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chatterbox: Gossip, speculation, and scuttlebutt about politics.

Part Two: Why Mr. Livingston ...

Walter Shapiro
Posted Saturday, Dec. 19, 1998, at 11:28 AM ET

A mortified Chatterbox will never again underestimate the furies of the Washington morals squad. Little more than 12 hours after Chatterbox smugly assumed that House Speaker Never-to-Be Bob Livingston would survive the Hustler hysteria, there was the guy on the House floor demanding that Bill Clinton resign--and vowing to do the same thing himself. In Chatterbox's checkered career as a prophet, the Livingston flip-flop will go down as this column's "DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN" moment.

But Chatterbox will not resign. He will never resign, for he knows that Americans secretly hate quitters no matter what they tell the pollsters. Also, Chatterbox was right about the big point: Livingston did not deserve to be outed. If we take our cues from Hustler this time around, pretty soon Washington sex scandals will be launched by salacious graffiti on men's room walls.

--Walter Shapiro

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Walter Shapiro has covered the last seven presidential campaigns and just completed a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He can be reached at .
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