To be honest, it was only on further reflection that it occurred to me the new movie “Rushmore” might be called “Young Mr. Clinton,” the bizarro-universe corollary of John Ford’s 1939 “Young Mr. Lincoln.” The biggest fuck-up at Rushmore prep school, the film’s protagonist, Max, is half precocious and half stunted, half triumphant smirk and half self-pitying whine, outrageous liar and compulsive con man, an embodiment of the present moment while stuck in a past of old Donovan songs and ’60s Playboy centerfolds tacked to the wall. Sound familiar? That he hasn’t yet become a complete sexual degenerate is only because he’s 15.
The news media hasn’t made the connection between the president and “Rushmore,” but then the news media is no longer in the business of making connections, assuming it ever was. The very idea of pop culture saying more about the country than the political culture ever did or could doesn’t simply confound the media, it terrifies it: If you were to ask Sam Donaldson who was more important to post-World War II America, Gerald Ford or Chuck Berry, do you have any doubt what he would answer? That any president of the United States, even one as inconsequential as Ford, might be less significant in the vast scheme of things than the man who invented the musical vernacular of the last half-century threatens everything Donaldson represents. Because media culture and political culture breathe the same air and exchange the same conceptual viruses, and anything from outside the bubble in which they exist is alien to their common immune system. It’s just another example of how — like the political culture it pimps for — the Washington opinion-elite that presumes to speak for the country fails so utterly to understand it.
For a year now, the country has been trying to tell the media something about itself. This, it has said again and again, is who we are. Again and again the media has ignored it. Once, 30 or 40 years ago during the McCarthy hearings and civil rights and Vietnam and Watergate, the electronic press in particular was mediator between the political establishment and the rest of us. But somewhere in the unfolding Lewinsky scandal the press finally and completely lost its bearings. Exacerbated by the cable age’s hothouse atmosphere of competition, the media’s natural inclination to patronize the nation turned into barely veiled contempt mixed with full-blown confusion, its every acknowledgment of the public’s “disconnect” from the scandal implicitly suggesting that the great unwashed didn’t get it. It was the same argument Henry Hyde made for the last three months: If, like kindergartners, the distracted masses could just be focused long enough and educated about the nuances of the scandal as Hyde’s more exalted intelligence understood them, then opinion would shift accordingly.
Consciously or unconsciously, the media and politicians have become partners in this collective condescension. This is why the country hates them, and why it’s come to believe there’s no difference between them. With a few smart exceptions like Ronald Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times, throughout the scandal the punditocracy consistently relegated public opinion to libertarian nihilism at best — Dow Jones vs. Paula Jones — until this characterization finally ossified into bargain-basement wisdom. During the Senate trial of the president, nothing was more stupefying than the abject deference paid by reporters to the doddering nonsense of Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., whose delirious hegira across the landscape of impeachment increasingly manifested itself as a kind of constitutional Alzheimer’s: First he hinted broadly he would vote to convict the president of the charges against him; then he moved to dismiss the charges outright; then he told Cokie Roberts there was “no doubt whatsoever” in his mind Clinton committed high crimes and misdemeanors, but a president can’t be removed when the economy is doing well — a rankly cynical rationale for casting an impeachment vote if there ever was one. This from the so-called conscience of the Senate, the former Ku Klux Klan member who carries the Constitution around in his pocket because he supposedly loves it so much.
The public didn’t choose Dow Jones over Paula Jones. The public came to its disquieted conclusions about the Lewinsky scandal because into the Cuisinart of real life it fed its own experiential wisdom along with a gut feeling that the authoritarian instincts of the independent prosecutor more profoundly threatened the country’s values than the president’s depraved appetites. As well, people made a hardheaded assessment of the legal facts as falling short of what would win a conviction in any ordinary court case.
But most remarkable of all was the public’s evolving sense of moral dimension, one that far outpaced what the political culture or media culture or self-designated moral culture pretended to comprehend. People may have agonized over how they were supposed to explain the president’s behavior to their children, but they also ultimately understood that we don’t live in a child’s world guided by a child’s morality or a child’s schematic of right and wrong. We live in a grown-up world in which — William Bennett’s persistent laments and Rep. Tom DeLay’s protest about “relativism” vs. “absolute truth” aside — morality isn’t always absolute any more than it’s always relative. Some things are absolutely evil and some things are relatively wrong. Auschwitz was evil. The president cheating on his wife and diddling an intern half his age was wrong.
This is the sort of thing any reasonably thoughtful 14-year-old knows, so it’s amazing it has to be said at all. Over recent months Bennett and DeLay haven’t enriched moral discourse but cheapened it, devaluing the currency of moral rhetoric with a facile and opportunistic outrage that denies moral distinctions. Similarly, craven Democrats — still traumatized by 25 years of Republicans portraying them as druggies and orgiasts, and thus desperate to prove their rectitude by censuring the president — weren’t satisfied to call Clinton reckless, narcissistic and stupid; he had “dishonored” the presidency, they insisted, to which Republicans logically asked how anyone who had truly dishonored the presidency could be allowed to go on being president. And because from a dramatic standpoint the media has a vested interest in rendering all human endeavor as moral chiaroscuro, because it finds nothing more chilling than the prospect of being out of sync with the Zeitgeist, it joined in the bacchanal of sanctimony only to find itself not just out of sync but on a different planet. Itself traumatized by years of accusations of liberal bias, the press scrambled to position itself on the side of self-righteousness only to find the public wasn’t feeling especially self-righteous at the moment — at which point, like Bennett, Sam Donaldson could only wonder aloud at the ethical bankruptcy of a public that from the outset had a better grasp and perspective of what was involved than he ever did.
In the last week CNN’s Jeff Greenfield, usually one of the rare lights among TV commentators, said one smart thing and one dumb thing. The dumb thing was when he asked a group of four senators on “Larry King Live” whether the president didn’t warrant removal simply for the way he embarrassed the country, simply for the way people would wander by the White House and peer in at the Oval Office and — rather than thinking of it in the hallowed terms of Jefferson and Lincoln and Kennedy — forevermore think of it in terms of Clinton’s blow jobs.
Leave aside for the moment the argument’s obvious wrinkles, like Jefferson’s slave-mistress and Lincoln’s suicidal manic-depression and Kennedy’s blow jobs. It’s not hard to understand why Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, blissfully unburdened by imagination or insight, might be moved by such a question, posed as it was by Greenfield with enough indignant power and eloquence as to nearly obscure the obvious answer: No. We don’t remove presidents for embarrassing us. If and when we do, we’re going to be discarding presidents for the duration, because in the final analysis embarrassment is subjective; Clinton embarrasses you while Ronald Reagan mortified me on a daily basis. We remove presidents because they have committed high crimes against the state and are a danger to the country. In the end it isn’t complicated.
The smart thing that Greenfield said was that — contrary to the conventional wisdom that Clinton might have avoided all this if he had been more forthcoming early on — in fact Clinton has, all in all, handled the whole matter rather shrewdly, the disastrous Aug. 17 post-grand jury speech notwithstanding. Ruthlessly, the president determined from the beginning that if he could just run out the clock it would give the public a chance to absorb the scandal and maybe get him through those early days when condemnation seemed to be reaching critical mass. The hard and discomforting fact of the matter is that one of the baldest and most famous lies of modern American history — “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” — bought him time and probably saved his presidency.
That he survived the lie itself is what’s unique about Clinton and our relationship to him. Where once the press was mediator between the political establishment and the rest of us, as the dust finally settles on the Lewinsky matter what now becomes clear is how Clinton has become mediator between the rest of us and the press. Even in all his sordidness, people still relate to Clinton more than they relate to Sam Donaldson, which for someone in Donaldson’s position is absolutely catastrophic. In an America where a new national survey reveals one out of three people have virtually no sex life whatsoever, Clinton is our national sex surrogate, horndog-in-chief. As with Max in “Rushmore,” there’s something about him more vicarious than we would like, more endearing than may be good for us.
In the same way that Reagan used to make the political left crazy, over the last seven years the political right has become unhinged beyond all reason about Clinton. With the days ticking down and his relevancy waning by the moment, the right still can’t help clinging to the hope that some righteous retribution will yet visit down on him an “acid rain” of public fury, as George Will put it so yearningly a week or two ago, deluging the president now that the struggle over impeachment is concluded and the question of his survival in office is safely resolved. In one of those periodically idiotic pronouncements by which she convinces impressionable people she’s an intellectual, Peggy Noonan wrote with great satisfaction six months ago in Time that the public had finally come to see Clinton for the horrid person he is. Whereas people used to say that Warren Harding wasn’t really bad, just a slob, Noonan explained, in Clinton’s case they have come to know he’s not just a slob, he’s bad.
Dear editors at Time. For a 10th of whatever you’re paying Noonan I’ll be happy to write this kind of horseshit for you; please contact me through Salon. People have concluded nothing of the sort about Clinton. They have, in fact, concluded exactly the opposite: In this decade of polls there’s been none more telling than one taken by the Washington Post during the campaign of 1996, when a large majority of Americans confirmed they considered Republican nominee Bob Dole to be the man of higher moral character, and a larger majority said they believed Clinton cared about their problems more than Dole did, and the largest majority of all — three to one, roughly corresponding with the president’s current job rating — said that, given the choice, they preferred the empath to the saint. For all his phoniness and adolescent behavior and all-consuming self-involvement, Americans believe that Clinton is still the slob trying to get them better health care while all those fine upstanding Republican paragons are looking out for the tobacco companies and every toddler’s right to pack his own assault weapon. In the end, this isn’t complicated either. Closer to Chuck Berry than Gerald Ford, Clinton is a president of and for “Rushmore” — the movie, of course, not the mountain.
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.
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.
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.
Over the weekend and all through Monday, the presidential impeachment trial rocked and sloshed toward some undetermined but increasingly inevitable showdown. The one thing everyone agreed on was that the weekend did not go well for the Republicans. Saturday degenerated into squabbling reminiscent of the House proceedings in December, and the return of Monica Lewinsky to the capital presaged still more of the confusion and ugliness that has made the public increasingly insistent that the trial be brought somehow, some way, to an end.
By Monday afternoon the progress of events pointed in two contradictory directions. On the one hand, there was increasing talk about different witnesses the House might want to call, and 10 Senate Republicans sent a list of 10 new questions to the president. But behind the scenes, Republicans seemed increasingly anxious for a deal. Senate sources told Salon late Monday that even a majority of the Republican caucus is now, privately, looking for a way to avoid witnesses. The only question is how a deal will be fashioned and which Republicans will provide the crucial votes to make it stick.
The trial proceedings livened up measurably Friday when scripted presentations gave way to questions from the senators. The new phase actually brought an air of uncertainty to what might happen. At one point House manager Asa Hutchinson leapt to his feet to object to a question from Sen. Barbara Boxer. Every one in the chamber broke into laughter when Chief Justice William Rehnquist, clearly caught off-guard, looked around for a moment and then asked if a manager was even allowed to object to a question in the first place.
You had to feel sorry, though, for Ed Bryant, the first House manager to speak on Friday. Ever since the White House’s strong finish the day before, the managers had been smarting out loud about how unfair it was that they had no chance to rebut the White House case. So the first question of the day, from the Republicans, simply asked the House managers whether there was anything in the White House presentation that they would like to rebut — obviously coordinated by House and Senate Republicans. But just before the question was asked, Rehnquist announced that he would limit answers to five minutes (a limit he rarely enforced). Bryant clearly thought he was going to have a half-hour or so to rail against the president’s case. He ended up racing off an incoherent speech that was probably a shambles of the presentation he meant to give.
But the real drama — and the real blow to the House managers — came a few minutes after 3 p.m. on Friday. A staffer came walking through the press gallery handing out photocopies of a press release from Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and warned us not to rush out of the gallery as soon as we read it. This got a chuckle — such press releases rarely merit reading, let alone reporting — but it turned out to be a big deal. Byrd was announcing that he’d be voting to dismiss the charges against the president. Soon the same press release was making its way around the Senate floor.
Byrd has been the most overwatched Senator in the entire impeachment trial. Earlier in the month, he had pundits swooning when he condemned the president’s post-impeachment “rally” as an example of “shameless arrogance.” But Byrd is important because everyone has such an outsized impression of him. And he is known to hold the president, personally, in deep disdain. He had conspicuously held open the possibility that he could be persuaded to vote to convict Clinton. Every possible scenario for the president’s conviction required that Byrd vote to convict, and bring along a dozen of his Democratic brethren by sheer dint of his leadership. When Byrd announced he’d vote to dismiss the charges, it meant that not one Democrat would break ranks; and the Republicans knew it.
Byrd’s announcement left the managers, and a lot of Republican senators, really pissed off. I saw Rep. James Rogan coming down one of the stairwells with a gaggle of reporters, griping about Byrd and asking why he couldn’t have waited at least until the day’s presentations were over. Clearly, Byrd’s announcement crystallized the steady erosion of support for a full-length Senate trial.
But it only confirmed a more pervasive shift in the mood of the proceedings: They had become a distinct embarrassment to the Senate, especially to Republicans. Later that evening one Republican insider told me how a number of the marquee “moderate Republicans” from last month’s House impeachment fight had called him and told him they never would have voted to impeach if they had known it would come to this. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, was proposing that the trial merely be adjourned with the Senate voting to “acknowledge” the House’s vote to impeach the president. By the evening, it seemed clear that the only question left wasn’t whether the trial would end, but how it could be ended with everyone allowed to save face.
But the House managers came back on Saturday with a bold new sortie: They had gotten independent counsel Kenneth Starr to invoke her immunity agreement in order to compel Monica Lewinsky to be interviewed by them. (More than one pundit called it a Hail Mary pass.) In private, of course, Democrats concede that they’re quick to depict Republican moves as partisan or shady. But the attempt to bring in Starr to lean on Lewinsky, just as the possibility of witnesses seemed to be fading, caused genuine surprise and even some real outrage on the part of Senate Democrats. Senators who had kept their comments measured and cool let go with words reminiscent of last year’s fight in the House.
On Saturday, Tom Daschle told Salon, “They don’t get it. They can’t help themselves. They have so much venomous hatred towards the president that they’re on this path of self-destruction that will lead them ultimately, I think, to an extraordinary demise.” Daschle’s comments echo a frustration that is heard often on the Democratic side of the aisle. With polls showing the Republicans taking a terrible beating for prolonging the impeachment trial, Democrats are thinking to themselves: How long and how hard do we have to beg them not to adopt a course that will do them immense political damage?
Of course, some Senate Republicans are looking for a way out. Sen. Trent Lott had floated a proposal to skip over the divisive motions to dismiss and to call witnesses, in order to cut straight to a vote on the two articles of impeachment, but he was attacked by his own caucus. On Monday Lott decided to take a different tack, joining with nine other Republican senators to send Clinton 10 questions about the matters at hand, but no one was expecting the president to reply.
Lott also made it clear that the Republicans had the votes to defeat the Byrd motion to dismiss, and that they intended to do so. “We have the votes, I believe, not to dismiss it at this point,” Lott told the Associated Press Monday. “I think that is a short-circuiting of the process that would not be fair. The American people would not agree with that.” (Actually, given the state of the public opinion polls, if the Democrats could get Lott to say that under oath, they could probably get him for perjury.)
By Monday morning, it was clear that efforts to reach a compromise that would let the Senate forego both a vote on dismissal and on witnesses had failed. The Senate took up Byrd’s resolution to dismiss the charges against the president and bring the trial to a halt. White House lawyers and House managers made their respective cases for and against the resolution; but even while they were doing so, attention was shifting toward the upcoming vote on whether to depose witnesses — the decision that is quickly shaping up to be the decisive vote of the trial. Over the weekend, four to six Senate Republicans indicated they would vote against calling witnesses; Democrats only need a half-dozen defections to put that issue behind them.
Monday ended with a vote, not on the resolution to dismiss, but on whether to set aside the Senate impeachment rules dictating that deliberations be held in closed sessions. After this resolution went down, 57-43, the Senate reconvened in executive session to debate Byrd’s motion to dismiss the charges.
The behind-closed-doors discussion was appropriate, symbolically at least, because that’s where all meaningful discussions about how to end the trial are now taking place. There is still a possibility that the trial could conclude by the week’s end. But this scandal has always moved by its own distinct logic. As the pressures inside the Republican camp grow more intense, expect a long week of confusing, erratic decisions on both sides of the aisle, with more plot twists to come.
