Princeton historian Sean Wilentz left Washington after testifying against impeachment — unavailingly — before the House Judiciary Committee last week, convinced something more had to be done. And within 72 hours, there he was, onstage at New York University Law School’s Tishman Auditorium, with Toni Morrison, E.L. Doctorow, Jessye Norman, Elie Wiesel, Mary Gordon, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and Alec Baldwin, telling some 800 people present that something very important was at stake for the nation in President Clinton’s fight for political life.
Wilentz, red-haired and equivalently insouciant, won a slap from the New York Times for warning pro-impeachment Congress members, “History will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness.” But a few days later the New York Times was publicizing the NYU event he thought up with a restive friend, New York writer Paul Berman, who talked to another restive friend, New Yorker film critic David Denby. Then NYU law professor Stephen Holmes was enlisted, and their phones started buzzing over the weekend, and electronic circuits got humming. And the next thing anyone knew, all the seats of the law school auditorium were filled Monday night at 7:30, and so was a spillover room of equal size equipped with two TV monitors, and the satellite uplinks were posted on the street outside, and the doors of the law school had to close to latecomers.
The crowd was mannerly, groomed, heavily white, middle class and cross-generational, though skewing toward the middle-aged. Some were in suits, some in white collars, hardly any in jeans or with metal piercings evident. Undergraduates were few. This was 1998, not 1968, and not a few in the audience knew the difference viscerally. For some moments throughout the evening, much of the crowd was combative and, at least in undercurrents, celebratory, too. “Are we glad we’re here, or what?” asked Gloria Steinem. The sense of emergency was palpable. So was the sense of relief, that at long last like-minded people were rallying.
At a time when national moralism has come off the leash, cautions in biblical cadences were welcome. Wiesel, an infrequent visitor to public displays of indignation on American national themes, uttered a line many protesters took to heart: “Who shall judge the judges?” Doctorow distinguished between Reagan lies and Clinton lies, proposing that “perhaps the problem with President Clinton’s lies is that they lacked grandeur … Speak of perjury, if you will, but to me the whole thing smells of entrapment. The impeachment drive” — Doctorow shifted upward the metaphorical gears — had “all the legitimacy of a coup d’itat.”
“Who started this coup d’itat?” asked Rep. Nadler a few minutes later. “Who paid for it?” (Considerable applause.) “What was the role of the Arkansas Project, paid for by Richard Mellon Scaife?” Sen. Torricelli: “I will never vote to convict this man [Clinton]. Never. Never. Never. Mr. President, I ask you this. Do not resign!” Huge applause.
Steinem characterized Clinton as “the first president elected by woman voters” and defended feminists against the hypocrisy charge in the Paula Jones case, noting that “Paula Jones refused to see Patricia Ireland, and not the other way around,” and calling for “an end of the humiliation of Clinton but also of Monica.”
Alec Baldwin represented the Hamptons side of the president’s base with a pleasingly unpolished talk that culminated in a crack at “the sociopaths that run the Republican Party.” Kennedy Schlossberg, a surprise guest, read her speech gamely and was moving by virtue of her being there. Philosopher Thomas Nagel, author of a brilliant piece in a recent Times Literary Supplement, repeated his argument that there is no civilization without privacy, including the freedom to dissemble.
Novelist Mary Gordon likened Clinton to the hapless Billy Budd and the Republicans to phobics (a nice touch, speaking of those who affect opposition to the culture of victimhood), and struck a nerve with Yeats’ frequently quoted but too infrequently felt declaration, written around the time of Henry Hyde’s birth: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” The number of speakers expanded past elasticity, but there remained for two hours, in this crowd, a good-humored willingness to give each speaker the benefit of the doubt. They had, after all, taken the platform. At last.
- – - – - – - – - -
A certain exultance was pardonable, though sobriety quickly took over as the crowd disbanded. This was probably the fastest-organized rally since the Cambodia and Laos invasions of 1970-71. It was also the slowest in coming. Which raises the question: Why the months of public inertia? Why have polls been permitted to stand in for political action? Why the long-running inactivity of the activists? These are questions to absorb the attention of what is laughably called the left during the long nights to come. Among the thoughts in circulation were these:
Disbelief triumphed, and triumphed, and triumphed again. First came months of Lewinsky drip. Yes, the right rode high, unhinged as they were. But public opinion remained staunchly unaffected by months upon months of leaks, barking heads, Starr chamber sessions, exercises in televisual humiliation and, lately, the injudicious theater of idiocy orchestrated by the House Judiciary Committee. So the coup seemed to have failed, right? So said the off-year elections, right? Newt was disgraced, right? Who would have thought the Grand Old Party would have so much blood in’t? Who thought they could keep their Frankenstein monster humming after the repudiation of Nov. 3?
Even the White House was not sure they would. The press treated the turn against the Republicans as a victory for the Democrats and for Clinton, little noting that in a nation with 36 percent turnout, Congress has cut loose from the popular will as surely as the space shuttle pulls away from the gravity of Earth. Rep. Nadler didn’t anticipate things coming to this pass. He told me this was the first protest event he’d been invited to. “I don’t think anyone thought that impeachment was really going to happen,” said Jill Steinberg, an NYU graduate student in media ecology.
But more deeply, Clinton had long estranged the activist networks that call themselves progressive. They were disaffected from him, or preoccupied with their issues — which came to the same thing — and barely if at all impressed by him in the first place. Just as the Republicans hated Clinton for, among other things, pirating part of their program, so did Democrats of the left hate him for NAFTA and for welfare, or for Iraqi sanctions, or the pharmaceutical raid in Khartoum, or all of the above. They had independently arrived at the Republican line that Clinton is only incidentally a twice-elected president lowly accused of high crimes.
The absolutists of the left have no dog in this fight. Not for them such bourgeois questions as that of constitutional justice. Not for them such tawdry questions as whether the poor would be better off if Clinton were deposed. They sneer at those reformist words “better off.” They can live with the likes of Henry Hyde and Bob Barr, revealing the true (white, male) face of imperialism.
Even activist Democrats have been late to rouse themselves. Debra Cooper, executive vice president of the Upper West Side Ansonia Independent Democrats, who was leafletting the NYU rally with phone and fax numbers of coy Republicans, told me that at this late date, the state Democratic Party still hasn’t been heard from. Parties don’t dirty their hands except with money, these days.
And then, what of the uses, and seductions, of electronic politicking? An old friend of mine, with whom I marched on many a picket line in a bygone decade, whose name begins with “S,” wrote me that his stepdaughter was e-mailing her local congressman, who is one of the Republican wafflers. Then he put this question: “Remember when we used to demonstrate, not send e-mail?” My friend is not a nostalgia buff. He is intellectually active on many issues in the palpably here-and-now. He is not a demonstration freak. Still, questions do come to mind: How virtual is a virtual demonstration? An online petition campaign?
But e-mail, requiring little effort from its deployers, has its uses, partly for that very reason. As the MoveOn.org campaign shows, it can get protesters charged up, confirm them in the sense that they’re in good company. For instance, longtime human rights campaigner Cathy Fitzpatrick took it upon herself Sunday night to send out a multirecipient e-mail that is striking in this respect. Fitzpatrick wrote, in her private capacity, that for months she had found the impeachment juggernaut an annoyance, but a sideshow to her main interest. Annoyance, however, turned to impediment. She had been trying to work with the White House on a 50th anniversary commemoration of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The White House had sounded cooperative, but as the Dec. 10 date drew closer, its staff pulled away. All attention had turned to impeachment. (A White House ceremony did take place. Notice it? The press didn’t.) So she sat down at her keyboard to make the case that President Clinton does matter to human rights. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been a major force in the world for the principle that women’s rights are human rights. Gregory Craig, the president’s lawyer, has taken time off from — human rights work! So it was time for human rights activists to put some muscle into stopping impeachment. Fitzpatrick appended a list of Republican House members who might be swayed in the days to come. Many other such messages have been crisscrossing cyberspace.
It is hard to avoid the thought that after years of fatalism, ideological blur, specialized politicking, group preoccupation and plain disappointment, much of the left has forgotten, if it ever knew, how heavy is the right wing of American politics, how fierce, how organized, how elected, how capable of obstructing all the projects of the left (and the center) and how capable of acting in unison when they care enough to hate — as they do Clinton, That Man in the White House. So it took until Monday night, Dec. 14, a mere three days before the House is due to vote on impeachment, before a cross section of the protesting class rallied. Some of the left was coming to life. Too late? Better late.
Is today’s midterm election a referendum on (choose one) (a) President Bill Clinton, (b) Speaker Newt Gingrich, (c) Social Security, (d) local issues?
The answer is, none of the above. More than anything else, the election is a referendum on the American political system itself. And, election after election, the system flunks. But the big flunk does not make big news. The big story, virtually the only story of this election, is a nonstory: At the core of American politics is a yawning, black sinkhole where Democrats’ hopes melt down and most of the electorate vanishes. For the key to this election, as to most American elections, is the electorate that doesn’t turn up. It is disproportionately — no surprise — less affluent, less educated, less white, less Republican than the private club of regular voters. To say its members are alienated is to say the obvious. The no-shows explain why a country with a largely Democratic belief system gives rise to an electorate that votes Republican.
There is some good news. The American public is gamely trying to declare independence from the Beltway blowhards and petty inquisitors who have been trying to stampede them into deposing the president. The most unexpected good news about the slow-motion coup d’état the Republicans have mounted since January — courtesy of Kenneth Starr, Linda Tripp, Lucianne Goldberg, Newsweek, Matt Drudge and a supporting cast of thousands — is that the public hasn’t bought it. Poll after poll, for more than nine months, reveals a public convinced that Clinton lied, that Starr overreached, that the media ran amok and that impeachment would be wrong. The problem is that this vast public, whispering its tastes and distastes to the pollsters, muttering in the streets, is not what elects the American government. The electorate is a sector, a fraction. And not a representative one.
If registered voters beamed their likes and dislikes directly into a supercomputer, they would elect a Democratic Congress. So the polls say, and rather consistently. Here are some big, fat numbers to hold in your mind: According to a New York Times poll Oct. 26-28, registered voters prefer Democratic over Republican candidates for the House by a margin of 48 percent to 38 percent. It will take more numbers to drive the point home, so let me start by repeating. Forty-eight to 38 percent. If registered voters could cast their ballots simply by wishing — leaving aside the ones who would sit it out even if they could vote with an act of mental concentration — 56 percent of those who were prepared to choose when polled by the Times would choose Democrats over Republicans. A Congress elected in that way would consist of 243 Democrats and 192 Republicans.
But we haven’t yet figured out how to tally votes via Spockian mind meld. For a host of reasons, turnout falls far short of 100 percent of registered voters. Unlike other democracies, we vote on a work day, not a weekend. No one gets time off to vote. We consider politics dirty, distracting, trivial, juvenile. So turnout has been falling throughout the 20th century, with the falloff interrupted only by upticks in the 1930s, jolted by the Depression and the New Deal, and in the 1960s — jolted by hopes for the Kennedy and Johnson years, by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war and the antiwar movement. The falloff resumed after the ’60s and goes on. During presidential elections, we’re lucky to get 50 percent turnout. And during off-year elections, without a superhero or supervillain to draw folks to the booths, forget 50 percent. In 1994, it was 39 percent.
Suppose that turnout this year matches the turnout of 1994. Then, according to the Times poll of Oct. 26-28, Republicans are preferred by 48 percent and Democrats by 43 percent. (The others are presumably undecided.) In the event voters turn out in those proportions, the House will number 229 Republicans to 206 Democrats.
Or suppose the turnout is at the low end of recent off-year elections — 31 percent as opposed to the 39 percent of 1994. According to the Times’ calculations, the Republican House margin would soar to 241-194 — almost as great a Republican margin as the Democrats would achieve via the Spockian mind-meld vote.
On the other hand, even if Americans vote at a high rate — if, say, a grand 47 percent of the voting-age population rouse themselves — they’ll still go for Republicans, albeit by a slender margin of 220 to 215 seats. Right now only one question is absorbing the pundits, spinners, counterspinners, advisers and consultants — the whole electoral industry — how Republican?
- – - – - – - – - -
One reason people don’t vote is that they’re not registered — that’s 19 percent of the voting-age population, including convicted criminals in many states, who are disproportionately African-American, and many of the ill and the elderly. Getting an absentee ballot in many states is no picnic. (Before the September primary, in New York City, it took me two phone calls and a lot of voice-mail patience to get an application for an absentee ballot. After I mailed it, the actual ballot arrived too late. Call me a primary nonvoter.) Even after a Democratic Congress passed the motor-voter bill in 1993 and President Clinton signed it (after several Bush vetoes), many states dragged their feet setting up procedures to get the paperwork done. Making voting too easy might not be a good career move for many politicians.
But the nonregistered are only a minority of the nonvoters. Most nonvoters have gone to the trouble of registering and don’t want to go to any more. Some are, they say, “not interested.” Some think not voting is a positive act, a declaration of independence. They’re voting with their feet — voting against politics. Politics is for suckers, they believe. Politics has victimized them, left them behind, so they are taking revenge. There are more of these affirmative nonvoters every year, who think not voting is a righteous act, a sort of civil disobedience. Don’t vote, goes the bumper sticker, it only encourages them. By not voting, this growing majority ensures that politics will be dominated by the politicians they despise. A luxurious attitude, befitting a sort of aristocracy of dropouts.
Enter the Republicans with their on-again, off-again attack ads that lots of people (not only high-minded do-gooders) hate with a passion. Why, since the public so fiercely disapproves of these accusations, do the Republicans still love to point fingers in living color? Why, after denying that they would do so, did the Republicans bring out their poison darts in the closing days of the campaign? In part, precisely because so-called negative ads are offensive, and being offensive is the Republicans’ best defense. Ugly politics keep people away from the ballot box. The uglier the campaign, the more people decide that all politics are the work of the devil, and they want to stand clear of them. The more vicious the Republicans are, the more likely to convince the already estranged that politicians are unseemly and politics a pastime for fools. And therefore, the more likely the alienated citizen is to find something more absorbing to do on Nov. 3 than drag him- or herself to the polling place.
So inciting anger against politics serves a Republican purpose. One shouldn’t exaggerate this, however. Left-wingers make the mistake of thinking that nonvoters are sitting on their hands waiting for a righteous party of the left, as if they constitute a reserve army of the potentially radical. There’s no evidence for that, and a lot of evidence to the contrary. The liberal left has squandered its natural advantage on economic issues — HMOs, the minimum wage, Social Security, education funding — by resorting to a self-immolating identity politics that doesn’t rely on its enemies to divide and conquer; it does the job itself.
But voter estrangement marries complacency in today’s politics. This estrangement feeds on itself. Voters rule, nonvoters are ruled. The people who benefit least from politics as they exists are least likely to vote, and by not voting, preserve the lock the complacent have on the politics that works to the advantage of voters and the disadvantage of nonvoters. Thus, the self-fulfilling prophecy that rules American politics. Believing makes it so.
Prepare then for the next phase of the Republican Standoff — the epilogue to their Revolution, which even in failing has succeeded in bottling up most Democratic initiatives, limited though they were, over the last four years. Despite the disappointments (for Republicans) of the Gingrich years, this failed Revolution still sets the boundaries of the possible for American decisions about wages, equality, health care, child care, labor law, trade, environment and whatever other issues you care to name. The best result Democrats hope for this week is a Republican victory too slender to support impeachment. True enough, rolling back the slow-motion Republican coup d’itat that proceeded under cover of the prosecutorial Starr would be an achievement. It would be a fine thing to elect more than 41 senators, thus to remain cloture-proof. To put the Christian right in its place is a necessary condition for progress.
But for small-”d” democrats, a nondefeat defeat is a weak expectation indeed. Unhappy is a party that has need of such victories. Certainly Bill Clinton hoped for a better political legacy than mustering enough votes to avoid impeachment. The hope of making progress on the big questions in American politics is forestalled as long as nonvoters make up the majority party.
Is today’s midterm election a referendum on (choose one) (a) President Bill Clinton, (b) Speaker Newt Gingrich, (c) Social Security, (d) local issues?
The answer is, none of the above. More than anything else, the election is a referendum on the American political system itself. And, election after election, the system flunks. But the big flunk does not make big news. The big story, virtually the only story of this election, is a nonstory: At the core of American politics is a yawning, black sinkhole where Democrats’ hopes melt down and most of the electorate vanishes. For the key to this election, as to most American elections, is the electorate that doesn’t turn up. It is disproportionately — no surprise — less affluent, less educated, less white, less Republican than the private club of regular voters. To say its members are alienated is to say the obvious. The no-shows explain why a country with a largely Democratic belief system gives rise to an electorate that votes Republican.
There is some good news. The American public is gamely trying to declare independence from the Beltway blowhards and petty inquisitors who have been trying to stampede them into deposing the president. The most unexpected good news about the slow-motion coup d’itat the Republicans have mounted since January — courtesy of Kenneth Starr, Linda Tripp, Lucianne Goldberg, Newsweek, Matt Drudge and a supporting cast of thousands — is that the public hasn’t bought it. Poll after poll, for more than nine months, reveals a public convinced that Clinton lied, that Starr overreached, that the media ran amok and that impeachment would be wrong. The problem is that this vast public, whispering its tastes and distastes to the pollsters, muttering in the streets, is not what elects the American government. The electorate is a sector, a fraction. And not a representative one.
If registered voters beamed their likes and dislikes directly into a supercomputer, they would elect a Democratic Congress. So the polls say, and rather consistently. Here are some big, fat numbers to hold in your mind: According to a New York Times poll Oct. 26-28, registered voters prefer Democratic over Republican candidates for the House by a margin of 48 percent to 38 percent. It will take more numbers to drive the point home, so let me start by repeating. Forty-eight to 38 percent. If registered voters could cast their ballots simply by wishing — leaving aside the ones who would sit it out even if they could vote with an act of mental concentration — 56 percent of those who were prepared to choose when polled by the Times would choose Democrats over Republicans. A Congress elected in that way would consist of 243 Democrats and 192 Republicans.
But we haven’t yet figured out how to tally votes via Spockian mind meld. For a host of reasons, turnout falls far short of 100 percent of registered voters. Unlike other democracies, we vote on a work day, not a weekend. No one gets time off to vote. We consider politics dirty, distracting, trivial, juvenile. So turnout has been falling throughout the 20th century, with the falloff interrupted only by upticks in the 1930s, jolted by the Depression and the New Deal, and in the 1960s — jolted by hopes for the Kennedy and Johnson years, by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war and the antiwar movement. The falloff resumed after the ’60s and goes on. During presidential elections, we’re lucky to get 50 percent turnout. And during off-year elections, without a superhero or supervillain to draw folks to the booths, forget 50 percent. In 1994, it was 39 percent.
Suppose that turnout this year matches the turnout of 1994. Then, according to the Times poll of Oct. 26-28, Republicans are preferred by 48 percent and Democrats by 43 percent. (The others are presumably undecided.) In the event voters turn out in those proportions, the House will number 229 Republicans to 206 Democrats.
Or suppose the turnout is at the low end of recent off-year elections — 31 percent as opposed to the 39 percent of 1994. According to the Times’ calculations, the Republican House margin would soar to 241-194 — almost as great a Republican margin as the Democrats would achieve via the Spockian mind-meld vote.
On the other hand, even if Americans vote at a high rate — if, say, a grand 47 percent of the voting-age population rouse themselves — they’ll still go for Republicans, albeit by a slender margin of 220 to 215 seats. Right now only one question is absorbing the pundits, spinners, counterspinners, advisers and consultants — the whole electoral industry — how Republican?
One reason people don’t vote is that they’re not registered — that’s 19 percent of the voting-age population, including convicted criminals in many states, who are disproportionately African-American, and many of the ill and the elderly. Getting an absentee ballot in many states is no picnic. (Before the September primary, in New York City, it took me two phone calls and a lot of voice-mail patience to get an application for an absentee ballot. After I mailed it, the actual ballot arrived too late. Call me a primary nonvoter.) Even after a Democratic Congress passed the motor-voter bill in 1993 and President Clinton signed it (after several Bush vetoes), many states dragged their feet setting up procedures to get the paperwork done. Making voting too easy might not be a good career move for many politicians.
But the nonregistered are only a minority of the nonvoters. Most nonvoters have gone to the trouble of registering and don’t want to go to any more. Some are, they say, “not interested.” Some think not voting is a positive act, a declaration of independence. They’re voting with their feet — voting against politics. Politics is for suckers, they believe. Politics has victimized them, left them behind, so they are taking revenge. There are more of these affirmative nonvoters every year, who think not voting is a righteous act, a sort of civil disobedience. Don’t vote, goes the bumper sticker, it only encourages them. By not voting, this growing majority ensures that politics will be dominated by the politicians they despise. A luxurious attitude, befitting a sort of aristocracy of dropouts.
Enter the Republicans with their on-again, off-again attack ads that lots of people (not only high-minded do-gooders) hate with a passion. Why, since the public so fiercely disapproves of these accusations, do the Republicans still love to point fingers in living color? Why, after denying that they would do so, did the Republicans bring out their poison darts in the closing days of the campaign? In part, precisely because so-called negative ads are offensive, and being offensive is the Republicans’ best defense. Ugly politics keep people away from the ballot box. The uglier the campaign, the more people decide that all politics are the work of the devil, and they want to stand clear of them. The more vicious the Republicans are, the more likely to convince the already estranged that politicians are unseemly and politics a pastime for fools. And therefore, the more likely the alienated citizen is to find something more absorbing to do on Nov. 3 than drag him- or herself to the polling place.
So inciting anger against politics serves a Republican purpose. One shouldn’t exaggerate this, however. Left-wingers make the mistake of thinking that nonvoters are sitting on their hands waiting for a righteous party of the left, as if they constitute a reserve army of the potentially radical. There’s no evidence for that, and a lot of evidence to the contrary. The liberal left has squandered its natural advantage on economic issues — HMOs, the minimum wage, Social Security, education funding — by resorting to a self-immolating identity politics that doesn’t rely on its enemies to divide and conquer; it does the job itself.
But voter estrangement marries complacency in today’s politics. This estrangement feeds on itself. Voters rule, nonvoters are ruled. The people who benefit least from politics as they exists are least likely to vote, and by not voting, preserve the lock the complacent have on the politics that works to the advantage of voters and the disadvantage of nonvoters. Thus, the self-fulfilling prophecy that rules American politics. Believing makes it so.
Prepare then for the next phase of the Republican Standoff — the epilogue to their Revolution, which even in failing has succeeded in bottling up most Democratic initiatives, limited though they were, over the last four years. Despite the disappointments (for Republicans) of the Gingrich years, this failed Revolution still sets the boundaries of the possible for American decisions about wages, equality, health care, child care, labor law, trade, environment and whatever other issues you care to name. The best result Democrats hope for this week is a Republican victory too slender to support impeachment. True enough, rolling back the slow-motion Republican coup d’état that proceeded under cover of the prosecutorial Starr would be an achievement. It would be a fine thing to elect more than 41 senators, thus to remain cloture-proof. To put the Christian right in its place is a necessary condition for progress.
But for small-”d” democrats, a nondefeat defeat is a weak expectation indeed. Unhappy is a party that has need of such victories. Certainly Bill Clinton hoped for a better political legacy than mustering enough votes to avoid impeachment. The hope of making progress on the big questions in American politics is forestalled as long as nonvoters make up the majority party.
“Have you ever discussed with Mrs. Clinton whether the President has a sex addiction?”
“Does the President believe that oral sex is sex?”
“Does the President’s religion include sexual intercourse?”
– Questions put to presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal by prosecutors Jackie Bennett, Jr. and Solomon L. Wisenberg before the Washington grand jury, as reported in the New York Times on June 29 and 30, 1998.
…………………………
Mr. Blumenthal, did the president ever tell you that he has stopped beating his wife?
With your own eyes, did you ever see the president stop beating his wife?
Did Mrs. Clinton ever tell you that the president had stopped beating her?
Did the president ever tell you that he has stopped beating anyone else’s wife?
Have you seen the president stop beating anyone else’s wife?
If the president had stopped beating anyone’s wife, would you necessarily have seen him do so?
Has Mrs. Clinton ever asked you whether you have stopped beating your own wife?
Did Mr. Clinton ever stop beating your wife?
Did Mrs. Clinton ever tell you she had evidence that Mr. Clinton had beaten anyone’s wife?
Did Mrs. Clinton refer to any records she had kept of Mr. Clinton’s activity with respect to anyone’s wife?
Did the president ever tell you that he has stopped having sexual intercourse with anyone else’s wife?
Did the president ever discuss with you the ideal frequency of sexual intercourse?
Does Mrs. Clinton’s religion include sexual intercourse?
Did the president ever threaten to beat anyone’s wife?
Did Steven Brill ever tell you that he had beaten anyone’s wife?
Did the president ever tell you that his religion forbids beating anyone’s wife?
Did the president ever say in your hearing, “Take my wife — please”?
Did you ever see the president wink while discussing a visit to Santa Monica?
Did you ever see the president wink or nod while referring to “affairs of state”?
Has the president ever used what is commonly called a four-letter word in your presence?
Has the president ever discussed with you the rightward-leaning aspect of his masculine member?
Has the president ever discussed with you the rightward-leaning aspect of the independent prosecutor?
Has the president, in your hearing, ever cast aspersions on the sexual proclivities of the independent prosecutor?
Has the president ever told you that size matters?
Has the president ever told you that size doesn’t matter?
Has the president ever made obscene gestures in your presence?
Has the president ever discussed his toilet training with you?
Has the president ever discussed Mrs. Clinton’s toilet training with you?
Has the president ever discussed with you his participation in the toilet training of his daughter?
Has the president ever discussed your own toilet training with you?
Has the president ever discussed any toilet training whatsoever with you?
Would you comment on the president’s personal hygiene?
Does the president believe that flossing is dental hygiene?
Have the president and Mrs. Clinton read the Bible together in your presence?
Would you characterize their demeanor on such occasions?
Would you call it reverent?
Did Mrs. Clinton ever tell you that of all the songs by the Eagles, the president most preferred “Lyin’ Eyes”?
Did Mrs. Clinton ever tell you that of all the songs by the Eagles, the president least preferred “Lyin’ Eyes”?
Did you ever see Mr. Clinton run screaming from the room at the sound of the song “Lyin’ Eyes”?
Did the president ever tell you that of all the songs of Frank Sinatra he most favors “My Way”?
Did the president ever caution you, “Don’t ask, don’t tell”?
Have you ever discussed with Mrs. Clinton whether the president has an addiction to potato chips?
Have you ever discussed with Mrs. Clinton whether the president has an addiction to Big Macs?
Have you ever discussed with Mrs. Clinton whether the president has an addiction to french-fried potatoes?
Have you ever discussed with Mrs. Clinton whether the president has an addiction to any foodstuffs whatsoever?
Have you ever discussed with Mrs. Clinton whether the president has an addiction to any controlled substances?
Have you ever discussed with Mrs. Clinton whether the president has an addiction to any substances whatsoever?
Have you ever discussed with Mrs. Clinton whether the president has an addiction to golf?
Have you ever discussed with Mrs. Clinton whether the president has an addiction to any activities whatsoever?
Has the president ever discussed with you the shape of any female person?
Has the president ever discussed with you the shape of his office?
Has the president ever discussed with you the shape of the nation?
Did Mr. Matt Drudge ever ask you if you had stopped beating your wife?
When an industry leader stands up in public and mournfully declares that he is “truly alarmed” by major trends in his business — in particular by corporate mergers — this is remarkable. When the man is widely revered, having been amply decorated for valor by his profession, it’s all the more remarkable.
The industry is newspapers and the man is Gene Roberts, managing editor of the Times since May 1994, and before that for 17 years the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. At the Inquirer, it is fair to say, Roberts was responsible for more serious investigations than all of Rupert Murdoch’s papers on four continents over their entire lifetimes. The best known of Robert’s initiatives was a multi-part series by Donald Barlett and James Steele that blew the whistle on the savings and loan bailout (a multi-hundred-billion dollar detail that’s routinely overlooked when the subject of the infernal deficit rears its head). Hundreds of thousands of requests poured in for reprints, and the book version, “America: What Went Wrong?”, was a best-seller.
This year’s multi-page Times pieces on corporate downsizing, genital mutilation, and New York housing bear the Roberts stamp, reflecting his faith in the curiosity and intelligence of his readers, and his conviction that journalism is a calling, not simply a regrettable investment necessity. Some reporters grumble that these series have been overlong, some readers resent this theft of their breakfast hours, but it is fairest to say that this man gives good value for trees pulped.
Roberts, now 64, is an interim man at the Times, brought back near retirement age and planning to exit next summer. He sounds like a statesman more than a lame duck, though, and if there is anyone who can rally a much-demoralized profession, it is he. Roberts left the Inquirer after chain proprietor Knight-Ridder started squeezing his budget. He had planned to leave anyway, but what concentrated his mind was the incessant budget meetings. “In my last year at the Inquirer,” he said during Q. and A. after a lecture at New York University Dec. 3, “we had to go through 9 budget revisions, all downward.” Not his idea of the journalism business. “If I’d wanted to be an accountant, I’d have been one.”
Roberts, in a baritone Southern drawl that makes Bill Clinton sound like a city slicker, makes a devastating case against the chain newspapers that clank across the land. Absentee managers discover that, in the short run, at least, they can make more money by publishing less news, shallower news, more celebrity puffs. Roberts cites a study of the fate of the Louisville Courier-Journal since it was bought by Gannett, the biggest of chains. The overall news space did go up, but much of the increase consisted of features, soft news, and wire copy. The average local news story shrank. Wire service copy went up by an astounding 76 percent. So it happens that at a time when the Federal government is foisting more power upon the statehouses, coverage of those muck-filled precincts declines. Less scrutiny translates into emboldened lobbies and mindless legislation.
To care about this sort of degradation, of course, you have to care about some fusty-sounding ideals, namely the connection between information and democracy. Roberts, who covered civil rights at the Times in the ’60s, finds there his strongest precedent for claiming that newspapers matter. During the civil rights era, he says, “a double handful of Southern newspapers, independently owned, stood up for civil rights, and made an incalculable contribution.”
And where have all those flowers of enlightenment gone? Gone to chain gangs, almost every one. Little Rock’s now-defunct Arkansas Gazette, which called for Federal intervention to enforce the court order to integrate Central High School in 1957, is now Gannettized, as is the Nashville Tennessean. In Greenville, Mississippi, the Delta Democrat-Times, owned by the Hodding Carter family, which spoke up against the White Citizens Councils at a time when you could get your house burned down for doing that, is now owned by a chain with the perfect Orwellian name of Freedom Newspapers.
When newspapers are yanked around by time-and-motion experts, it’s hard not to lapse into small town, Front Page, green-eyeshade nostalgia. Your present-day writer, who happens to have organized Roberts’ lecture, stands ever-skeptical about golden ages. But Roberts is a practical fellow who does not seem enamored of gloom and doom simply because the ’90s are less noble than the ’60s. He does know that the question is not only what is to be done, but who is to do it. He is dubious about government action. “I wish in retrospect that we had limited newspaper ownership in some way to x papers in x towns, but we didn’t. I tend to think at this point that [the spread of the chains] is irreversible.”
What then? Shame the chains into improving by wielding the instrument of journalism itself: Compare chains the way we compare cars. Roberts proposes that the three journalism reviews — the American Journalism Review, Columbia Journalism Review, and Nieman Reports — commission good reporters to make on-site visits to chain papers (and TV stations), stay long enough to assess what they do and how well they do it. They should pay particular attention to local coverage, and publish the results in magazine, pamphlet, and book form.
All very well, Roberts knows, but the erosion of public spirit has taken a toll on the reviews themselves. As he speaks, these publications teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, so they would need an infusion of money to do this work. Foundation executives please note: Roberts, although he is most definitely not an accountant, calculates that the whole venture could be funded for $1.5 million. Marshall Loeb, the just-appointed incoming editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, might find this an interesting way of reviving interest in his bimonthly.
To the question of whether reporters could be expected to bite the hands that pet them, Roberts responded laconically, “If you’re in reporting for the right reasons, occasionally you have to put your job on the line.” Not every newspaper editor would say those words. They should be emblazoned over every journalism school in the land. For that matter, every school.
Here is my list of the worst best-of lists.
1. The best pizza in New York.
2. The best movie.
3. The best play.
4. The ten best David Letterman lists.
5. The NBA point guard with the highest free-throw percentage on Tuesdays at the Garden.
6. The most influential political consultant of the decade. (Whoops.)
Enough already. Look how desperate people are to get listed somewhere for something. The Commissioner of Parks has a staffer count the number of hands who pet his dog, and Sri Chinmoy’s disciples undertake all manner of weird exploits, both in order to get in the Guinness Book of Records. And universities tout their U. S. News and World Report rankings as they troll for alumni gifts and prospective customers.
There’s good news and bad news about lists. The good news is that winners get to dine out on their reputations at top-ranked restaurants, surely, and why not? Oscar-winning movies, Pulitzer-Prize winning books, Tony-winning plays, and the like may get a second life, also sometimes deserved. Documentary filmmakers get a measure of fundraising help. Universities get to pick and choose among the applicants they want to pick and choose among. Parents and prospective students may hear of colleges they’d never heard of before.
The bad news is that rankings are frequently guilty of what Alfred North Whitehead (one of the ten most interesting philosophers of the twentieth century, no doubt) once called “misplaced concretism.” They frequently assume that important matters exist in quantitative units that can be laid end-to-end and counted. They emphasize precisely what can be counted, and sweep aside what cannot be. They boost a secular society’s version of canonization. Numbers ‘R Us, even when the rankers duly note (see asterisk) that their rankings should not be overesteemed.
In the mania for ranking, shoppers tend to assume that rankers have reason to know what they’re talking about. Numbers look hard and fast. Academics may get promoted on the basis of the number of times their names come up in the citation index which counts the number of times their colleagues mention their work in journal articles. Ever-faster silicon chips power ever-cheaper computers to pump them out faster with every passing byte. Hence the numerals that clutter up the screen of every sports broadcast. Hence the poll fetish that is sweeping throughout the world inspired, if that is the word, by number-crunchers.
Rankings, of course, are only as good as data, and data are smeared with fingerprints. Everyone who uses ratings, rankings and prize lists should keep salt-shakers with fat holes at the ready. Surely the Nobel list might suffer if readers understood that neither Tolstoy, Henry James nor Borges was honored. Yet the mania spreads far and wide as competition knows no bounds, whether it be for the Booker Prize or prospects for medical school admissions and legal partnerships. Shame fails to stop the high-rankers from touting their high ranks without itemizing the footnotes.
In recent years, U. S. News and World Report has set out to distinguish itself from its competition by emphasizing “news you can use,” in which category it publishes special issues, later expanded into books, ranking colleges and universities. “America’s Best Colleges” has just hit the stands. According to Larry Van Dyne’s informative piece in the September Washingtonian, this is U. S. News’ best-selling issue of the year, a total of 2.3 million issues including subscriptions and newsstand sales. “America’s Best Graduate Schools” follows in the winter. Van Dyne writes that colleges have been known to resort to such techniques as sending cookies to prospective applicants to enlarge their pool, thereby pumping up their selectivity ratio, which is a factor that U. S. News takes into account. University presidents, who know on what list their bread is buttered, lobby at U. S. News offices. It’s spin, spin, spin for the home team.
In a recent issue of Insights, the journal of the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication, Professors Tom Goldstein of Berkeley and Ted Glasser of Stanford raise nettlesome questions about the rankings of graduate schools. Under the headline, “Ratings Game Reaches New Low,” they note that in its 1996 ranking of graduate journalism schools, Stanford ranked in the top five in broadcast journalism — an extraordinary achievement, considering that Stanford has no such program. The University of Minnesota ranked fifteenth in print journalism, despite having shut down its graduate journalism program one year before.
Alvin Sanoff, a U. S. News editor who works on the college rankings, admits to “some responsibility” for the errors on Stanford and Minnesota. He told me that when a woman with the title “coordinator” was asked by a U. S. News researcher if Stanford did indeed have a broadcast program, she referred the researcher to someone else, who said “You can say that we do” — a statement that turned out to be false. (A Stanford official later said that the person who affirmed the existence of the program was not qualified to do so, according to Sanoff.) Sanoff’s case for including Stanford is that it was still possible to concentrate on broadcasting by compiling a certain sequence of courses.
As for Minnesota, Sanoff says that U. S. News took a list of journalism and mass communications programs compiled by Lee Becker of Ohio State University, and circulated it to both practitioners and academics for the survey. The practitioners didn’t answer in large numbers, and as for the academics, they were evidently willing to rank a nonexistent program. A rather stirring reason to doubt the entire procedure, one would think. Becker has said that he did not intend that his list be used in this fashion. Goldstein says that the list includes many schools that are more involved in teaching communications, advertising and public relations than journalism, and that their deans can’t make informed assessments of journalism programs proper.
Sanoff says that U. S. News revises its methods all the time, and that its door is open for constructive suggestions. Goldstein says, “I can’t say for sure what all the indicators should be, but U. S. News should go out and report. Lists are a substitute for reporting.”
U. S. News is not the only misplacing concretizer in the education business, only the best-circulating one. There is also a ranking system of graduate academic departments published periodically by the National Academy of Sciences. This one is supposed to be the result of a survey of professors. I professed for sixteen years in a sociology department (Berkeley) that always ranked first, second, or third in the country. Not once was I ever asked my opinion, nor were several of my colleagues whom I once asked.
“Measure what can be measured,” wrote James Fallows in his fine book “Breaking the News.” There, he was properly critical of reporters falling all over polls and neglecting to note that oftentimes people know next to nothing about the terms on which the citizenry are invited to express opinions. The tendency to pile up numbers and let them substitute for meaning reaches its point of absurdity in the rankings. Papers now routinely report box-office results. Museums count bodies, publishers live and die by their own numbers. Nine out of 10 doctors are still recommending. Fallows is now top editor at U. S. News — surely one of the most promising appointments in years. He should get out his salt-shaker, as should we all.
