The Democrats have surely paid a price for the president’s bad conduct. But if the results on Election Day are not so ruinous for them — if in fact the Republicans gain only a few seats, or actually lose a few — then who will take Clinton’s place as the national goat? Nobody has said so yet, but the correct answer is House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Already, the same right-wing extremists in the Republican caucus who tried to depose Gingrich in 1997 are laying blame on him for a disappointing election result. They attacked him furiously over the recent budget deal because its extra spending was seen as a victory for Clinton, the mortally wounded president. They were even more incensed that the budget included no tax cut for their wealthiest constituents.

Then word leaked out on Capitol Hill that a final $10 million anti-Clinton advertising blitz by the GOP had been directed by Gingrich himself. The speaker was widely quoted last April vowing, “I will never again, as long as I am Speaker, make a speech without commenting on this topic,” meaning the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. So nobody believed the denial from Republican headquarters about Gingrich’s involvement in the targeted scandal commercials. And almost everybody regards the Clinton-bashing ads as a stupid error, drawing voter attention to the Republicans’ unpopular impeachment obsession. The notion that those ads could be stealthily targeted to specific districts without drawing news coverage from a scandal-obsessed media was probably the dumbest assumption of all.

What would constitute a defeat for the Republicans in this election? The conventional wisdom suggests that the party in the White House always loses some seats in a midterm election. But how many? Amnesia afflicts the punditry on that question, too. Since World War II, the presidential party has lost an average of 27 seats in every midterm election. But Clinton is in his second term, a different situation altogether. This year will mark only the sixth time since the Civil War that a two-term president has faced a midterm electoral verdict in his sixth year. The average loss for the president’s party in those elections has been a whopping 48 seats. The high in this century was set under Franklin Roosevelt in 1938, when the Democrats lost 71 seats, while the low was set under Ronald Reagan in 1986, when the Republicans lost only five.

“I’ve been active in politics for most of my adult life and I know that in 1986 we tied for the best record in the second term [of a two-term president's tenure] … So the Democrats would have to match the all-time best to lose five or six, and I don’t think they [can] do that,” said Gingrich last July.

Still, as far as predictions are concerned, the speaker wisely has covered his butt. Both historian and political scientist, he knows how to play the expectations game. The week before the Lewinsky scandal broke, he told his fellow Republicans that he expected an electoral gain of “between 15 and 40 seats,” a wide enough range to seem safe at the time. His deputy, John Linder, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, has been equally cautious, guessing that the party would gain a minimum of 13 seats and perhaps as many as 20. By Oct. 22, Gingrich still said he believed that the Republicans could increase their majority by up to 40 seats, although he had revised his downside prediction to “about plus-10.” And on the eve of the election, Linder told CBS that he expected to gain between 10 and 15 seats, adding, “I never did believe that it was a referendum on Bill Clinton.”

Perhaps not, although the fortunes of Linder’s party seem to have declined most steeply since the House impeachment vote. But if the election doesn’t represent a popular verdict on Clinton, then it could be seen as a condemnation of Gingrich — the widely disliked villain of the Democratic campaign — and his four years in control of Congress.

Covering my own behind requires noting that the pre-election polls may be wrong. With a sufficiently low turnout, the Democrats could still lose badly.

But should the Republicans gain fewer than 10 house seats on Nov. 3, the speaker of the House would be well advised to watch his backside. His loyal friends Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, along with Louisiana Rep. Bob Livingston, have begun to line up votes to succeed him. The House backbenchers who tried to bump Gingrich off a year ago last July never really sheathed their knives.

Instead of Clinton, it may be Gingrich who is urged to resign and get out of town to save his party and himself. And when the new Congress takes office in January, the summer coup of 1997 just may be replayed as the winter putsch of 1999.

But those sentences were actually declaimed in 1951 by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who claimed (falsely, as it turned out) to possess proof of widespread Communist subversion in the State Department. McCarthy’s Cold War “great conspiracy” speech stands as the high-water mark of an outburst of national insanity that scarred the political landscape for years.

President Clinton, heaven knows, is no Red Scare blacklist victim; but the unremitting moral zeal on display in the president’s broadcast grand jury interrogation, the preposterous logic of Kenneth Starr’s “Referral to the United States House of Representatives” and the stampeding, irrational emotions that now grip Washington bear alarming comparison to the nation’s cyclical witch hunts and outbreaks of paranoid persecution.

It’s no exaggeration to say that normal, rational political calculus and process of law has utterly broken down. Consider: The Gingrich majority in Congress, which stands to gain nothing from disposing of a weakened President Clinton, seems nonetheless hell-bent on impeachment hearings, ignoring pleas for sanity from distinguished Republican lawyers like Iran-contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh and former Nixon Attorney General Elliot Richardson.

Monday, in defiance of the most minimal standards of responsible inquiry and due process, the House Judiciary Committee published reams of raw, uncorroborated grand jury records and investigative files. (Everyone in Washington seems to have forgotten that in 1991, when a single raw FBI report on Clarence Thomas bearing the name of Anita Hill found its way to the press, those same congressional Republicans went on an enraged leak-hunt.)

House Judiciary Chairman Hyde, who a few weeks ago was still discussing the very high standard of wrongdoing needed for impeachment, now leads the impeachment-hearing juggernaut; Gingrich and DeLay threaten Salon and other publications; while honorable Republican moderates like campaign finance reformer Christopher Shays stand silent.

At the root of all this is the Starr team’s unshakable conviction — evident both in the impeachment report and the interrogation of President Clinton — that while conventional evidence for obstruction of justice by President Clinton doesn’t actually exist, it must be so, for only a deliberate, organized effort by the president could explain how Clinton and Monica Lewinsky both decided to lie in their Paula Jones depositions last year.

As a matter of law, this argument doesn’t make much sense. Banished for all time is Starr’s image as a scholarly, careful, precedent-honoring conservative jurist, respected even by his philosophical adversaries. The Judge Starr of the impeachment report embraces unprecedented legal arguments in unashamed advocacy of presidential impeachment, supported by a wealth of sexual detail and balletic leaps in logic.

Media coverage has focused on Lewinsky’s explicit descriptions of her sexual encounters with the president, and on Clinton’s resistance to taking his testimony down that road. But it is the 11 “possible grounds for impeachment” with which Starr closes his brief that most reveal the independent counsel’s mind-set. Starr claims that Clinton perjured himself in that grand jury testimony, which Republican leaders have seized on as a far more serious criminal charge than misleading or evasive testimony in the dismissed Jones civil suit.

Yet the only “evidence” of grand jury perjury offered by Starr is the contradiction between two lovers’ descriptions of their encounters: Clinton, in the testimony broadcast Monday, maintains he didn’t touch Lewinsky’s breasts “with an intent to arouse,” while she says he did. Starr’s report says it “strains credulity” to think that the president would have settled for simply being serviced by his lover — but somehow the strained Victorian credulity of Judge Starr hardly seems secure evidence of perjury.

Starr’s report calls it “obstruction of justice” when the president challenged his grand jury subpoenas in court, and when secret service agents (backed up by former President George Bush, among others) sought exemption from testifying. And in the interrogation of Clinton, Starr prosecutor Robert Bittman suggested it amounted to obstruction of justice when the president answered only the questions put to him by Jones’ lawyers rather than offering his antagonists additional information. By making impeachable offenses out of legal appeals or careful responses to a lawyer’s queries, Starr proposes nothing less than criminalizing the most ordinary legal protections.

That prolix and dangerous interpretation of the law links Starr directly to the anti-Communist witch hunters of the McCarthy era, who in similar fashion criminalized the Fifth Amendment by turning witnesses’ invocation of the constitutional right to silence into admission of subversion. Indeed, the wild events of the past week only make sense if you consider the Starr report not as law but as part of the particular American tradition of conspiracy-obsessed literature devoted to threats to the political and moral order, from the great crisis of 1798 — when Federalists, convinced that opposition Jeffersonians were conspiring with French and Irish revolutionaries to undermine the new republic, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts and arrested dissenting newspaper editors — through the McCarthy era.

To Starr’s cultlike legal team and Jones’ religious-right lawyers at the Rutherford Institute, Clinton epitomizes a 1960s-bred moral relativism that is the real “impeachable offense,” a sort of moral subversion that fits within the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” clause. (Starr obliquely addressed this theme even while conducting his investigation, in one speech bemoaning the decline of “civility” and morals, in another in May defining “the good lawyer, the moral lawyer” — with the clear implication that a certain law-professor-turned-president is neither.)

While Clinton’s personal
morality is unlikely to win many friends on any part of the political
spectrum, it’s the far right alone that since the 1992 election has
been unceasingly obsessed with the Clinton family’s sexual politics as a
literal danger to the fabric of the country: Clinton “turned the White
House into a playpen of sexual freedom,” Dick Armey declared to the Christian
Coalition’s convention last week. This is an obsession rooted not in Clinton’s relentless dogging around but in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s
feminism, in both Clintons’ support for abortion rights, in the early
presence of gay rights in the Clinton platform. It is sexual politics, not
sex, that lies behind the prosecution of President Clinton. This is why the
right sees no contradiction in attacking Clinton’s morals (Clinton “doesn’t
deserve forgiveness,” Pat Robertson said last week) while embracing
adulterers Henry Hyde, Helen Chenoweth and Dan Burton.

The various elements of Starr’s report that have left experienced lawyers
scratching their heads — the seemingly gratuitous fixation on sexual
narrative, the leaps in logic amid an overwhelming mass of obsessive detail
– are familiar to American historians from bestselling anti-Catholic
tracts of the early 19th century, from the Victorian-era anti-smut
campaigns of Anthony Comstock (who perceived a direct link between
pornography, contraception and political corruption) and from several waves
of red scares.

It’s particularly rewarding to read Starr’s report alongside
an essay written in 1963 by the great American historian Richard
Hofstadter. Hofstadter set out to define once and for all what he called
in the essay’s title “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Hofstadter’s take on
the quintessential witch-hunting “paranoid spokesman” immediately conjures
Starr’s pietistic invocation of “truth” and his relentless inquisition:
“He is always manning the barricades of civilization. Since what is at
stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the
quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight
things out to the finish.”

The nemesis envisioned by Hofstadter’s
archetypal witch-hunter bears a striking resemblance to the Clinton of
Starr’s “referral”: “The enemy is clearly delineated: He is the perfect
model of malice, a kind of amoral superman, sinister, ubiquitous, powerful,
cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. The sexual freedom often attributed to him,
his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective
techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style
an opportunity to project and freely express unacceptable aspects of their
own minds.”

Over the last few weeks Washington wags have pointed out that the very
social conservatives who promulgated the Communications Decency Act rushed
to publish Starr’s sex-drenched report on the Internet. All this seeming
hypocrisy — even the possible collusion between Jones’ lawyers and
Starr’s conspiracy-hunting prosecution team — would have made perfect
sense to Hofstadter: “A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is
imitation of the enemy … The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point
of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and equally
elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and
quasi-secret operation.”

Or as another historian, David Brion Davis of
Yale University, wrote of 19th century nativists, “By censuring the
subversive for alleged licentiousness, he engaged in sexual fantasies.”
(Years ago, a friend of mine joined a marginal quasi-Marxist political
sect. Members stayed up all night copying and re-copying documents, telling
and re-telling their leader’s utterly fictitious autobiography until they
became convinced that they were the vanguard in an imminent revolution. From a certain perspective, Starr and his legal team — in their years of
isolated work, their shared commitment to a fairly extreme model of social
conservatism, their telling and re-telling of Clinton’s sins until the
conspiracy seems self-evident to them — may have come to resemble such a
self-ratifying secret society.)

All this would amount to idle speculation about Starr’s
character except for how — following the classic pattern — his bizarre
report has collided with election-year opportunism by less fanatical
Republicans. While survey after survey shows the public suspicious of Starr
and anxious to lay the Lewinsky scandal to rest, the media continues its
all-Monica-all-the-time obsession, and Democrats, ignoring their own
pollsters, retreat into family-values defensiveness. The very language of
law and politics has overnight been distorted and debased for partisan and
paranoid ends, beginning with the Starr report’s loose construction of
perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power and extending through
the overheated language that has now overtaken Congress. The president,
like so-called unfriendly witnesses called before the House Un-American
Activities Committee in the McCarthy era, is subjected to a degradation
ritual that will end only when Clinton acquiesces to an acceptable
confessional script.

Of course Clinton, unlike those blacklist victims, holds all the resources
of the presidency, and is no selfless social reformer. In both presidency
and personal life, he’s a putz. And unlike McCarthyism — which spread
irrational fear throughout the country and cost thousands of teachers,
actors, defense workers and professors their jobs — this remains a crisis
of the elite, pitting well-funded conservatives against a popular president
in the high-wire arena of the electronic media.

But it remains a dangerous moment. In the short run, Starr and Capitol Hill
Republicans seem intent on pursuing a legal putsch, forcing
forward impeachment even though in poll after poll they enjoy the support
of no more than a third of citizens. But the longer-term fallout from the
precedents being set this week — the irresponsible and
partisan release of grand jury evidence, the very notion of FBI
investigation of political reporting, the redefinition of high crimes and
misdemeanors, the criminalization of the president’s legal appeals — may
be far worse.

The past week — beginning with the Starr report and
extending through Friday’s House Judiciary Committee vote to release
Starr’s grand jury records — represents our generation’s triumph of the
paranoid style. Historically, it is just such moments — the intersection
of a conspiracy-obsessed personality like Kenneth Starr’s with a divided
and opportunistic political establishment — that have proven most
destructive to American civil liberties and democratic life.

“These intimidation efforts amount to a direct assault on the United States House of Representatives,” House Majority Whip Tom DeLay told reporters as he released a letter asking the FBI to investigate allegations that the White House is orchestrating a campaign to intimidate congressmen.

Late Thursday the FBI said it would look into the matter and promised “appropriate steps will be taken to determine if a violation of federal law has occurred.”

Meanwhile, Salon came under a withering assault from journalists who argued that the story was not worthy of publication.

“In Washington establishment journalism, at least, there was widespread revulsion at the Salon story within an hour of its appearance,” wrote National Journal media critic William Powers in an article for publication Friday. Another journalist called Salon’s publication of the Hyde story “despicable” and “slimy.”

Salon’s story, written by editor David Talbot, described Hyde’s five-year affair with a woman in Illinois while they were both married. The article included quotes from the woman’s then-husband and a statement from Hyde, 74, acknowledging the affair and attributing it to “my youthful indiscretions.”

“The only purpose for this being dredged up now is an obvious attempt to intimidate me and it won’t work,” said Hyde, one of the more respected members of Congress, who is essentially in charge of the impending impeachment hearings against Clinton. The day Salon published its story, Hyde was holding meetings to decide whether to release Clinton’s videotaped grand jury testimony under questioning from Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.

“Isn’t the timing well-planned,” DeLay said Thursday.

In an editorial accompanying the article, Salon’s editors argued that Starr’s investigation of Clinton’s personal life made dalliances of congressmen such as Hyde fair game. Republicans and Democrats took to the House floor shortly after the House came into session to denounce the story and its alleged White House connection.

“Let’s tell it like it is,” railed Rep. James Traficant, a Democrat from Ohio. “The same White House that called Monica Lewinsky a liar is on the attack. Who else is on the list? Are you on the list? Am I on the list?”

Threatening a backlash against the White House, Traficant said: “The spin to win could provoke the mood to remove.”

The White House claimed it had no role in prompting the Hyde story, and press secretary Mike McCurry, deputy chief of staff John Podesta and chief of staff Erskine Bowles issued a number of denials, saying the White House “would not tolerate conduct like that.”

The report on Hyde’s affair was the third exposi of a Republican in the past few weeks. Indiana Republican Dan Burton, chairman of a committee investigating campaign fund-raising tactics by the White House, held a press conference admitting a dalliance, and Idaho arch conservative Helen Chenoweth followed shortly after.

Moving to stem the disclosures, the chairmen of Democratic and Republican fund-raising committees threatened to withhold funds from any congressman who trafficked in allegations of private sexual conduct. Rep. Martin Frost, a Texas Democrat who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said he was “appalled” by the Hyde story.

Many mainstream journalists were appalled that Salon published the story. After Talbot defended his story on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” George Stephanopolous said, “He’s saying that he can publish something that happened 30 years ago because it’s all of a sudden relevant. I don’t know that Henry Hyde went to a grand jury and was accused of not telling the truth. This did not happen in office. This is the kind of bottom feeding that’s unbelievable.”

National Journal’s Powers wrote that Salon “has carried a great many buckets of water for the White House in the past seven months,” and added: “The rules — the unspoken code by which political journalists used to decide which secrets in a politician’s private life are germane to his public life — died this week.”