitutional probity of Congress’ lame-duck impeachment. This is an extension of one of Starr’s most pernicious charges, that the president obstructed justice by asking courts to review the independent counsel’s subpoenas of White House lawyers and Secret Service.
No more dangerous argument has emerged from the entire Clinton-Starr confrontation: that the mere assertion of legal rights amounts to obstruction of justice. Now the impeachment faction would convict Clinton in the Senate for the high crime of mounting a vigorous defense.
This is no surprise. One of the cornerstones of Reagan-and-after conservatism has been the rhetoric of prosecution, the persistent drumbeat that criminal defendants are let out on “technicalities.” Hyde, Bill McCollum, Phil Gramm and company are pursuing in Clinton’s impeachment their precise image of how trials should be conducted: with as few rights as possible for the accused and no procedural checkpoints along the way. Clinton, too, has played more than a minor role in shredding the rights of criminal defendants, in particular the appeal rights of death-row prisoners. So it’s fitting that now, like Robespierre, he seems trapped by the very culture of prosecution he’s helped nurture.
With the Clinton trial, most Americans hope for some ratification of the calm and sanity that seemed to descend during the holiday interregnum. Which is precisely what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they lodged the power to try impeachments in the Senate, which is more insulated than the House from immediate political pressure.
Though it seems ever less likely, Clinton’s impeachment could still become a showcase for the nation’s best constitutional values, winning credibility through senators’ religious adherence to due process. If not, the Clinton trial will be what the O.J. Simpson trial was for many people: a dispiriting metaphor for the state of the union.
From time to time during the impeachment trial, Salon will publish this impeachment diary by a senior aide to a U.S. senator who must remain anonymous.
Tuesday, Jan. 5
8 a.m.: Talk till you die
My boss gets a call from Sen. X, a well-known windbag who is pretending he has the clout to work a deal. Sen. X expounds on the virtues and history of the Senate, the chamber of honor and caution, aka the “talk till you die and still do nothing” chamber. Everybody knows that two-thirds of the Senate will not vote to remove the president. But in time-honored Senate tradition, we’re going to talk about it until we bore to death every voter in America.
Sen. X, though, holds out some hope that right-thinking men like he and my boss can work out a deal to spare the country death-by-impeachment. Conversations like this are taking place all over the Senate. Sens. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., came up with a workable compromise to shorten a trial to just a few days and then have a preliminary vote to see, even if all the charges were proven, if there were enough votes to remove the president. If not, we’d move to a quick censure deal.
But by early Tuesday it was clear that the Gorton-Lieberman deal would die, leaving the field open for new heroes. Sen. X, like many others, thinks he could be just the man to make a deal. Would we look at a deal? Of course. Senators are always interested in making a deal, especially if they can get something in return for the effort — like a bridge or a new highway project. Don’t laugh; every time there’s a close vote, Clinton’s allies dole out the pork. If this vote ever looks close, the potential for pork is there. But not today.
9:45 a.m.: Goodbye reason and quick justice
We turn on CNN to watch Phil Gramm of Texas put the nail in the coffin of the Gorton-Lieberman deal, which was far too sane and rational for these proceedings. No, Gramm promised, he and others would not allow a truncated trial, nor an early vote to determine whether to proceed with a full trial. Gramm, in the finest Senate tradition, vows to ensure the proceedings will go long enough to let each senator give America the full glory of his thoughts and questions.
11 a.m.: Impartial justice? From whom?
“I solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of President Clinton, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help me God.”
We get the exact language each senator will utter as the Chief Justice swears them in as trial jurors. We laugh about “impartial justice.” Is anyone in Congress impartial? Are they going to lie under oath? And doesn’t the fact that 100 senators take an oath they know to be untrue make them perjurers? Does that mean we’ll have to face 100 more impeachment trials?
The staff spends time deciding which two senators deserve impeachment first — just to shut them up. We immediately resolve to start with Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., and Rick Santorum, R-Penn. C-SPAN, still trying to recover from losing Al D’Amato and Dale Bumpers in one year, might shut down from lack of news if Wellstone and Santorum’s rambling, impassioned speeches suddenly ceased.
1:30 p.m.: We love poll results
I go to another office to hear the results of a poll that told us what swing voters in key states want to see and hear from their elected officials. In essence, someone paid $20,000 to find out that people want us to shut up immediately — which everybody already knew.
But the poll answered such important questions as how many voters want the evidence fully debated, what percentage wants the juicy details and what percentage wants the whole thing to go away now. I’m told that most respondents favor a senator who appears impartial and wants to hear the evidence. A high percentage wants a senator to be a leader in finding a compromise. Most voters want Clinton to face some kind of sanction, but most don’t want him removed. We discuss at great length the public positioning of senators and how it is crucial they appear impartial, serious and steadfastly committed to doing the work of the people. This is a lot of homework for supposed “impartial” jurors who have all probably long ago decided how to vote.
3:30 p.m.: Spin session
Senior staff meet to decide our senator’s strategy. We adopt words like “thoughtful, considerate and determined” to guide our talking points. We strive to show that we take this entire deliberation very seriously, and really, really want to get back to helping average Americans. As for the trial, we decide to “look at the facts and then make a decision.” We discuss the very tiny problem that our senator went all over the place during the House debate telling anyone who’d listen exactly what he thought in advance. We decide not to worry about this, remembering that no one remembers anything, anyway.
5:15 p.m. Press and beers
After ducking press calls, we adjourn for beers, hoping to run into some leadership staff who can tell us what the hell is going on.
Wednesday, Jan. 6
All day: Free food
Feast today, the slaughter starts tomorrow. Today was a day to celebrate the new arrivals and the victorious incumbents. All 33 senators who won elections in November got sworn in by Vice President Al Gore. As he says “congratulations” to each Democrat, his smile reminds them: “You owe me.” And to each Republican, he serves as a reminder that removing the president gives Gore the Oval Office to run from.
The chief justice will swear in the “jurors” Thursday. Trent Lott and Tom Daschle spent today announcing that tomorrow they would announce “the plan.” It looks like nothing will start for real until Monday or Tuesday.
We spend the day surfing the inaugural parties. Doesn’t matter the senator’s political persuasion: The food is all good. At every party someone is hatching a new idea to get us out of this mess. Now, if we could just get the lobbyists to shut up and stop eating all the food their PAC dollars bought.
