Casual
Past Tension Despite reelection, a lofty public approval rating, and discombobulated opponents, President Clinton is in a funk. He whines that the cynicism of the press has finally gotten to him,...
...Wherever he went, they went (or tried to go...
...He used to care about such things, but no more...
...The truth is all Washington has been gripped by ennui...
...They want to beat him, even as he tries to make himself more ideologically palatable to them...
...Now when I drive by, the parking lot is practically empty...
...For decades, the White House press dutifully maintained a "body watch" on the president...
...The big goals—banning abortion, reforming the tax system, taming entitlements— aren't attainable any time soon...
...What, for example, do the prospects for a balanced budget agreement depend on...
...Every press conference, I watched...
...Remember when George Bush described his square-off with Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News as "tension city...
...Journalists (that means me) want more money, so they fight their way onto TV and give paid speeches...
...Newt...
...What's achievable now is mostly small stuff like hooking up kids in the hospital to the Internet...
...I'm not alone...
...And what's the most divisive issue facing Congress...
...That was a howler, but at least people understood what he was getting at: a battle of importance between titans...
...Then, decisions made at the White House and Pentagon and on Capitol Hill mattered...
...It was exciting to follow and write about...
...America's survival wasn't at stake, but our role in the world was...
...Casual What's palpably missing in Washington is tension...
...nothing seems to matter very much...
...Pols want money, so they quit and become lobbyists or write books...
...He can't decide what the Republican agenda should be, or even if there should be one...
...And normalcy turns out to be pretty slow-paced and dreary...
...The reason was the president might be called upon at a moment's notice to respond to a nuclear attack by the Soviets...
...No depression, no New Deal, no world war, no Cold War, no civil rights movement, no Great Society, no Watergate, no Republican Revolution— all we've got is . . . sorry, the best I can come up with is Coffeegate...
...Power, as Henry Kissinger said, may be the ultimate aphrodisiac, but money is the motivating force behind a lot of what happens, now more than ever...
...Money is Washington's dirty little secret...
...The efficacy of the relationship between Clinton and Senate majority leader Trent Lott...
...Clinton and the Democrats wanted money, so they did whatever it took to raise it...
...So what's the problem...
...senators if they sat on his lap...
...My stories concentrated on President Bush's heroic role in the war...
...There's nothing at stake...
...Hence, Coffeegate...
...Maybe there isn't one...
...Every morning, I turned to the Washington Times to find out which anti-war wussies it had put in its Desert Storm Hall of Shame...
...He whines that the cynicism of the press has finally gotten to him, and that he has grown cynical too...
...I'd imagine the war room in the Pentagon, brimming with officers assigned to track military movements and ominous events around the world, all through the night, every night...
...Maybe after 60-plus years of turmoil and passion and alarm in Washington, we've returned to what Warren Harding promised: "normalcy...
...All politics in Washington today is either personal or about money...
...A military aide carrying the "football," a briefcase containing the nuclear codes, was always near the president...
...They just hate the guy...
...Meanwhile, a prominent columnist and TV commentator says he wouldn't know some of the new U.S...
...It made stories from Washington about foreign policy or military affairs seem all the more significant...
...There were invariably plenty of cars...
...America isn't threatened anymore...
...No one bristles with energy or enthusiasm or zip...
...Democrats still want to drive him from Congress, but I suspect their main motive isn't ideological...
...In those days, when I drove home to Virginia each night, I'd notice the parking lot at the Pentagon...
...Newt Gingrich is no better off...
...Fred Barnes...
...And if you actually went to the front of the Cold War to cover, say, the anti-Communist contras in Nicaragua, your story might truly be important...
...Like Bill Bennett says of Republicans, I'm suffering from a bad case of ennui...
...Desert Storm was all I thought about or talked about...
...It was a book deal, remember, that initially got Gingrich in hot water...
...In those days—it was 1988 when Bush and Rather clashed—there was a real struggle between America and the Soviet Union, and it produced real anxiety in Washington because there was something very large at stake, namely the survival of human freedom...
...The last great moment in Washington was Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991...
...As best I recall, he wasn't in a funk, not even for a single fleeting moment...
...All this was great for journalism...
...Lassitude and apathy reign...
...I'm glad we won the Cold War, but I miss the tension...
Vol. 2 • February 1997 • No. 23
