From today's SLATE (9/12/98) to expand your readiong list
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FLYTRAP TODAY - David Plotz on Monica the stalker, Bill the cad.
Saturday, Sept. 12
High School, Not High Crimes Reading the Starr Report.
By David Plotz
So this is what $40 million buys these days: A two-buck Harlequin
with a stalker for a heroine and a cad for a hero.
As you've heard by now, Starr's report is utterly damning. But it is
damning in its own small way. Starr proves that Clinton perjured
himself when he denied sexual relations with Monica. (Read the
already famous and not-to-be-repeated-in-mixed-company sections of
the report for evidence that Clinton touched Monica sexually.)
Starr likewise demolishes Clinton's claim that he didn't try to
influence Betty Currie's testimony. Clinton says he was refreshing
his own memory when he told Currie: "I never touched her, right?" As
Starr notes, it's preposterous for Clinton to claim he was
"refreshing" his memory by telling Currie something he knew to be
false. He was obviously trying to get her to go along with his
story. Starr is equally persuasive when he argues that Clinton
concocted a scheme to make the gifts disappear. And he is convincing
when he says that Clinton got Monica to lie in her affidavit in the
Jones case.
Starr, in short, has proved...exactly what we already knew. His PR
strategy is backfiring. His prosecutors have been leaking damaging
evidence for months to gin up public interest in the case. Now these
leaks have returned to haunt them. The report arrives not as a
revelation but a shrug. There are no new allegations, no new claims
of presidential villainy. What ever happened to Kathleen Willey? And
the talking points? And Bruce Lindsey's supposed thuggery? And the
alleged second intern?
Clinton's defenders are vindicated (sort of): It really does boil
down to a tawdry little affair with a starstruck girl, and the
pathetic-and yes, illegal, but so what?--ways he attempted to cover
it up. The report effectively confirms Clinton's basic defense:
Whatever wrongs he committed were simply those required to cover up
a dumb affair, not grotesque crimes against the state.
The first tactical error is telling Americans only what they already
know. The second is telling the story through Monica. This makes for
fantastic reading-the report is mesmerizing, and emotionally
wrenching--but bad evidence. This tale indicts Clinton more for his
romantic failures than his legal ones. His crimes are against
Monica.
The most telling line of the report is a Linda Tripp quotation buried
in a footnote: Monica had a "photographic memory of the
relationship." The report is that memory, and it is exactly what men
imagine that their ex-girlfriends do: Compile an elaborate, complete
dossier of every moment of their relationship, and every single
thing that you ever did wrong. This is romance as seen through the
eyes of an obsessive, loving, insecure twit.
The story begins in sweetness. She is the perfect Cosmo girl-a do-me
feminist who believes in Titanic and Altoids. They seduce each other
with flirtatious glances. She delivers him a pizza and shows him her
underwear. Of course a romance is kindled. He's selfish and tender,
all at once. The sex is rote: He kisses her lips, kisses her breast,
touches her a little, then unzips and demands service. (Even the
president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked: It
apparently hurts his back to lie down during sex)
But still, he calls her "Sweetie" and "Baby" and "Dear." He strokes
her hair and tells her she is beautiful. She calls him "Handsome"
and tells him her ideas on the administration and on "education
reform" (What were they? America wants to know). She falls in love
with him, dreams that he might leave Hillary, convinces herself he
loves her.
There is something missing. They never talk. "This was another of
those occasions when I was babbling on about something, and he just
kissed me, kind of to shut me up, I think." He chats on the phone
during the act. (Dick Morris, Rep. Sonny Callahan, Rep. John Tanner,
former Rep. Jim Chapman-did the president sound distracted?) She
loses her White House job and gets angry, but does she really
deserve to be transferred because she is sleeping with the boss?
The romance doesn't last either. The sex gets rarer and rarer. He
dumps her, but she won't stay away. She brings gifts and sends
erotic postcards, wants to talk, and demands a better job. She feels
him up in a rope line, offers him an Altoids blowjob, but nothing
works. He has a million excuses: He's late for a state dinner. Or he
vowed after his 40th birthday that he would be faithful (that's a
good one!). She's abandoned, despairing, heartsick.
(By the end, you almost feel sorry for Clinton. Monica is a nightmare
romance: What started with no-strings-attached quickies becomes an
endless round of emotional conversations about the "relationship."
They had only 10 sexual encounters, yet it dragged on for years!
This is, incidentally, why I doubt there is another Monica out
there. How could he have time for her? In a hilarious footnote,
Vernon Jordan reminds Monica that Clinton has other things to think
about besides her, that he is after all, leader of the free world.)
So what are readers left with? Too much detail and too little. We
learn everything about Clinton's sexual habits, but the report
excludes inconvenient characters. Linda Tripp, Lucianne Goldberg,
and erratic mother Marcia Lewis are virtually absent from the
narrative. Starr doesn't explain how Lewinsky came to the attention
of Jones' lawyers, hardly mentions Tripp's sleazy taping, and
doesn't discuss Tripp's planned book deal.
Starr also diminishes the role of Clinton's aides to make the
president look worse. By painting aides such as John Podesta and
Sidney Blumenthal-who were not born yesterday-as innocent, wronged
dupes, Starr keeps the focus on what he sees as the singularity of
evil, Bill Clinton.
But Starr doesn't seem to realize that what he is reporting is not
really evil. It is more mundane: everyday selfishness, weakness, and
venality, and the efforts to hide it. Monica was right: Clinton is
just a Big Creep. He can rest easy because the report-thin on public
crime and fat on private squalor-makes him safe from impeachment.
But it also makes him impossible to take seriously again.
Some Other Juicy Details
1) For the most pathetic part of the report, check the footnotes of
any quotation from Monica's writing. Virtually every one of those
footnotes contains the phrases: "spelling corrected" or "spelling
and grammar corrected" or "spelling and punctuation corrected."
2) Clinton once told Monica that they need to concoct cover stories
to explain their phone sex because "he suspected that a foreign
embassy (he did not specify which one) was tapping his telephones."
Two thoughts:
a) Foreign spies tapping White House phones!?! Who's doing it? Has
anything been done to stop it? Why hasn't anyone investigated this?
b) What a great liar! Of course she believed him.
3) Hidden in footnote 210 of the narrative: "They engaged in
oral-anal contact as well." Now Starr wants to criminalize kissing
the president's ass.
4) Starr repeatedly exposes Clinton's shiftiness with language. Time
and again, he catches Clinton trying to claim that words mean what
they clearly don't. A favorite example: Clinton told the Jones
lawyers that he was never alone in the Oval Office with Lewinsky.
Clinton then testified to the grand jury that he hadn't lied because
when he said he was never alone with Monica in the "Oval Office,"
what he meant by "Oval Office" was "Oval Office complex," which
includes rooms outside the Oval Office where Currie and Secret
Service officers are stationed.
5) So much for the saintly Betty Currie. In devastating detail, the
report shows that Currie did everything she could to abet the
affair. She came into work after hours simply to admit Lewinsky to
the White House. She persuaded the Secret Service not to record
Lewinsky's visits in their logs. She fielded Monica's phone calls
and communicated with her using a code name. Other staffers
chastised Clinton for his misbehavior, but Currie let him do it and
never seems to have said a word. |
