It’s raining — in Inslee’s Seattle district, anyway. The challenger, who trailed White in the state’s open primary by 6 percent, had closed the gap a little since then. But he jumped four points in the days after his aggressive ad was broadcast, to move slightly ahead of the incumbent two weeks before Election Day. “Yesterday a woman stopped her car in the middle of one of Seattle’s busiest streets,” a bemused Inslee recounts, “just to tell me, ‘It’s about time somebody had the guts to do this!’”

A month after the punditocracy predicted the Monica Lewinsky scandal could cost Democrats as many as 30 seats in the House of Representatives, some strategists are saying the mess could work in the Democrats’ favor, as scandal-weary voters use the election as a referendum on whether they want to watch congressional impeachment hearings drag on well into 1999. A relative handful of votes either way can matter: In 1996, 11 close elections that gave the Republicans their 11-seat majority were decided by a total of less than 12,000 votes.

The boldest — or most partisan — among campaign strategists are even predicting that a national ground swell of disgust over the protracted impeachment debate could actually help Democrats gain seats. “Democrats should want their election campaigns to engage the impeachment issue,” says a memo to Democrats from Clinton booster James Carville and Democratic pollsters Stan Greenberg and Al Quinlan. “Do not run from it. The impeachment inquiry is an opportunity.”

According to the three strategists, their poll of 800 voters in mid-October yielded good news for Democrats: The base of likely voters in the coming election who are Democrats rose from 31 to 36 percent of the electorate, compared to 31 percent Republicans. And after dropping in polls just after the release of independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s report on the Lewinsky matter, Democrats nationwide have gained four points in the last month. Carville urges Democrats to grab the impeachment issue and ride it to victory.

“These last two weeks are likely to be very different from what we have experienced up until now,” Carville wrote in the memo. “Democrats have been on the defensive … But now is the time to use every free media outlet you have because voters are ready to sit up and take notice. Hit the Republicans hard.”

To some Democrats, the best evidence that Carville and company are right comes from the relative Republican silence on the impeachment issue in the hundreds of congressional races around the country. Just over a month ago, strategists were predicting a blitz of TV ads featuring Clinton’s many televised Lewinskyisms — from denial to admission to semantic hair-splitting in his grand jury testimony. But since then GOP candidates have dropped the issue. The few Republicans who ran anti-Clinton ads quietly pulled them when they yielded no gains.

But just as predictions of an impeachment-inspired Republican landslide proved to be wishful thinking, so might the Democrats’ dreams of an impeachment backlash. Some Democrats and their supporters — including one of Greenberg and Quinlan’s clients — question the idea that running hard on impeachment will help party candidates. The truth is no one understands the inscrutable midterm electorate.

Traditionally, many fewer Americans vote in the elections held in between presidential campaigns — turnout usually drops by half — and those who do tend to be more conservative. While national polls show Democrats leading in the congressional races by several points, the advantage goes to Republicans when the polling universe is narrowed to likely voters.

So far, there’s little hard data to suggest this election will be a bellwether on impeachment. The real story might be that last month’s hand-wringing over the Democrats’ congressional chances, in the wake of the Starr Report revelations, had little basis in fact. There was no difference in Democratic turnout or election support in primaries held before the Starr Report and after according to Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.

And an analysis by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in early September found that Republicans outnumbered Democrats among likely voters in this midterm election by eight points. But the gap was actually smaller than the 10-point difference polls found before the 1994 midterm. (Because Congress is already majority-Republican, where it was majority-Democrat in 1994, an outcome similar to 1994 would merely maintain the status quo, not doom Democrats.)

Pew’s latest poll, released yesterday, says the picture hasn’t changed — yet.

“The supposed backlash against Congress hasn’t made an iota of difference in local races,” says Pew director Andrew Kohut. Republicans still hold a lead among likely voters, and in the 105 races analysts consider “competitive,” the Republicans lead 48 to 44 percent. Even though voter opinion of Congress has “soured,” Kohut says, leading to a decline in support for incumbents to 58 percent of registered voters from 66 percent last January, the percentage of voters who say they’ll use the election to vote against Clinton rose from 16 percent to 23 percent. Meanwhile, only 19 percent say the Starr investigation is very important for the nation and only 3 percent say they want candidates to talk about Clinton during the campaign.

Yet Kohut says the Carville strategy could pay off for Democrats in certain races. “If Democrats can bring it up in the right way, it could be effective. But right now the anger about impeachment is mostly confined to core Democratic constituencies — who may not vote.”

- – - – - – - – - -

The two big questions about the election come down to who will vote, and what will independent voters do. There’s good news for Democrats on both counts.

For two months the common wisdom has been that if the Lewinsky mess inspires the Republican base to surge to the polls, Democrats are doomed. But if Democrats get energized by what Clinton defenders call a Republican coup d’état against a popular president, Republicans are in trouble. Most observers have expected the first scenario.

Two weeks ago, Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib predicted that public opposition to impeachment wouldn’t help Democrats in upcoming elections, because Clinton supporters tended not to vote. Likely voters, Seib observed, were “older, richer, more conservative, more Southern and more Republican than the overall population” — and more likely to support pushing on with the impeachment proceedings. “The opinions of the millions of Americans who have checked out of the electoral process by failing to vote don’t really count for very much,” sniffed Seib.

But the Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday shows that this year, the base of likely voters is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. While in October 1994 — just before the Republican congressional landslide — polls gave Republicans a 40 percent to 30 percent advantage, the Pew poll found Democrats and Republicans each make up 35 percent of the likely electorate this fall.

Other Democratic pollsters are seeing trends similar to those described by Carville and Greenberg. “I think it’s safe to say that Democrats are getting more interested in this election,” says Fred Yang, a pollster with Hart Research in Washington, D.C. “Intensity has risen and the percentage of likely voters who are Democrats has too.”

Maybe most disturbing for Republicans, independent voters — who made up more than a quarter of the midterm electorate in 1994 — “are starting to go the Democrats’ way,” Yang says. The Pew poll confirms this: It found that independent voters are closer to Democrats than Republicans in their opposition to impeachment and in their disapproval of the way Congress has handled the inquiry debate.

But while voters’ impeachment fatigue could help Democrats, some analysts doubt that going aggressively negative against Republicans on the issue is a winning strategy for Democrats. “I really don’t think so,” says Stephanie Cohen, communications director for Emily’s List, which supports women candidates. Cohen says her group’s polling — which, ironically, was conducted by Greenberg and Quinlan — actually shows that women voters, at least, are turned off by outright partisan attacks on Republicans.

“That kind of tone — continuing to raise the saber of impeachment with very partisan attacks — is not what they want,” Cohen says. “Our polling shows women want to know who has solutions: Who will fix the schools? What are their plans to improve health care?”

Pollster Al Quinlan acknowledges there’s reason for Cohen’s concern. “Stephanie is right: Women voters in particular want to hear about issues, not politics,” he says. Quinlan, Carville and Greenberg say the best strategy is combining a critique of the impeachment mess with vocal Democratic stands on key issues like education, health care and Social Security.

“And we wouldn’t advise a candidate to raise impeachment in certain races — pretty much anywhere in the South, for instance, and some places in the Southwest. It’s best seen as a strategy for Democratic challengers. If it’s done well — and it looks like Jay Inslee did it well — you’ll see a jump.”

Impeachment or not, something is stirring the Democratic base. Turnout by women declined by 2 million between the 1992 presidential election and the 1994 midterm race, and more Republican women voted than Democrats, thus erasing the gender gap that had favored Democrats in 1992. But Pew polls show the gender gap is back: Democrats enjoy a 48 to 41 percent edge among women voters.

“Despite what the pundits have been saying — and they’re really a bunch of bed-wetters — this is a very good climate for the Democrats,” insists California Democratic Party consultant Bob Mulholland. “P.T. Barnum said it best: ‘If you want to build a crowd, start a fight.’” California Democrats are devoting $6 million to energizing their base, Mulholland says, targeting districts with lots of minority voters and white liberals with absentee ballot campaigns, a get-out-the-vote drive and “mailers with photos of Ken Starr and Newt Gingrich.”

Nationally, the AFL-CIO is sinking millions into grass-roots voter turnout strategies. The Women’s Vote Project is pledging to bring back the 2 million women who left the rolls in 1994 with an aggressive publicity and voter turnout drive. The national Democratic Party is promising that ads and appearances by Jesse Jackson and Hillary Clinton are planned to boost turnout among women, minorities and liberal loyalists.

Some observers are skeptical that the Democrats really know how to energize their base. “The problem is, they learned some of the wrong lessons from their defeats: They learned to avoid dealing with their base,” says elections analyst Curtis Gans. “After going too far toward identity politics in the ’80s, they developed this studious, poll-driven, middle-class appeal, and in certain ways narrowed their constituency. So I think the Carville strategy is as good a strategy as the Democrats have right now.”

So far, though, the success of Inslee’s aggressive campaign strategy hasn’t yet produced a storm of copycat advertising. No one interviewed knew of another Democratic candidate readying similar ads. Only Ralph Neas, a Democrat who faces a tough battle to unseat moderate Republican Connie Morella of suburban Maryland, has hit the airwaves with an ad attacking his opponent’s impeachment stand, and he ran it before the Inslee results were in.

“Impeachment is not a big issue in this race, ironically,” says Beth Davidson, spokeswoman for Cincinnati Mayor Roxanne Qualls, who is trying to oust Republican incumbent U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot in a closely watched race. “Chabot voted against the budget yesterday, which gives us plenty to work with on an issue that’s important to our constituents.”

But Inslee says his strategy was the right one for his district. Having served in Congress for one term — he was defeated in the Republican 1994 landslide, thanks largely to his vote for an assault-weapons ban — he knows the feel of a winning issue. “This didn’t come out of polling. I didn’t approach this with a lot of campaign sophistication. I’m the one out there listening to people and they’re very angry. So my campaign advisors just asked me to think about it — did I really want to take this on?

“And I told them I did. So we moved ahead together. I knew voters felt strongly about it.” In the Seattle area, at least, the polls are proving him right.

It’s raining — in Inslee’s Seattle district, anyway. The challenger, who trailed White in the state’s open primary by 6 percent, had closed the gap a little since then. But he jumped four points in the days after his aggressive ad was broadcast, to move slightly ahead of the incumbent two weeks before Election Day. “Yesterday a woman stopped her car in the middle of one of Seattle’s busiest streets,” a bemused Inslee recounts, “just to tell me, ‘It’s about time somebody had the guts to do this!’”

A month after the punditocracy predicted the Monica Lewinsky scandal could cost Democrats as many as 30 seats in the House of Representatives, some strategists are saying the mess could work in the Democrats’ favor, as scandal-weary voters use the election as a referendum on whether they want to watch congressional impeachment hearings drag on well into 1999. A relative handful of votes either way can matter: In 1996, 11 close elections that gave the Republicans their 11-seat majority were decided by a total of less than 12,000 votes.

The boldest — or most partisan — among campaign strategists are even predicting that a national ground swell of disgust over the protracted impeachment debate could actually help Democrats gain seats. “Democrats should want their election campaigns to engage the impeachment issue,” says a memo to Democrats from Clinton booster James Carville and Democratic pollsters Stan Greenberg and Al Quinlan. “Do not run from it. The impeachment inquiry is an opportunity.”

According to the three strategists, their poll of 800 voters in mid-October yielded good news for Democrats: The base of likely voters in the coming election who are Democrats rose from 31 to 36 percent of the electorate, compared to 31 percent Republicans. And after dropping in polls just after the release of independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s report on the Lewinsky matter, Democrats nationwide have gained four points in the last month. Carville urges Democrats to grab the impeachment issue and ride it to victory.

“These last two weeks are likely to be very different from what we have experienced up until now,” Carville wrote in the memo. “Democrats have been on the defensive … But now is the time to use every free media outlet you have because voters are ready to sit up and take notice. Hit the Republicans hard.”

To some Democrats, the best evidence that Carville and company are right comes from the relative Republican silence on the impeachment issue in the hundreds of congressional races around the country. Just over a month ago, strategists were predicting a blitz of TV ads featuring Clinton’s many televised Lewinskyisms — from denial to admission to semantic hair-splitting in his grand jury testimony. But since then GOP candidates have dropped the issue. The few Republicans who ran anti-Clinton ads quietly pulled them when they yielded no gains.

But just as predictions of an impeachment-inspired Republican landslide proved to be wishful thinking, so might the Democrats’ dreams of an impeachment backlash. Some Democrats and their supporters — including one of Greenberg and Quinlan’s clients — question the idea that running hard on impeachment will help party candidates. The truth is no one understands the inscrutable midterm electorate.

Traditionally, many fewer Americans vote in the elections held in between presidential campaigns — turnout usually drops by half — and those who do tend to be more conservative. While national polls show Democrats leading in the congressional races by several points, the advantage goes to Republicans when the polling universe is narrowed to likely voters.

So far, there’s little hard data to suggest this election will be a bellwether on impeachment. The real story might be that last month’s hand-wringing over the Democrats’ congressional chances, in the wake of the Starr Report revelations, had little basis in fact. There was no difference in Democratic turnout or election support in primaries held before the Starr Report and after according to Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.

And an analysis by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center in early September found that Republicans outnumbered Democrats among likely voters in this midterm election by eight points. But the gap was actually smaller than the 10-point difference polls found before the 1994 midterm. (Because Congress is already majority-Republican, where it was majority-Democrat in 1994, an outcome similar to 1994 would merely maintain the status quo, not doom Democrats.)

Pew’s latest poll, released yesterday, says the picture hasn’t changed — yet.

“The supposed backlash against Congress hasn’t made an iota of difference in local races,” says Pew director Andrew Kohut. Republicans still hold a lead among likely voters, and in the 105 races analysts consider “competitive,” the Republicans lead 48 to 44 percent. Even though voter opinion of Congress has “soured,” Kohut says, leading to a decline in support for incumbents to 58 percent of registered voters from 66 percent last January, the percentage of voters who say they’ll use the election to vote against Clinton rose from 16 percent to 23 percent. Meanwhile, only 19 percent say the Starr investigation is very important for the nation and only 3 percent say they want candidates to talk about Clinton during the campaign.

Yet Kohut says the Carville strategy could pay off for Democrats in certain races. “If Democrats can bring it up in the right way, it could be effective. But right now the anger about impeachment is mostly confined to core Democratic constituencies — who may not vote.”

The two big questions about the election come down to who will vote, and what will independent voters do. There’s good news for Democrats on both counts.

For two months the common wisdom has been that if the Lewinsky mess inspires the Republican base to surge to the polls, Democrats are doomed. But if Democrats get energized by what Clinton defenders call a Republican coup d’état against a popular president, Republicans are in trouble. Most observers have expected the first scenario.

Two weeks ago, Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib predicted that public opposition to impeachment wouldn’t help Democrats in upcoming elections, because Clinton supporters tended not to vote. Likely voters, Seib observed, were “older, richer, more conservative, more Southern and more Republican than the overall population” — and more likely to support pushing on with the impeachment proceedings. “The opinions of the millions of Americans who have checked out of the electoral process by failing to vote don’t really count for very much,” sniffed Seib.

But the Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday shows that this year, the base of likely voters is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. While in October 1994 — just before the Republican congressional landslide — polls gave Republicans a 40 percent to 30 percent advantage, the Pew poll found Democrats and Republicans each make up 35 percent of the likely electorate this fall.

Other Democratic pollsters are seeing trends similar to those described by Carville and Greenberg. “I think it’s safe to say that Democrats are getting more interested in this election,” says Fred Yang, a pollster with Hart Research in Washington, D.C. “Intensity has risen and the percentage of likely voters who are Democrats has too.”

Maybe most disturbing for Republicans, independent voters — who made up more than a quarter of the midterm electorate in 1994 — “are starting to go the Democrats’ way,” Yang says. The Pew poll confirms this: It found that independent voters are closer to Democrats than Republicans in their opposition to impeachment and in their disapproval of the way Congress has handled the inquiry debate.

But while voters’ impeachment fatigue could help Democrats, some analysts doubt that going aggressively negative against Republicans on the issue is a winning strategy for Democrats. “I really don’t think so,” says Stephanie Cohen, communications director for Emily’s List, which supports women candidates. Cohen says her group’s polling — which, ironically, was conducted by Greenberg and Quinlan — actually shows that women voters, at least, are turned off by outright partisan attacks on Republicans.

“That kind of tone — continuing to raise the saber of impeachment with very partisan attacks — is not what they want,” Cohen says. “Our polling shows women want to know who has solutions: Who will fix the schools? What are their plans to improve health care?”

Pollster Al Quinlan acknowledges there’s reason for Cohen’s concern. “Stephanie is right: Women voters in particular want to hear about issues, not politics,” he says. Quinlan, Carville and Greenberg say the best strategy is combining a critique of the impeachment mess with vocal Democratic stands on key issues like education, health care and Social Security.

“And we wouldn’t advise a candidate to raise impeachment in certain races — pretty much anywhere in the South, for instance, and some places in the Southwest. It’s best seen as a strategy for Democratic challengers. If it’s done well — and it looks like Jay Inslee did it well — you’ll see a jump.”

Impeachment or not, something is stirring the Democratic base. Turnout by women declined by 2 million between the 1992 presidential election and the 1994 midterm race, and more Republican women voted than Democrats, thus erasing the gender gap that had favored Democrats in 1992. But Pew polls show the gender gap is back: Democrats enjoy a 48 to 41 percent edge among women voters.

“Despite what the pundits have been saying — and they’re really a bunch of bed-wetters — this is a very good climate for the Democrats,” insists California Democratic Party consultant Bob Mulholland. “P.T. Barnum said it best: ‘If you want to build a crowd, start a fight.’” California Democrats are devoting $6 million to energizing their base, Mulholland says, targeting districts with lots of minority voters and white liberals with absentee ballot campaigns, a get-out-the-vote drive and “mailers with photos of Ken Starr and Newt Gingrich.”

Nationally, the AFL-CIO is sinking millions into grass-roots voter turnout strategies. The Women’s Vote Project is pledging to bring back the 2 million women who left the rolls in 1994 with an aggressive publicity and voter turnout drive. The national Democratic Party is promising that ads and appearances by Jesse Jackson and Hillary Clinton are planned to boost turnout among women, minorities and liberal loyalists.

Some observers are skeptical that the Democrats really know how to energize their base. “The problem is, they learned some of the wrong lessons from their defeats: They learned to avoid dealing with their base,” says elections analyst Curtis Gans. “After going too far toward identity politics in the ’80s, they developed this studious, poll-driven, middle-class appeal, and in certain ways narrowed their constituency. So I think the Carville strategy is as good a strategy as the Democrats have right now.”

So far, though, the success of Inslee’s aggressive campaign strategy hasn’t yet produced a storm of copycat advertising. No one interviewed knew of another Democratic candidate readying similar ads. Only Ralph Neas, a Democrat who faces a tough battle to unseat moderate Republican Connie Morella of suburban Maryland, has hit the airwaves with an ad attacking his opponent’s impeachment stand, and he ran it before the Inslee results were in.

“Impeachment is not a big issue in this race, ironically,” says Beth Davidson, spokeswoman for Cincinnati Mayor Roxanne Qualls, who is trying to oust Republican incumbent U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot in a closely watched race. “Chabot voted against the budget yesterday, which gives us plenty to work with on an issue that’s important to our constituents.”

But Inslee says his strategy was the right one for his district. Having served in Congress for one term — he was defeated in the Republican 1994 landslide, thanks largely to his vote for an assault-weapons ban — he knows the feel of a winning issue. “This didn’t come out of polling. I didn’t approach this with a lot of campaign sophistication. I’m the one out there listening to people and they’re very angry. So my campaign advisors just asked me to think about it — did I really want to take this on?

“And I told them I did. So we moved ahead together. I knew voters felt strongly about it.” In the Seattle area, at least, the polls are proving him right.

Clinton’s abdication leaves independent counsel Kenneth Starr without prospect of future employment. His appointment at Pepperdine University has been withdrawn, after all, and his old partners at the Kirkland & Ellis law firm are not exactly clamoring for the return of the most unpopular man in America. But the indefatigable Starr sees a continuing mission for a figure of outstanding rectitude such as himself, particularly so long as there are Democrats in high office.

So before the Clintons have finished packing, Starr applies to Attorney General Janet Reno for permission to extend his investigation to President Al Gore. All those dubious campaign contributions demand investigative scrutiny (and didn’t Gore confess that he smoked pot back when he was in college?).

Reno would never allow that, of course. The attorney general denies Starr’s application and tries to fire him as well, but she is overruled on both counts by the panel of three right-wing judges that administers the independent counsel statute. The judges rubber stamp the Gore probe, which quickly results in a report recommending impeachment and immunity for numerous Buddhist nuns. (Getting Clinton took four years and $40 million, but there’s no stopping Starr when he’s on a roll.)

In accordance with his duty, Starr swiftly transmits a packet of scorching material on President Gore to the House of Representatives, specifically to Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde. Newt Gingrich is still hanging on as speaker in the new Congress, although there are recurrent rumblings from the rump faction that has wanted to oust him for almost two years. As we shall see, there’s more than one way for the House to rid itself of its vexing leader.

Being a creative thinker who sees opportunity within crisis, Gingrich pounces to impeach the new president. The nomination of Gore’s vice presidential choice, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is permanently frozen in the Senate, leaving the speaker next in succession should Gore be forced out.
Meanwhile, both Starr and Hyde are quietly reminded that a President Gingrich eventually would need to fill one or two vacancies on the Supreme Court.

The universally respected Hyde opens hearings on the impeachment of Al Gore, preparing a resolution to be sent to the House floor, where the speaker eagerly awaits. (The unthinkable alternative to Gingrich, who would himself be vulnerable to a Starr-style inquisition, is the ancient Senate President Pro Tem Strom Thurmond — No. 4 in constitutional succession — and the independent counsel already has issued a subtle threat to probe Thurmond’s legendary libido, even if that means calling a parade of little old ladies before the grand jury.)

Only a party-line vote now stands between the portly Georgian and his ultimate goal, the White House. The clerk of the House calls the roll, eliciting the first in a series of doleful “Ayes.” Our long national nightmare is ending, while another is about to begin …

Sounds like a hallucination, doesn’t it? Nothing to be afraid of, right? Except that in some respects, the ascendancy of Newt Gingrich may be here already — as we shall see when the struggle over the budget resumes in September.

Yes, the budget — that endless, boring stack of spreadsheets that does nothing but determine our present and future priorities. While the nation remains transfixed by the Days of Our Lives/Law and Order episode unfolding in the White House, the executive and legislative branches have been heading toward another fiscal showdown like the one that shut down government in 1995-96.
Neither the balanced budget nor even projected surpluses have changed the continuing clash over money between Clinton and Gingrich. The president wants to spend significant amounts on child health, public education and national service programs; the speaker would rather spend the same money on capital gains and estate tax cuts that would mostly benefit the rich. The administration’s budget proposals would expand health insurance for children and reserve most of the surplus in the coming years to help underwrite Social Security for the baby boomers. The House budget resolution proposes to shortchange Social Security (while hoping to privatize the system altogether, thus creating a windfall for Wall Street).

The White House is currently threatening to veto nearly all of the appropriations bills that keep the government running because they contain offensive provisions of some kind. Among these are cuts in environmental spending, and even a “gag order” to prevent educational efforts about global warming. The defense appropriations bill would require the president to get congressional authorization before taking military action abroad, presumably precluding the kind of anti-terrorist attack he undertook the other day. And the president has personally promised to veto an omnibus domestic spending bill that would cut hundreds of millions of dollars from child literacy, school reform and Headstart programs.

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.