SCRAPBOOK

...Supposedly, DeLay had handed out three pages of talking points and a checklist of political tasks (town hall meetings, talk radio, etc...

...Hillary Clinton never made that connection...

...Campolo's own political activism goes back at least to his unsuccessful run for Congress in the early 1970s as a McGovernite Democrat...

...Both sides will find a tantalizing paper trail to use against Forbes...

...IN THE TANK Surely few things in life can be as frustrating for a writer as thinking that you have written a puff piece about a politician you admire, and then having it backfire...

...But if Hillary did intend to designate a ten-year age of innocence that came after Flowers and before Lewinsky, she'd first have to disqualify Dolly Kyle Browning (who claims her long affair with Clinton ended in 1992), Kathleen Willey (who claimed she was groped in 1993), and Paula Jones (who says she was asked to "kiss it" in 1991...

...Probably the last...

...She refers, for instance, to the period in their lives between Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky, saying, "We did have a very good stretch...

...The Scrapbook isn't sure, then, if this means that Franks doesn't understand her interview with Hillary, didn't read the article published under her byline, or merely puts no limits on the service that she is willing to render to Hillary Clinton...

...For if there's one thing Hillary possesses, more than her husband's gift for embroidery or omission, it's a lethal case of naivete...

...The factual basis of other Hillary statements in the interview has been less scrutinized...

...It should be obvious that if that administration becomes tarnished by scandal, then evangelicals will be harmed by association...

...Well, maybe finding that George W. Bush had done cocaine, but you get the point...

...But Hillary's admission to Talk would seem to put the lie to Clinton's amended lie...

...Even if Hillary confused her time periods, it's hard to see how she could claim, without crossing her fingers, that there were "years and years of nothing...

...DELAY TACTICS Nothing would please the press more than proving that House Republican whip Tom DeLay is single-handedly running Congress behind the scenes...

...But it's hard to believe the latter ever was necessary...

...His own activities may not have helped the cause of liberal evangelicalism...

...As for DeLay, no good deed goes unpunished...

...DeLay did just that, thinking he'd cleared everything with a Watts aide...

...As soon as Marsha Berry, Hillary's spokeswoman, disputed the content of the interview—"She did not say the president's childhood in any way caused his behavior"— Franks got on the horn to the Times to explain that Berry was correct and Franks's own article was wrong: The first lady "never makes a connection between his chaotic childhood—full of alcoholism, physical abuse by his stepfather toward his mother and conflict between his mother and his grandmother—and his sexual infidelities," said Franks...

...Oops...

...On the other hand, Campolo's insight from 12 years ago that close association with the scandal-prone can harm a reputation wasn't all wrong...

...If you could stand with me and give $100, $75, $50 or even $35 or $20—even if you could only give $10 it will help me show that in New York we stick by our own...

...I thought he had conquered it...

...He later put the lie to his own original defense, by admitting to Paula Jones's lawyers that he'd had a sexual encounter with Flowers—in 1977...

...There's Forbes's 1997 fund-raising letter for mentor Al D'Amato, for example: "Whoever emerges as Al's Democratic opponent, Geral-dine Ferraro, Chuck Schumer, or Mark Green, their liberal spending will take us back to the Bad Old Days...

...Then we noticed the date on the clip: It was a remnant from the bad old days of the Reagan administration—May 9, 1987—when Campolo, a leading evangelical liberal, deplored religious conservatives' allowing themselves "to be put into the hip pocket of the Reagan administration...

...Time to work on that chronology again...

...Yes, they stick by their own...

...To play fair, we won't even consider the charges of the Arkansas state troopers who claimed to have procured scores of women for Clinton...

...That must explain the astonishing spectacle of Lucinda Franks's desperate explanation to the New York Times last week that her interview with Hillary Clinton didn't say what it surely did: that in Bill Clinton's childhood can be found the explanation for his misbehavior as an adult...

...Perhaps to his credit, Campolo stood by the president who had called him "my good friend" in the 1994 State of the Union address...

...According to David Maraniss's authoritative biography of Clinton, the president's domineering grandmother "assumed that she was in control," ordering every area of his life to the point of "pushing food in his mouth if necessary...

...THE NEWEST DEMOCRAT It's hard to predict who's going to have more fun running against party-switching Long Island congressman Michael Forbes next year—his Republican opponent in the general election or whatever Democratic rival he ends up attracting in the primaries...

...Forbes was the only rank-and-file House Democrat who got to speak, and he was introduced affectionately by the president he once voted to impeach: "I have letters in my files," said Bill Clinton, "that Mike Forbes wrote me when he was a member of the Republican Caucus about the importance of our education agenda to the children that he represented...

...It is possible, of course, that the first lady actually believes what she's saying...

...Not to mention this "Very Urgent Message" to constituents earlier this very year: "The Democrats have shown their cards...

...But here, according to Franks's article in Talk, is what Hillary Rodham Clinton told her: Quoth Hillary, "He has become more aware of his past and what was causing this behavior...

...Watts, the chairman of the House GOP conference, leaked that DeLay was trying to take over Watts's operation, the press jumped...

...The former Republican was trotted out to share the spotlight with President Clinton at a Democratic press conference on Capitol Hill last week...

...We will not consider the hosts of Susan McDougals and other suspects who've denied having Biblical knowledge of their president...

...Of course, he didn't quit...

...In this decade, his political enthusiasms led him to become a frequent visitor at a White House that eventually did, spectacularly, become tarnished by scandal...

...And those are just the consensual cases (Juanita Broaddrick claims Clinton raped her in 1978...

...A little later, she says, "I thought this was resolved 10 years ago...

...but he didn't go deep enough or work hard enough...

...One can understand the political impulse at work here, but it was probably a mistake for the president to suggest looking through the files for old Mike Forbes letters...

...They want to punish me for voting my conscience on the Articles of Impeachment...

...So when the staff of J.C...

...The Scrapbook, it so happens, found quite a few in its own files, and they make for poignant reading...

...But when Watts found out, he was embarrassed, complained to speaker Denny Hastert, and threatened to resign...

...If, in fact, Hillary intended to stand by her husband's under-oath contention that his tryst with Flowers was limited to 1977, then one should still be wary of Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Connie Hamzy, and Sally Perdue, all of whom claim to have had affairs or to have been propositioned by Clinton in the period between 1977 and 1989...

...for members—all without notifying Watts, whose job it is to do that, or (gasp) without issuing the document on Watts's stationery...

...Bill, of course, went on to deny that he'd had an affair with Flowers, who claimed she'd been involved with Clinton from the late '70s until 1989...

...Why else would she ask, as she did in Talk, "Why do I have to talk about things no one else in politics does...

...The last thing DeLay wants is to take over Watts's operation," said a GOP official...

...It was Hillary who agreed with her husband, during their infamous 1992 60 Minutes interview, that Flowers was nothing more than a "friendly acquaintance...

...Years and years of nothing...

...If it has been ten years since Bill Clinton's last woman-pleasing relapse—that would put us closer to the end of Flowers's alleged 12-year affair (1989) than Bill's single night of passion (1977...

...They are going to throw everything they have at me in the next election because they want revenge...

...THAT WAS THEN And speaking of old files, The Scrapbook was startled to find a clipping from President Clinton's favorite evangelical, his spiritual adviser Tony Campolo, warning that "To tie up evangelicalism with any particular presidential administration is a serious mistake...

...In truth, Watts and Pete Hoekstra of Michigan had visited DeLay earlier and asked for his help in cajoling members into communicating the GOP message...