Reporters and television camera crews have spent so much time breathlessly broadcasting live from the White House lawn during the Clinton calamity that they wore out the grass and turned the area–fittingly–into a mud pit where nothing would grow.
In presidential crises of the past, the grass would rebound when reporters stopped stomping on it and moved on to other stories breaking somewhere else.
But not this time.
The White House groundskeepers have given up on the lawn. As the Monica Lewinsky revelations of January persisted into spring, then summer and now autumn, a chunk of the White House grass was covered with gravel, a permanent patio for the media hordes.
Even as the rest of the country seems to be moving on to other things, telling inquiring journalists to “get a life,” Washington remains a city consumed with the Clinton story. For the Inside the Beltway crowd, the story of what President Clinton did, and what might happen to him, is their life.
The effect is a near-total disconnect between the capital and the rest of America, where the citizenry in beauty shops, taverns, aerobics classes, assembly lines and living rooms is sounding increasingly like Josh Bukowski, a regular at Mojoe’s Coffee House in southwest suburban Orland Park: “Let’s just drop it.”
Not so fast, is the reply in D.C., where House Republicans vowed Tuesday to push toward a formal impeachment inquiry within the next two weeks. Washington is filled with journalists, bureaucrats, pundits, lawyers, members of Congress, congressional staffers, think tanks, lobbyists and more whose livelihood, literally, depends on what happens in Washington.
Whether writing stories, preparing reports, briefing bosses, drafting subpoenas, spinning the media, churning out data–or feeding, clothing, housing, doing photocopying and dry cleaning for the writers, churners, spinners and so forth, Washington is the classic one-industry town.
How can you expect the people in Washington to change the subject when it’s the only subject anybody they talk to is talking about?
“I really believe (Independent Counsel) Ken Starr thinks everyone else in the world is as interested in this as he is,” said legal secretary Christina Batey, 25, as she lunched Tuesday in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Chicago. “I feel like the whole thing has gotten way, way, way out of control.”
Consider the pre-video spin that seemed to consume the chatter in Washington where the conventional doomsday analysis was that the Monday broadcast of Clinton’s grand jury testimony could be his undoing. The reality: His job performance rating went up as much as 9 points after the broadcast, depending on which poll you read.
National polls stubbornly reflect the public’s longtime view of the scandal. The CBS poll showed the president’s approval rating jumped to 68 percent from 59 after the videotape aired; ABC News’ poll showed him holding steady before and after the video at 60 percent, and a CNN/USA Today poll had him at 66 percent approval on Monday after the video, up 6 points from Sunday, before it aired.
More important, the polls showed, between 6 and 7 of every 10 Americans do not want the president to resign or be impeached, even if 80 percent do not buy his legalistic definition of “sexual relations.”
A majority of Americans surveyed also do not think Republicans in Congress should have released his videotaped grand jury testimony and think Clinton was correct in refusing to answer prosecutors’ explicit questions about details of behavior with Lewinsky.
Even Mayor Richard Daley weighed in on the unreality of Washington, declaring Tuesday at the opening of a new grocery store in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood, a genuine news event for the residents there, that: “If you had a penny for every word uttered in Washington, D.C., you’d end the deficit. It’s entertainment.”
Far from hanging on Clinton’s every televised word Monday, Daley said, “I didn’t see any of the president’s (testimony).” Instead, he took the day off: “I did a 90-mile bike ride, which I enjoyed.”
It’s not just Outside the Beltway America that thinks there is more to life than a blue Gap dress, e-mail about “the Big Creep” and parsing the precise moment when presidential pawing constitutes sex. Even German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said release of the Clinton videotape “makes me vomit.”
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Closer to the Loop, receptionist Jamie Dyer spoke for a yawning populace saying, “Get over it. He had sex. Who cares? Get a life.”
Dyer, who works at Tan Bodies, a Gold Coast salon, offered an explanation of why the American public seems less than outraged by reports about the president’s perfidious pastime.
“I’m sure we’ve all lied and cheated,” said Dyer. “I have not heard any talk of Clinton in the whole building. I have heard a lot of talk about baseball.”
That could be another explanation for Washington’s obsession with the Clinton story. Chicago has–depending on whether you count the White Sox–two professional baseball teams, and a genuine hero in Sammy Sosa. Washington has no major-league baseball and few, if any, heroes. Thus, the need to fill idle hours with talk of presidential impeachment.
Then there was the empathy factor. Filling up his Mercedes sedan at a Vernon Hills gas station, Rick Byrd, 44, a North Carolina college professor said, “Personally, I can relate. Young women I’ve taught at school have been attracted to me. It’s flattering and tempting.”
Reflecting the reality of an America where divorce is rampant and adultery commonplace, Byrd said, “Any man going through a midlife crisis could be exploited like Clinton has been. There’s not one perfect person on Earth. They’re crucifying him.”
Or, to put it another way, “There ain’t no man in the world who would admit publicly that he cheated on his wife.” That from Steve Vole, 36, of Lincolnshire, the service manager at Ernie’s Auto Body in Vernon Hills.
“He has the most important job in the world,” Vole said of Clinton. “Let him do it.”
In another capital, Springfield, at the newsstand in the Illinois Capitol building, a reporter –one not covering Clinton or his misdeeds–was almost pushed aside by a citizen trying to buy a newspaper filled with news of the president’s videotaped testimony.
“Oh, I guess you want to read about Bill Clinton too,” said the reporter. “No,” the man replied, “I just want the lottery numbers.”
All it takes is personal tragedy, observed Jimmy Ciavirelli, 40, a Chicago potato chip delivery salesman, to put the Clinton story in perspective.
“I watched my mom die the most painful death from cancer and less than six months later, my brother jumped out a window and I had a friend got his chest blown away by some druggie,” said Ciavirelli. Of Clinton’s misdeeds, he said, “This is nothing.”
He added:”People are looking for ways to be happy. Maybe their wives don’t love them and they look for that love somewhere else. . . . He’s (Clinton) a human being. So he made a mistake. Nobody’s perfect. He shouldn’t be haunted by it for the rest of his life.”
“Congressmen should take a few days off and go home to their districts and find out what their people want,” said Lowell Hedberg, a salesman at Cue-N-Cushion, a billiards store in downtown Elmhurst.
At Mojoe’s, the suburban coffee shop, employee Amy Groth, 28, of Tinley Park, said that nine months ago, when the story of Clinton’s affair first broke, “People were talking about it a lot, saying who they thought was right and who was wrong.”
But, she said, “Now all the customers pretty much talk about is when it will be over.’