THE REPORT THAT ATE D.C.
BROOKS, DAVID
THE REPORT THAT ATE WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 LIMBO DAY ONE The New York Times and CNN are reporting that Starr will issue his report Friday, but by mid-morning ABC is spreading the word that this is...
...People have scrolled down to the sex...
...Says the report: "After phone sex late one night, the president fell asleep mid-conversation...
...Away they go...
...Phones start ringing as people read each other the startling parts...
...As it transpires, he doesn't match the rhetorical grandeur of Sen...
...CNN, which can't cut away too fast without looking like it made a mistake, lingers...
...The people are with them on the issues, but the Republicans are trying to distract people from what really matters...
...The president was involved in the Lewinsky affidavit denying their affair...
...The private matters go on page after page...
...Meanwhile, on the Senate side, Robert Byrd, father of a thousand West Virginia highways, is suffering an acute case of Lieberman envy...
...THE REPORT THAT ATE WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 LIMBO DAY ONE The New York Times and CNN are reporting that Starr will issue his report Friday, but by mid-morning ABC is spreading the word that this is the day...
...Now, too, the White House "prebuttal" is out...
...As private phone conversations escalate from lively to hysterical, the politicians become increasingly pious and deliberate...
...Out of touch...
...settles it: "The IC is to deliver his report to the 19-year-old guy at Kinko's, who will proceed to spill pizza sauce upon it...
...Lewinsky, the president said that 'he had never been treated as poorly by anyone else as I treated him.'" Late in the day, phone traffic is heating up, with people checking out one another's perceptions...
...Its members are all terrified that some competing news organization will get the report before them...
...When the boxes are switched to the second van, it looks for a moment as if the bottom of one box will give way, strewing papers everywhere...
...The culture war lives...
...Talk about current events...
...The story is that the report will be put on four Internet sites, which will all promptly crash...
...Everyone is watching the vote on the rule on C-SPAN...
...The scramble is on to get the report on the Internet...
...Uh . . . what . . . uh . . . Oh, sorry, I was reading the report," he answers...
...Most are absolutely appalled...
...Loretta Sanchez, the California Democrat who beat Bob Dornan, lets us know that everything is going great for her party...
...Reminds me of a French Rugby coach who explained his team's rough play by saying, "We wanted to get our retaliation in first...
...But then around 2 p.m...
...Washington erupts as if this were the most exciting thing on earth...
...Dan Rather tells him to take a deep breath...
...I was always giving him my stupid ideas about what I thought should be done in the administration...
...Conservatives are concentrating on the moral stuff...
...Meanwhile, on the Metro, the commuters are not talking about the high drama of the day...
...David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The bottom has been reached...
...Until the contents of the report are made public, everyone is going around in circles, just at different speeds...
...The scene is beginning to look like one of those Last Judgment paintings...
...The phone traffic agrees: The perjury charges are rock solid...
...Up on Capitol Hill, reporters are surging around members' offices looking for copies...
...If there were a reporter with any brains, he'd call every member of Congress and say, "I'm working on a story about your private life," and then pause to see what each one confessed...
...Media people face enormous deadline pressures, but they can't stop reading...
...Clinton's job approval is as high as ever, at 70 percent...
...Section 595b of the Independent Counsel Statute THE STORY IS THAT THE REPORT WILL BE PUT ON FOUR INTERNET SITES, WHICH WILL ALL PROMPTLY CRASH...
...Gingrich, Hyde, and Gephardt are leading a bipartisan meeting, and it's as if the press corps is a bunch of records spinning at 45 rpm while the pols are turning at a stately 17...
...On another occasion, she and the President had brief genital-to-genital contact...
...First comes the "news"—the actual impeachable stuff...
...I call an editor at a New York-based magazine on entirely innocent business...
...What tension...
...The excitement over, the Washington gossip community gets back on the phone to trade rumors and search for news nuggets...
...FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 D-DAY Is it out yet...
...A motorcade of boxes...
...David Shuster of Fox and Lisa Myers of NBC seem to be doing the most sophisticated job of getting the information out...
...Somewhere in the netherworld, Richard Nixon is loving this...
...Then comes word that the boxes are on their way to Capitol Hill...
...Look for a government shutdown over this...
...Sanchez testifies that the Democrats are popular and getting more so...
...This, few were prepared for: the detailed, blow by blow, minute by minute, narrative of the pair's intimate moments...
...Over at ABC they are too dainty to read the graphic material...
...But the transfer is completed, and the documents are locked away...
...Who should know better than the Democrats, who are having a conference at the Mayflower Hotel for their business donors...
...He's waxing philosophic about the times and the mores and Bill Clinton's moral failings...
...On another occasion, she and President inserted a cigar into her vagina...
...Approval of congressional Democrats is high at 57 percent...
...According to her, Democratic campaign leader Martin Frost told House Democrats this very morning that they've already as good as won 6 of the 11 seats they need to take back the majority...
...Will the people who handle them be wearing those head-to-foot white suits, like workers in a nuclear-power plant...
...Is it out...
...Immediately the rumor mill goes into high gear, about everything from Bill Clinton's taste for macadamia nuts to the likely composition of the Gore administration...
...News of Clinton's Florida speech is seeping back...
...The medium-sized newspapers are hypersensitive, as always, about preferential treatment being given to the big boys...
...FORGET ABOUT Y2K...
...This is a figure all of polite Washington can giggle about...
...Reporters, activists, and staffers are circulating dirty jokes about what's in the report...
...Unfortunately the debate is about migratory birds...
...Everyone wants to know which militia he belonged to...
...Everybody bursts out laughing...
...It turns out he was her business partner, and their affair was outed by the media...
...The sickness of the relationship...
...On the generic ballot, Americans prefer Democratic congressional candidates to Republicans by 41 percent to 32 percent among all voters and 39 percent to 35 percent among likely voters...
...Will the Democratic congressmen read it and be sickened or read it and be outraged that Starr laid it all out...
...All the old adulteries are rising from obscurity...
...A Hill aide busts into a conversation cluster and remarks with faux sobriety, "This is a moment of national crisis...
...Today's rumors are mostly about who is going to get indicted by Starr over the next few weeks...
...Hearers wonder whether the classics-quoting pork king will find a way to mention Pericles or Caesar crossing the Alps...
...We'd usually end up, kind of the pillow talk of it, I guess, . . . sitting in the Oval Office...
...This is no crisis of the American regime, since the Constitution provides for impeachment...
...The most moving bit is the sentence, "I've tried to do a good job taking care of this country even when I haven't taken such good care of myself and my family...
...Mark Penn, the very smart pollster who briefs Clinton every week, tells virtually the same sunny story, but in more sophisticated form...
...The great question is how the masses will respond to the sex narrative...
...Meanwhile, just to show the serious work of the American people is being taken care of, Republican Bill Thomas of California has introduced H.R...
...4522 prohibiting the IRS from taxing baseball fans who catch record-breaking home-run balls and return them to the hitter...
...Listening to Penn, you'd be amazed any Republican could be elected...
...Somewhere in the White House, a strategist is telling Clinton to go to Capistrano to apologize to the swallows as part of his Contrition Tour '98...
...This is a bad day for America's forests...
...People are trading Web sites...
...So crowds gather instead around office televisions...
...The press corps, however, has more urgent concerns...
...Forget about Y2K...
...Purple scissors cut open the boxes, and out come the big three-ring binders...
...If this is the way Republicans really talk to her, I'll agree to be locked in a room with Bob Dornan for an hour...
...Pat Buchanan says on TV, "You cannot get much more drama than this in the nation's capital," which, if true, is a sorry comment on the dull lives we lead here...
...Political wonkery is interrupted by the news the Idaho Republican zealot Helen Chenoweth has admitted she had an affair with a married man that ended 14 years ago...
...The Cato Institute will no doubt approve of the privatization of the Congressional Press Offices...
...God, I love this f— story," a TV newsman confesses...
...They're talking about Mark McGwire and their own lives...
...According to Ms...
...Moyni-han, who's been going around town saying this is a "crisis of the regime...
...the tone of the TV coverage and Beltway chatter changes...
...Clinton's odd morali-ty—his weird rules about what he can do, when, with Monica...
...Candy Crowley reads it out over the air: "On one occasion, the President inserted a cigar into her vagina...
...The TV news is all heavy breathing, but the phone gossip has it that parts of the report are comparatively weak, like the abuse-of-power section...
...There is no room for levity...
...Says Monica: "We would talk about our childhoods...
...Some find the report underwhelming...
...Presidents who love too much...
...Slowly the nuggets are emerging: The president asked Dick Morris to poll on whether he should tell the truth...
...Over at CBS, Bob Schief-fer is reading the report on the air too...
...He comes to the beginning of the sex part and seems to stumble...
...Another option, used for past document releases, is to ship the report straight to Kinko's, where reporters can pay for their copies...
...Look for people to fall into utterly different camps, the moralists and the amoralists...
...As a Heritage Foundation observer notes, it could be like a Moonie wedding in reverse—a mass divorce in one of the congressional caucus rooms...
...In office after office, the report is being copied and copied...
...THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 LIMBO DAY TWO The media are filled with confident and wildly divergent reporting about what's in the Starr report...
...They are praying and hoping that the issues don't come up," she tells the audience...
...Democratic Hill staffers tell each other that the worst is over...
...The rest of the stuff is not quite as strong...
...I spoke to some of my Republican colleagues...
...CNN, thinking it's found an actual event, switches to live coverage of the House floor...
...People are on the phone, watching TV, and surfing the Internet (the vulgar ones have found the Stain Monica's Dress game) all at the same time, asking one another: Do you think the reports are in plain brown wrappers...
...The phrase is brilliantly portentous and vacuous...
...Only the internal congressional site seems to be functioning well...
...The fate of Hillary Clinton's husband is being stored in a building named for Gerald Ford...
...The president fed Betty Currie the line about how Monica was stalking him...
...Then we hear that Hyde and Conyers are walking over to pick up the report...
...Also literally untrue...
Vol. 4 • September 1998 • No. 2
