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50 percent off
THE PRESIDENT'S TRIAL HAS COME TO AN END,
BUT THE ON-AIR VITUPERATION ISN'T GOING ANYWHERE

BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK | It was one of those days when you couldn't tell the ads in the newspaper from the headlines. "Presidents Day! 50% Off!" cried the banners above washer-dryer sets and double-stuffed mattresses. And indeed, it was the president's day this Friday as President Clinton got 50 percent off, skating on the second article of impeachment by splitting the field straight down the middle, as he has his entire career.

And so we, the professional beneficiaries of the Monica Effect, begin our long, sad journey into ordinary time. Maybe it was just the balmy weather on the Eastern seaboard that day, but the last day of the only news event in living human memory had a sort of elegiac, graduation-day feel, as TV news organizations threw together musical montages of Lewinsky-scandal film clips -- constitutional crisis as video yearbook. There was even, courtesy of National Public Radio, a final exam: The educationally minded broadcast service sent an essay question on "what they have learned during the past year" to eight satirists, correspondents and aspiring Bailey Whites.

Meanwhile, the 100 senators, like chummy upperclassmen at an exclusive Washington prep school, said warm goodbyes and sauntered off for a rest on the family estate. It must have been with a perverse sense of humor that Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., set the deadline for the vote on the Friday before a Senate recess, affording us the spectacle of a line of senators -- airline tickets in one hand, hailing a taxicab Alanis Morrisette-style with the other hand -- saying they can't wait to get back to "doing the people's business" (a euphemism, I believe, used when a congressman or White House staffer is indisposed in the washroom -- don't even ask what "turning to my legislative agenda" means).

What have we learned over the past year? For one, during the past week, we've learned that the members of the U.S. Senate are sage superbeings whose every vanity must be indulged for the good of the republic. The last few days have been a cavalcade of Senate ass-kissing, a generally weary, grateful consensus that the imperious, secretive decisions of a hundred pompous solons are preferable to messy, bickersome direct democracy and public discussion.

Flattered ceaselessly as an island of comity in a nation gone mad, the Senate has shown us that there are certain things stronger than partisanship, and the greatest of these is the feeling of superiority to one's fellow man. Certainly, the opponents of impeachment who have swelled this magazine's readership may have enjoyed the Senate's considered decision to crap on the House managers, who from Day One it regarded as a truckload of country cousins who showed up at their ancestral home with a dead possum to cook for dinner. But that enjoyment has come at the price of a nostalgic genuflection before an antidemocratic 19th-century process. And unfortunately, the widespread public disparagement of the media enabled senators to vote against public debate on the final vote on the grounds that they'd involuntarily turn into grandstanding buffoons if exposed to the cameras -- only to leave the closed discussion to grandstand before the cameras.

For what have we learned during the past year? That we'd all be better people without a runaway media, an easy criticism that sanctifies a lot of bad faith. But we did see the excesses of the 24-hour news cycle reprised Friday, when the cable news networks were left to cover a red-letter, this-day-in-history event with little news to report. That left them spending hours, for instance, parsing Clinton's terse answer to the "forgiveness" question shouted after his post-trial statement like starving men trying to make dinner out of a kidney bean. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer talked gravely about how Clinton's aides had debated whether he should give the statement as spoken or written: "We'll have to see for sure as we do some reporting over the next couple of hours." With all due respect -- Blitzer has done yeoman's work through most of the scandal -- how 'bout just knocking off and grabbing a brew, Wolf? The nation will survive.

Network analysts and White House pool reporters, conditioned by months of Kremlinology -- What does that tie mean? Will Hillary hold his hand or Buddy's leash? -- seemed loath to accept that there was nothing left to dissect. CNN's Bill Schneider gamely identified Bill Clinton's base of support among a group he identified as -- unveiling this coinage with a flourish -- "the New Rich." (Like the nouveau riche, but they speak English.) Meanwhile, reporters peppered White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart at an afternoon news conference: Did the president have lunch? Why did the White House lawyers leave for lunch by the northwest gate? How much was spent in legal fees? Once the questioning turned to Kosovo and upcoming legislation, it was pretty clear the significant stuff was over, and the news nets cut away -- making it all the more strange to hear a Fox correspondent babbling about how anxious the White House press corps was to start covering "anything but impeachment."

N E X T_ P A G E | Is it really over?