Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Feb 7, 1999 | There's a line from Monica Lewinsky's Senate-trial deposition that, after all these brutal, cynical months, broke my heart a little. It wasn't important enough to make Saturday's Senate battle of the snippets, but you can read it on page S1216 of her transcript:
Q. Did [Vernon Jordan] ask you why you wanted to leave Washington?A. Yes.
Q. And what was your answer?
A. I gave him the vanilla story of, um, that I -- I think I -- I don't remember exactly what I said. I -- I believe I've testified to this. I think it was something about wanting to get out of Washington.
Q. The vanilla story.
The vanilla story. Isn't that a touching little phrase? Monica Lewinsky has given up on everything she wanted. The man she loves doesn't love her back. That high-powered Washington career is out of the question. All her hoping and scheming and wishing comes down to this crappy little meeting with Vernon Jordan so she can clear town. And she thinks back to it now, and even after all this, after the rain of shit in the ensuing 14 months, she still comes up with this little ice-cream word, this little innocent word, this little waffle cone and a walk with your boyfriend word. (All the more poignant, mind you, from the one woman in America who can never again eat an ice-cream cone without inviting a dirty joke.)
The vanilla story.
Isn't that a touching little phrase?
Monica Lewinsky gave the House managers the vanilla story last Monday --the innocuous story, the stick-to-your-story story that the Clinton defense was hoping for -- and Saturday she shared it with the rest of us. Oh, sure, her testimony included, as the hype had it, three "human faces" (if we graciously include the serpentine Sidney Blumenthal -- "troubled people can get you into a mess. You have to cut yourself off" -- under that rubric). But you and I know that there was only one human face anyone tuned in to see.
Of the broadcast networks only NBC stuck with the trial all day; ABC never bothered, opting for Saturday-morning cartoons, and as CBS gave up around noon, Dan Rather gave a rambling quasi-apology for the lack of drama. "Real life," he drowsed, "isn't like the television show 'Perry Mason.'" (Doesn't somebody at CBS vet this stuff, by the way? You'd think the network would avoid reinforcing its atherosclerotic image by having its doddering anchor pulling pop-culture references from the Cretaceous Era of television.)
Dan had a point, though. The GOP questioning of Monica Lewinsky wasn't like a courtroom drama or a police interrogation. It was more like a bad date. Like an awkward widower trying to get back into the saddle, you could almost see Ed Bryant slicking on some Brylcreem and dropping the needle on an Esquivel platter -- all to impress this 25-year-old honey who showed up with chaperones, pinched lips and knees locked like iron bars. The air of inept seduction has permeated the courtship of Monica Lewinsky since the sting operation last January -- all those hotel assignations, breakfasts, sweet talk and passed notes. It's not a sexual vibe, just a really, really sad one. A glum Bryant characterized himself as Charles Laughton from "Witness for the Prosecution." But he really seems more like the sad sack from the Brian Wilson song "I'm Waiting for the Day," unable to understand how the girl he's courting still carries a torch for that slick dirtbag who did her wrong. In the managers' minds, she should be running into their arms as we reach for our hankies. They're the nice guys. He hurt her.
That, at least, would explain the managers' puzzling insistence Saturday on harping on the president's caddishness; they can't help themselves, even at risk of playing into the "it's just sex" rebuttal. One minute James Rogan's telling us that adultery is not an impeachable offense, the next, he's reminding us, gravely, that Clinton began "using (Lewinsky) for his gratification the very first day he spoke to her"; the president "responded not in love, not in friendship, not even in concern." And Lindsey Graham closed with a petulant personal attack that implied that if he ever runs into the president outside Pop's Choklit Shop, Bill's really gonna be in Dutch.
Maybe there's a strategy here. The House managers have moved from bloodthirsty to dogged to merely pathetic and, at long last, it seems pathetic is where they're most comfortable. How else to explain Henry Hyde's Eeyore-like arias of self-pity in the Senate well? Ever more haggard and bitter, the managers seem to positively wallow in defeat, glorying in posing as dejected nice guys holding their wilted daisies on the front porch.
Having tried the aggressive approach, threats, sweet talk, and bad-mouthing Monica's true love, the House managers are finally giving up and turning to the electorate and history for a little sympathy nooky, which, as any failed lover knows, is the last refuge of a schmuck.
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