The Breakfast Table

Getting Caught With His Pants Down

Dear Tucker,

I think your explanation of the Gore-is-dead phenomenon is pretty sound, if a depressing comment on the mores of journalism. (If anything, there is even more evidence today that Gore still has a pulse: He’s gaining in Florida, and Bush would still need a miracle to take California.) But here’s another question for the ladybug: Why are you particularly anxious to see this election end? Do you always feel this way as voting day approaches? Or has there been something especially dispiriting about this campaign–other than the fact that both candidates have mostly ignored all voters under the age of 65 unless they live in Michigan?

I’m groping for an explanation on my own behalf, too. I’ve been loath to admit to myself how turned off I am to the whole thing at this point. (Though I am clear that I’m looking forward to an end to the charming candidate e-mails that clot my in-box by the dozen: GAO DISPUTES DEMOCRATS ON NURSING HOMES. BUSH GETS IT WRONG ON SOCIAL SECURITY–AGAIN. Can there be any e-mail greeting less alluring than REVISED CHENEY ADVISORY?)

But my obsession today is with the amazing interview Clinton gave to Esquire, complaining about the fact that the Republicans haven’t yet apologized for impeaching him. Just when you think you finally see Clinton whole, he goes and ratchets up the self-pity another notch. Only last Friday I went back and read Joe Klein’s remarkably fair-minded retrospective of the Clinton administration, published a month or so ago in The New Yorker. It left me in an unaccustomed state of mild Clinton nostalgia, especially for its account of the ways Clinton–somewhat invisibly, beneath all the swoops and dives and lightning and thunder of his two terms in office–has bettered the lot of the working poor. So reading Clinton’s latest–including the White House’s whining about how Esquire had promised to embargo the interview until the election was over–was just one last chance to stare into the clanking machinery that drives Clinton to drive us crazy.

Though he is obviously not the only pol who is given to self-delusion. Jim Moran, for those not up on Virginia politics, is a Democratic congressman (Is he, in fact, your congressman?) who finds himself on the front page of the Washington Post this morning because he took a $25,000 unsecured loan from his good friend who just happened to be a lobbyist for Schering-Plough; five days later, Moran just happened to co-sponsor a bill to extend the company’s patent for the drug Claritin. All a coincidence, says Moran.

Of course what’s really interesting about this story is the part that no one will ever talk about, which is that Moran and his friend met when both were Hill staffers. Twenty-three years later, the one who had spent five terms in Congress was financially desperate–all the more so for his efforts to solve his problems in the stock market; the one who had stepped through the revolving door to become a lobbyist was in a position to write a friend a check for $25,000 at a favorable interest rate, no big deal. These relationships–and the envy and fury they inspire in people who earn public-sector salaries–are part of the very fabric of Washington and one of the reasons that someone will one day write a great Washington novel.

Which is not to say that Moran wasn’t remarkably dense, at best; only that the familiar elements of these Impropriety Dramas leave out all the great human stuff, which you need to know in order to understand that a guy who pockets a big loan from a lobbyist friend and then carries his water really can see himself as an innocent. The longer I live in Washington, the more convinced I am that nine out of 10 people who end up on the front page of the Post for shady dealing really haven’t admitted to themselves what was wrong with what they did.

Am I getting soft in my old age to find this aspect of the story so much more compelling than the simple fact that Moran got caught with his pants down?

Yours,
Marjorie