Dear Stuart:

What timing.

Here we are, back at Slate, just in time for the President to settle the Paula Jones lawsuit. The unthinkable becomes a footnote. What a difference a year can make. If he’d settled it before his January deposition, none of this would have happened. All he had to do was say he was sorry for whatever it was that he couldn’t remember, and then explain the next day that he said it to protect his friends, family, etc. from the intrusion on their privacy….

Which leads me to my favorite question. Why didn’t he settle before testifying? How could his lawyers have ever let him go into that deposition, if they’d known how vulnerable he was? Here he is being sued for allegedly demanding a blowjob from a 24-year-old employee, and you know your client had a secret relationship involving blowjobs with another 24-year-old employee would you let him go into a deposition? Not to mention the independent counsel down the block, the media, your political enemies, etc.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that the lawyers didn’t know the truth–that they thought Monica Lewinsky was a stalker with a crush, that it was handled, under control. The lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client; he loses the objective judgment that the lawyer is supposed to provide. Bill Clinton didn’t want to tell his lawyer (and/or his wife) the truth about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, and because of that, he’s had to tell the world….

But does the world care?

The President received a three-minute standing ovation last night at a fundraiser at the home of Power Rangers producer Chaim Saban, who now works for Rupert Murdoch. All told, he raised $4 million in the last 3 days. He is the best fundraiser Democrats have, still. It is not the picture of a man on the verge of impeachment. What is going on in Washington hardly seems real when you leave it….

I know. We have permission to talk of other things this week. I’m clipping, I really am. But I keep coming back to this. This is what the country and the world are doing right now. It is the international soap opera.

I know you respect Ken Starr. But tell me. Are you at all troubled by the kind of investigation his office conducted? By the precedent it sets? By the atmosphere of sexual “gotcha” that it’s created?

I don’t want to know about Henry Hyde’s past, or anyone else’s. But I think for now, it’s all fair game, and my guess is that there are some pretty nervous folks on Capitol Hill, and maybe even in the news media. All I can say is that I’m happy to be an old married lady at the breakfast table with you….

Best, Susan

PS Someone said last night that if Edward Bennett Williams had still been alive, he’d have asked Betty Currie if she thought the President ought to settle that lawsuit….

From: Stuart Taylor Jr.
Subject: Testosterone Charged Males
Posted Monday, Sept. 28, 1998, at 4:52 PM ET

Dear Susan:

Ah, the Big He again.

I had rather hoped that, in keeping with the scrambling of gender roles that keeps life interesting these days, you would have started off with a learned disquisition (a la George Will) on the solemn rhythms of the great game of baseball that have brought us to the historic home-run hysteria now consuming the country. I could then have confessed that, being a busy soccer mom, and having had my fan’s heart broken by the Phillies’ swan-dive in the 1964 pennant race (when you were too young to care), I haven’t the time or interest to follow the fatuous feats of testosterone-charged male maulers of little spheroids.

All true. And yet, I must confess that when I saw the New York Times headline about Mark Whatshisname hitting the magic 70, my sentimental regret for the eclipsing of the great Ruth-who looks rather like a sad-faced Baby Huey to Whatshisname’s muscle-bound Batman-was tinged by a momentary desire to be in awe of Whatshisname. Then I read the first paragraph, in which Mark McGwire (I’ve got that down for now) said: “I’m in awe of myself right now.” That spoiled it for me. Guess I’m old-fashioned.

Then I picked up The Washington Post and found, on page A6, the photo of the day: the Rev. Jesse Jackson standing hand-in-hand (above heads) with two other grinning males, one of whom was identified as “the Rev. Jerry Falwell.” Quickly I raced through the article-which said that Jackson was weighing yet another campaign for the presidency–to find out whether this was some other Rev. Jerry Falwell. But no, it was the one we have all known and loved since long before he helped put out the scurrilous “Clinton Chronicles.” Falwell and Jackson had united in the interest of helping Appalachian mineworkers in some unspecified way (which presumably would not include considering any applications that they might send to prestigious colleges on a colorblind basis).

I’m all for that, but in the politics-makes-strange-bedfellows department, I ask you to guess: Which of these reverends was quoted saying of Bill Clinton in 1992: “I know who he is, what he is. There’s nothing he won’t do. He’s immune to shame. Move past all the nice posturing and get really down in there with him, you find absolutely nothing…nothing but an appetite”?

If you guessed: The same one who was dispatched by the White House this January to volunteer his ministering to presidential secretary Betty Currie, perhaps to rescue her from any temptation to tell Kenneth Starr’s prosecutors the unvarnished facts, while instructing her on Larger Truths; the same one who subsequently accompanied the President and Currie and Bruce Lindsey on a tour through Africa; and who more recently has been seen shuttling between the private-healing-process in the White House family quarters and every TV talk show on which he could publicize his role in that process-you win.

Which brings us back to Big He. A hard subject to avoid, these days. To respond to some of your points: He could, of course, have settled the Paula Jones lawsuit the day before it was filed in May 1994 with some kind of non-apology apology and zero dollars. Instead, he dispatched his taxpayer-paid propagandists to smear her as trailer-trash and to utter such now-proven whoppers as “he was never alone in a hotel with her.” He could have settled it for $750,000 or so and some kind of apology before his deposition. He could have gone into his Jan. 17 deposition and refused on principle (and perhaps on the basis of a Fourth-Amendment privacy right claim) to answer any questions about alleged consensual affairs, and could then have appealed Judge Susan Webber Wright’s order that he answer such questions.

Instead, he did the same thing that he did when Gennifer Flowers showed up in 1992, and when his draft-evasion history started leaking, and when people asked him about pot-smoking, and when he promised a politically popular middle class tax cut, and when he pledged four months ago that he would not allow Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to commit in Kosovo the kind of atrocities that had been perpetrated in Bosnia: He lied.

He not only lied to the judge, lied to his Cabinet, lied to his aides, lied to the nation, lied to the grand jury, and is lying still. He also lied to his lawyers, it now seems clear. At least, if he didn’t lie to them, they should be disbarred for knowingly sponsoring perjured testimony. And when you say (as is commonly said). “How could his lawyers have ever let him go into that deposition?” I am tempted to remind you that the President was not working for Bob Bennett; Bennett was working for him. Clinton, not Bennett, knew the true facts. Clinton, not Bennett, decided not to offer a settlement that Paula Jones would accept. I know that it is a common conceit to speak in terms of what lawyers “let” their clients do, but I think it an odd one, especially when then client is the most powerful man in the world and a former law professor with a steel-trap mind to boot.

Does the world care? Some of it does. Time will tell whether there are enough of us until-now-Democratic voters who will never vote for any Democrat who rallied to the defense of President Clinton to make a difference. Perhaps the Democratic Party will do fine; perhaps it will follow Clinton to its own destruction. In the meantime, multi-millionaire Hollywood types and legal shakedown-artists like Clinton’s trial-lawyer friends still love him, perhaps because lying is first-nature to many of them too, perhaps because they benefit financially from their association with him. My guess is that the fact that lots of liberal Democratic journalists (and others) in Washington find Clinton’s conduct far more serious than the not-very-trustworthy polls suggest is true of many other Americans and reflects the fact that Washington journalists have paid closer attention to the details, as it is their job to do.

Liberal Democrats did not advocate government by poll and plebiscite when the issues were (say) what the Supreme Court or Congress should do about school segregation, or civil rights legislation, or racial preferences, or abortion, or Miranda rights; why do they advocate it now? Why not wait, at least, until the public has had a chance to absorb the detailed facts and their legal and moral implications through the impeachment process before assuming that transient poll samples represent the popular will?

As to my view of Starr: As I’ve said before, I think his partisan Republican ties made him the wrong person (if only as a matter of appearances) for this job, especially in light of his lack of prosecutorial experience. And I’ve been critical of some serious mistakes that I think he’s made, such as failing to put the pornographic portions of his report into a sealed appendix and failing to quote more conspicuously such exculpatory facts as Monica Lewinsky’s statement that “nobody ever asked me to lie.” I also think House Republicans (and Democrats too) are being too partisan. But on the whole, I think that Starr has been professional in handling a dirty job that-under the Independent Counsel Statute-somebody had to do, in the face of demagogic smears by people like Hillary Rodham Clinton; most of his mistakes warrant criticism not on grounds of any unfairness to the President (I’ve seen little or none of that), but on the ground that Starr has hurt himself, and allowed the Clinton camp to divert attention from the relevant facts, by being blind to appearances.

I really am not very troubled by Starr’s investigative methods. Since I am afraid I’ve gone on too long, why don’t I defer elaborating on why I’m not troubled by Starr’s conduct until you advise me what, exactly, you think should trouble me.

Best, Stuart

From: Susan Estrich
Subject: I Better Switch To Tea
Posted Monday, Sept. 28, 1998, at 5:27 PM ET

Dear Stuart:

You are eloquent as always, and it leaves me so deeply saddened. That you and I should be disagreeing over this and not fighting together for something–that this is what our country is doing, with the relief provided by the drug-induced Mr. McGwire (how do you explain that one to your kids?)–leaves me feeling impoverished by the state of our politics.

The President lied. He is still trying to avoid saying he did so in ways that would imply that he is guilty of any felonies. Cue Ball Carville or whatever he calls himself is back with his act, while Dick Morris holds forth on Drudge. It promises to go on and on. I hate it.

This is not a fight I would choose, not one I want, not one I think will produce any winners. But on the question of impeachment, which this has unbelievably risen to, I think Starr’s report does not support it. You’re right that he lied, and that he has lied before; but it is also the case that many men lie about sexual relationships, and that we have known about this flaw in this man since we elected him. We elected him anyway, and the results of that election should not be overturned by a prosecutor pursuing an investigation that most prosecutors would have deemed at the start to be going nowhere that they would go, in other words, not to be leading to a prosecutable offense. Starr’s report is the case at its worst, and it’s not a case for impeachment. That is a judgment the country should make; it is a poll sensitive judgment precisely because the founders entrusted it to the House, and then the Senate, not the Courts. Even the Chief Justice who sits in the Senate presides, but doesn’t rule. As for the facts, which I’ve had plenty of, they turn out to be, in some respects, better for the President than I thought; which is to say, her behavior is even worse. Young feminists who were the champions of sexual power are now cringing at what it looks like in practice; if this is how you sleep your way to the top, maybe we should go back to trying to earn it. But we’re not going to change anybody’s mind on this, which I think is the significance of the polls.

Jesse Jackson. What can I say? What is the state of black leadership in America today?

Last month, Mayor Willie Brown compared Justice Clarence Thomas to the Ku Klux Klan in calling for black groups to shun him as a speaker. In a speech to an organization of black sociologists, Brown said that the group would never invite a Klan leader, and that Thomas’ views represented “legitimizing of the Ku Klux Klan.” Brown said Justice Thomas “must not be allowed any comfort from any of us…. He should be reduced to talking to only white conservatives.” Brown’s criticism followed the controversy at the National Bar Association, where Judge Higginbotham led the protest arguing that Thomas should not have been invited…I asked my research assistant to see if she could find any black leaders, or liberals, who had criticized Brown? Guess what?

So what next? Does Gore watch the World Series with Jackson?

My kids go to an amazing diverse private school in Los Angeles, which is full of successful blacks. Every day at drop off, I see more successful blacks than many white professionals do in a month. But here’s the thing I always notice. None of them are in politics. They’re in sports, business, law, entertainment, medicine, etc.

But they’re not in politics. Who would want to be? Some of them, I have no doubt, have been guilty of adultery, and would lie about it, even, if asked, which they certainly would be.

What about all the other issues under the sun? Will you never support a Democrat, who stood by Clinton, even if you agree with him on more of those issues than anyone else? Have you become a single-issue voter, then?

I’m asked all the time whether I’d be defending President Gingrich if he did the same thing. Of course, I wouldn’t. Laura Ingraham would. But I wouldn’t be out there calling for his impeachment, and you and I know that if feminists were, they’d be ridiculed for it and accused of turning sex into a capital crime. I think the reason there is so much politics in this one is because there’s so much room for it….

On to the German elections…. How much time do you think cable news will spend on that, and how much on the Big Him?

As they say in Hollywood on Monday, see you at Mortons.

Best,

Susan

From: Stuart Taylor Jr.
Subject: Tea and Sympathy
Posted Monday, Sept. 28, 1998, at 8:28 PM ET

It saddens me to find you saddened. I thought we were just having the kind of short-run dialogue that the framers intended us to have to help figure out what to do about things political in the long run. And in the long run, of course, we’re all dead. Now that’s sad.

I would be delighted to figure out something that you and I could fight together for, or against. I think that we probably agree about many more things than we disagree about. And even when we disagree, it’s not always a typical left-right thing, since you are not that far to the left of center, nor I to the right, in my view. Actually, on a lot of issues I’d put myself left of center. If memory serves, for example, you sided somewhat reluctantly with the Virginia Military Institute against the women’s groups that were suing to force it to accept women; I sided somewhat reluctantly with the women’s groups.

So maybe we should form an organization to promote some stuff we can agree about. The most difficult task in forming any organization is, of course, to find a suitable acronym for its mission. For example, NOW is already taken by the National Organization for Women. THEN, as far as I know, has not been taken. So one possibility would be an organization named Those Hypocrites Excite Nausea. But that doesn’t go to the heart of our mutual unhappiness with the state of our politics. How about: CRALP, for Citizens Repelled by All Lying Politicians? That would cover Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and a lot of others, perhaps clearing the decks for a better class of public official faster than the most stringent term limits law could ever do.

As to impeachment, I really think the case gets stronger the more one focuses on the details of Clinton’s lies, and their context and motives, rather than on the general notion of “lying about sex.” I don’t care much about the president’s penchant for extramarital sexual affairs. I voted for him in 1992 even though I was sure he had had one with Gennifer Flowers and was lying about it. I would have preferred it if he had refused to discuss such matters by taking a principled stand for the right to privacy, but I didn’t deem a lie to the public about consensual sex disqualifying, considering the alternative candidates. It was when he carried the lying into the realm of perjury and obstruction of justice in legal proceedings–rather than settling the Paula Jones case or refusing to answer–that it became impeachable in my mind. The Constitution prescribes impeachment for “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” And perjury is a felony crime in the same range of seriousness as bribery.

A test for those who think Clinton should be given a free pass for perjury in the Paula Jones deposition (not to mention in his grand jury testimony): If we really believe that sexual harassment defendants should not have to answer questions about consensual sexual affairs in the workplace with subordinates, then we should change the law to bar plaintiffs from posing such questions. That would, of course, make it much harder for sexual harassment plaintiffs to prove their cases. But since the privacy benefits to us all would make such a tradeoff worthwhile, in my view, I have proposed a new law-Monica’s Law, I call it-to protect future Bill Clintons from having to answer such questions.

Would the feminist groups that are now acting as Clinton apologists support Monica’s Law, and thus explicitly adopt the principle they are implicitly espousing ? Not a chance. Would the Clinton Administration have supported such a law, had it been proposed as an amendment to (say) the Violence Against Women Act? Not a chance. In this respect, the president is hoist on his own petard.

I disagree, by the way, with your view that no ordinary prosecutor would pursue such a case. If Clinton had been, say, the Mayor of New York, and events had unfolded in a similar way, I think that he would have been prosecuted by the U.S. attorney, convicted, and sent to prison. And it’s altogether clear that even if Starr had sent Linda Tripp and her tapes to the Justice Department and said that he was too busy (and had too much baggage) to take this one on–as I wish he had done–Attorney General Reno would have been compelled by the independent counsel statute to seek appointment of another independent counsel to investigate the matter. Hoist on another petard: Clinton signed the statute in 1994, after it had been reenacted by Democrats over the opposition of leading Republicans.

I don’t share your pessimism about black leaders, although I do have an extremely low opinion of Jesse Jackson, Willie Brown, Maxine Waters, and the others whose leadership consists largely of demagogic efforts to whip up black resentment of white people. I wrote in Colin Powell for president in 1996; there’s a black leader one can admire. There are many more, including such thinkers as Glen Loury and some of the black mayors around the country, not to mention the many admirable black leaders in business, academia, sports, entertainment, and elsewhere. But don’t look for admirable black leaders in the groups that are in the big-lie business of complaining that the problems of black people come down to victimization by whites.

You are right to call my bluff on my suggestion that I will henceforth be a single-issue voter against any Democrat who supports President Clinton in these times. I overstated my case. But for the time being, at least, I would write in someone I like, or back a moderate Republican, or simply stay home rather than vote for any Clinton supporter. If it’s Al Gore–who I’d cut some slack given the difficult position he is in as Clinton’s vice president–in a close race against some loon like Ross Perot, I’d vote for Gore. But my general presumption in voting over the next few years will be that if the Democratic Party continues to rally behind Clinton as the process unfolds, then it deserves to be relegated to marginal status. In this scenario–which I hope can still be averted–if enough honest, moderate Democrats quit in disgust, they can start a new party, or at least have a civilizing influence on the Republicans.

As for Gingrich, if he were president, and had been caught lying to a criminal grand jury after seven months of lying to everyone else, I would very definitely be calling for his impeachment.

Let’s talk about something else tomorrow. I’ll send a brief mail in the morning after I’ve read the morning papers.

Best, Stuart

From: Stuart Taylor Jr.
Subject: Coed Cricket and Faculty Fatwas
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 29, 1998, at 11:17 AM ET

Dear Susan:

This morning’s papers bring welcome relief from you-know-what. The Washington Post reports that the Marlyebone Cricket Club finally voted to allow “ladies” to join, shattering 211 years of sexist tradition; enlightened sentiment apparently coalesced with a felt need for a few million pounds in otherwise-unavailable government and corporate grants to make improvements before World Cup championships come to Marlyebone. Once again, the magic of the marketplace comes to the rescue of human rights!

Less welcome news comes from Iran, where two senior Iranian clerics were quoted saying that “the fatwa against the apostate Rushdie . . . is irrevocable and cannot be changed at any time.” For some reason this reminded me of Hampshire College, where (as related in The Shadow University, a new book by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate) an assistant professor of leftist bent named Jeffrey Wallen almost lost his job in 1989 amid grousing by still-more-leftist colleagues that his teaching was weak on “the Third World Expectation,” and where a 1993 proposal to endorse “the freedom of expression” was voted down by the faculty (26 to 21) after after one professor objected to freedom for “objectionable” views and another (who is now a dean) reminded colleagues that “the First Amendment was written by a rich, white, male slaveowner.” I wonder if Hampshire, or one of our more prestigious politically-correct unversities, has thought of having a course on the multicultural wisdom of the fatwa tradition.

A Post editorial applauds a local government’s prudent decision to drop a proposal to outlaw free-ranging cats by requiring that they be leashed whenever wandering off the owner’s premises. The Post quotes the late, great Adlai Stevenson for the proposition that “it is in the nature of cats to do a certain amount of unescorted roaming.” Not just cats.

More serious stuff–starting on the front page and consuming two full inside pages–comes from New York Times reporter Jill Abramson, who is not exactly shocked, shocked to find that rich lobbyists are thriving in Washington, raking in big bucks for killing tobacco legislation, slicing up the tax code, funneling money to Democrats and Republicans with power, and other stuff that sounds a lot like old news. There are some worthwhile tidbits if you work your way to the end: Washington is now less the pure power town it used to be and more a money town like New York, experts say. Lobbyists are cluttering the once-peaceful Eastern Shore of Maryland with gaudy estates like the ones that have the old-timer nouveau riche in the Hamptons in a snit at the nouveau nouveau riche; political analyst Kevin Phillips contributes the thought that Washington has become what the Founding Fathers feared, “a capital so privileged and incestuous in its dealings that average citizens believe it is no longer accessible to the general public”; American University now has a course in lobbying; leading Democrats like Al Gore are at least as up-to-their-necks in lobbyist buddies as are the traditional tribunes of the rich, the Republicans (who recently signed up our sponsor, Microsoft Corporation, through one of its executives as a member of Team 100, the party’s $100,000-donor club). Former Congressman Tom Downey, a New York Democrat who came to Washington in 1974 as an idealistic “Watergate Baby,” heads a lobbying firm that brought in more than $2 million last year from the likes of Microsoft, Boeing, and Time Warner (my former sponsor). Rejecting the old you-sold-out guilt trip, Downey is quoted saying, “I do more interesting things now than I did as a member of Congress,” and joking that his large home with the hand-painted dining room mural “looks like one of my fund-raisers should be living in it.” Sort-of-sexually-harassing former Senator Bob Packwood is raking in decent bucks lobbying on tax and trade issue. One point that irate populists like Ralph Nader might ponder is that this phenomenon is fed in part by what the reporter calls the “lean salaries of congressional aides,” which (I would add) are lean in part due to the efforts of populists like Ralph Nader. While pure greed is no doubt the main motivator for some lobbyists, others–who might otherwise stay in the public sector to serve the public interest as they see it–are driven into the arms of the lobbying firms by the understandable desire to make enough money to send their kids to college.

The papers are full of sad stories, as always–Kosovo refugees facing the coming of winter; flood victims losing their homes on the Gulf Coast; a family wrestling on whether to pull the plug on a comatose father; partners at Goldman Sachs giving up the planned public offering that had been expected (back when the markets were hot) to bring them $50 to $125 million apiece–but I skimmed over them quickly to skirt the precipice of depression, and took refuge in my favorite newspaper item of the day: a magazine review by Peter Carlson of the Washington Post.

Carlson reports that Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, had unveiled in the New Yorker the true reason for the persecution of our President: Bill Clinton is black. Explains Morrison: “African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: this is our first black president. Blacker than any black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. [Colin Powell, I would infer, is white.] After all, Clinton displayed almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food loving boy from Arkansas.” Carlson wonders: “What would happen if a white writer published a piece suggesting that poverty, single parenthood and junk-food eating were uniquely black characteristics?” Back to you, Susan.

Best, Stuart

From: Susan Estrich
Subject: Lunch
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 29, 1998, at 5:32 PM ET

Dear Stuart:

Now we have found something we can fight against together: The silliness of the academic left, the stupidity of political correctness, and the number of unbelievably sad stories that will get no one’s attention at all today. I am lucky to be teaching in a “conservative” institution, so I miss it all; at Harvard, I was considered practically a right-winger, but at USC, I’m a liberal again. The irony, of course, is that USC educates more black kids from Los Angeles than UCLA, and more graduates of the public schools. We just do it without the politics. I have always believed that you should do your politics outside the classroom; inside, I cross-examine my own thinking. But maybe I should stop teaching the cases I do, since most of them were also written by old white men….

Speaking of which, the list in the New York Times was as stunning as it is familiar. Where is the outrage? I’ve been working with Fred Wertheimer and Common Cause on the campaign finance issue for a decade; it’s back before the Court this year; the Brennan Center has done terrific work trying to lay the groundwork for a change in Buckley. But my confidence in the ability of any law or constitutional construction to change the way things are done, the role of money, the clout of lobbyists, is decreasing. Do we have to get radical? Is the only solution political? How do you stop a nuclear war that has already broken out?

Or one that is about to. The big story here today is that Governor Pete Wilson signed a bill moving the state’s primary up to March 7th. Conventional wisdom is that no one but a well-entrenched establishment candidate–how do you spell Al Gore–will ever be able to afford to compete. Unconventional wisdom: the state is too expensive for even a rich candidate to compete in, and quirky enough to send a message. By the way, what do you think of your fellow Princeton man, Bill Bradley? I think he could do really well out here…Poor Al.

But don’t worry too much. He has a new best friend in Mayor Dick Riordan, according to another front page LA Times story….

I just got home from a funeral for a man who lived a wonderful life. His wife of 51 years was there, along with his three daughters and grandchildren. Their grief was so stunning, so real, that it almost made me jealous. I wanted to have been part of that family, loved by such a wonderful man. I think there is in this country a sort of yearning for all that is good and true, and what we get is a testosterone-boosted home run king and a corrupt Capitol. So I’m ready to sign up and do something good, but when it comes to the state of the world, what it is that one can do seems increasingly hard to figure out.

I’m off to teach. Until cocktails, Susan

PS. I’m glad to hear about the cricket club. In a survey Peter Hart did last year for NBC, women think that sports is the area where the most change been made to equalize things between boys and girls and men and women. The workplace lags far behind. Sort of tells you we’re still a bit short of the equality mark.

From: Stuart Taylor Jr.
Subject: Consensus Breaking Out?
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 30, 1998, at 10:43 AM ET

Dear Susan:

I fear that we may be approaching a dangerous place, if we want anyone to read this stuff: consensus. In grammar school, I was a bit puzzled when teacher told us that the sine qua non (or whatever) of all literature was conflict. At the time, I thought: Why can’t it just be nice? But teacher was mainly right. My agreement with your disdain for the silliness of the academic left and the stupidity of political correctness is so complete that I am left speechless.

But speak I must, if only to earn my keep. Since I have reached an age at which my mind tends to float free through time, space, and subject matters, rumination on the antisocial aspects of consensus brings to mind a fine op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal by Nicholas Von Hoffman, which begins, “Washington played host on Sunday to a throng of indeterminate size demanding all-out war on cancer.” Noting that the crowd was peaceful and orderly, Von Hoffman speculates: “Perhaps the special-interest groups favoring death by painful and humiliating disease were intimidated into staying home by the fame of the featured speakers: Vice President Al Gore, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Cindy Crawford, Sam Donaldson, Michael Milken, Scott Hamilton and Cokie Roberts.” (Perhaps Linda Tripp was too busy fending off prosecutors to show up.) I was especially gratified to note that Sidney Kimmel, the head of Jones Apparel Group Inc., shouted into the microphones that “the people here have come to demand of their government: No more cancer!” Yes, and while we’re at it, let’s outlaw the common cold, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, and hot, humid summer days. Reminds me a bit of the Chinese potentate who the other day proclaimed a glorious victory over this year’s disastrous floods, once again demonstrating the all-seeing wisdom of the Communist kleptocracy.

Vice is nice, but consensus is cloying. Still, I also find myself in sympatico (is that correct English usage?) with your observation that USC educates more black kids from LA than does self-satisfied UCLA. Free-associating again, I am prompted to pose the following question, which may be of some relevance to current debates on the costs and benefits of racial preferences in elite university admissions: If you had a cherished child whose many talents did not include the kind of academic prowess that yields high grades in high school and high SAT scores; and if your child could nonetheless get into Harvard through some combination of alumni preference and personal pull (or, say, racial preference); would you rather see your child enter Harvard as one of the least academically gifted kids in her class, with some prospect of being overwhelmed by the academic competition? Or would she be better off at, say, the University of California at Riverside, where she could realistically hope to vie for a place at the top of her class? Would you really want to pull out all the stops to get her accepted at Harvard, so that she could make the choice herself? Or would she be better off, in the long run of life, with alumni-blind, pull-blind, preference-blind admissions?

As you have probably sensed by now, I am having trouble containing the urge to start some kind of an argument. I could argue with the somewhat pessimistic tone of your latest email by counting some of our blessings: While we mourn the death of Tom Bradley, former Mayor of Los Angeles, his life reminds us that all of the exaggerated complaints about what a racist society we are did not prevent him from winning election several times in a city in which blacks were a distinct minority; the reports of massacres in Kosovo and the like remind us that nothing like that has happened in this country in a very long time, and that most of us (with the unfortunate exception of the millions in the inner cities and Appalachia) live in the most free and prosperous society in the history of the world; the fact that the most interesting case on the Supreme Court’s rather boring docket for the coming term (which the Court agreed to review yesterday, perhaps to alleviate the really extreme tedium of their other cases) involves alleged sexual harassment of one fifth grader by another–very nasty harassment, I should note–suggests that we are in a pretty placid era compared to the days of Brown v. Board of Education. I must say, though, that I did cringe at an article this morning about Iraq coming closer to having a nuclear bomb. The one thing that makes me consider moving out of Washington is the fear of having the whole place–including my family–blown up by a nuclear terrorist paying market rates for the nuclear materials that are now flowing loosely through the chaos in Russia, with a Ryder Truck or a fishing boat as a delivery vehicle. The same could happen to New York, Los Angeles, and other big cities. Vermont is looking pretty good.

You mention campaign finance. Alas, more consensus, insofar as you note your decreasing confidence in the ability of any law or constitutional construction to change the way things are done. It is far easier to say, “The system’s rotten! We must reform it!” than to draft a reform that could work, let alone one that could get passed by the same people who got elected under the current rotten system. I personally think that all of the proposals for radical reform are bunk, and that modest steps like outlawing soft money have the most promise. But here’s an iconoclastic thought: The American people were far more satisfied with the basically unregulated (except for bans on use of corporate and labor money) campaign finance system that we had before the reforms of the 1970’s. That may suggest that scrapping all of those reforms and returning to the old system would be better, and even less plutocratic, than what we have now.

Now, can we argue? You mention Bill Bradley as a possible presidential candidate. I must say, the first question that comes to my mind about him is: Has he called for President Clinton to resign? Until he does, I’m not much interested. This does not stem from fascination with Clinton’s sex life; it stems from frustration at the unwillingness or inability of our leaders (including big shot Democrats and journalists) to speak truth to power–power being with the people–about the seriousness of perjury and witness tampering, which can bring you five and ten years in prison, respectively, if you’re not the president. Maureen Dowd has an entertaining column in the New York Times once again demonstrating her lack of interest (which is more the rule than the exception in the chattering classes) in seeing past the sex and into the perjury. It is not Ken Starr who is obsessed with sex, sex, sex; it is Starr critics like Maureen, who portrays Monica as “the red-blooded predator” and the president as “more like a teen-age girl trying to protect her virginity.” Perjury? It would get more attention if it were an exotic practice catalogued in the Kama Sutra.

To put this in perspective: I note a small item in today’s New York Times reporting that denial by the Republican Governor of South Carolina of two-year-old allegations by Democrats that he had an affair with his former press secretary. I will not name her since she and her husband happen to be old and close friends of mine. The governor, his wife, and my friends all deny the affair. The Times reports that–in apparent pursuit of evidence of intimacies–“the Democratic Party had requested the Governor’s official schedules, email, computer records and recorded phone messages under the Freedom of Information Act.”

I submit that those pursuing this alleged affair are lowlifes, and that any passing resemblance to President Clinton’s troubles ends with the state of the record in the Gennifer Flowers episode at the end of 1992. (Actually, even that is a poor parallel, given Flowers’ public claims that she had an affair with Clinton and that he got her a state job while coaching her to keep quiet.) I am entirely convinced by my friends’ denials of any affair. But even if I did not believe them, this would seem to me no business of either the press or the public. If some other woman had sued the governor for sexual harassment, and had alleged (as did Paula Jones) that the governor had mistreated her for refusing his overtures while rewarding other women for succumbing; and if he had been ordered by a judge to answer questions about the alleged affair, and had denied it under oath and to the world for seven months, and then been proven a perjurer; and if in the face of that proof he had lied to a federal grand jury to avoid admitting his earlier lies; and if he had coached others to lie all along, and used the powers o his office to conceal the truth, attack those who speak the truth, and lie about his antagonists; why, then I would feel differently.

Consensus?

Best, Stuart

From: Susan Estrich
Subject: Consensus? Well, Close
Posted Thursday, Oct. 1, 1998, at 10:49 AM ET

Dear Stuart,

Consensus? Close. Actually, I think I’m probably tougher on affirmative action than you are, at least the kind that has been practiced in public institutions and is defended by the administration. I think granting absolute numerical preferences based on race is not only unconstitutional but unnecessary and counterproductive. One of my colleagues, a tax guy who has chaired our admissions committee for years, says he absolutely resisted the argument for numerical preferences when “liberals” were claiming it almost as a point of pride, and of course, we still admit blacks and they don’t. Graduation rates in the UC system being what they are, more blacks may actually graduate from public colleges now than did pre-Prop 209, which sounds unbelievable until you realize that the black dropout rate at the top campuses was 60 percent. Whose kidding whom? Most New York law firms still don’t have a black partner; no one, it seems, believes in affirmative action when it comes to promoting partners. But they’d all love to have Frank Raines in their midst and will tell you, and I believe them, that they would like nothing better than to find a black lawyer who meets their standards. So why don’t they?

I saw the item about the S.C. governor and his press secretary. I don’t know any of them, and when I read it, I thought: what a nightmare. I also, I am afraid to say, assumed there must be something to it, else why was the paper reporting it. Remember the good old days when a paper reporting a story like this implied that it had substance? I remember, 10 years ago, when I had to deny that Dukakis was mentally ill, and we lost eight points overnight. But it’s like money: The only way to stop it is to stop rewarding bad behavior. But the contrary tends to be true. Six years ago, Barbara Boxer won in part thanks to a last minute smear of Bruce Herschenson. The guy who did the smearing was a Democratic party operative who was suspended on the Friday before the election, rehired the Wednesday afterwards, and still has his job. Matt Fong, watch out.

Speaking of bad behavior, I find the whole lying vs. sex debate to be, in the end, not very helpful. Is lying less bad if the subject is sex, or is it that sex gives you permission to lie? I’m not sure. Having spent the day in synagogue, confessing sins and contemplating the lines between what we know and what we believe, what science says is so and what we believe is true, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no “right” answer in any scientific sense to the whole Clinton scandal.

We all know what he did. There’s really no doubt about the essence of it. He had a sexual relationship that was wrong and immoral, lied about it, and then lied about it again.

The question is what we believe about it. It is more like abortion than Social Security, more a matter of belief than of fact. That’s why, I think, the polls don’t change, and why you can believe in a position that is equally and diametrically at odds with mine, even as we chat pleasantly about affirmative action and political correctness.

The problem, of course, is that we can’t both be right, and that either of us having our way in this debate is a direct assault on what the other believes. It’s not something we’re used to in this country, certainly not in the Clinton era, where everything has been triangulated, and agreeing has been seen (rightly I think) as a value in itself. It’s conflict for sure, and I fear it will be conducted at the worst level.

Cue Ball Carville against Dick Morris. I turned my television on at 4:00 p.m. today and who is the first person I see but Dick Morris, appearing for a 15-minute interview on Fox about the so-called Secret Police. By the end of it, he had managed to suggest that Terry Lenzner (who happened to be coming to my break fast, since he was visiting our friends) might have been responsible for kidnapping Kathleen Willey’s cat and warning her that her family might be next. No one stopped him and said, What the hell are you talking about? What possible basis do you have to believe that a distinguished lawyer with a 30-year record of integrity would be kidnapping a cat? No, they just listened, treated it all with respect, allowed him to make accusations, just like your friend the governor and the press secretary. It has become an industry, particularly on television, and the only way I know to avoid it is not to watch.

One final thought. If the Democrats had the guts, they’d turn this election into a referendum on impeachment. Get the Democrats out to support Clinton, since the Republicans are coming anyway. Promise the country that if they vote Democrat, at least Congress could go back to talking about education, if not doing something about it. Let the country decide, a position that is a whole lot safer when the country is on your side. Not a chance.

Happy New Year. As we say, may God inscribe us all in the Book of Life, even if it means another year of Monica.

Best, Susan

From: Stuart Taylor Jr.
Subject: Mentally Ill Candidates, Scummy Journalists, etc.
Posted Thursday, Oct. 1, 1998, at 11:36 AM ET

Dear Susan:

Now, really. If Dukakis was not mentally ill, why in the world did he climb into that silly looking tank, put on that stupid looking helmet, and allow himself to be photographed, looking like a 10-year-old playing soldier?

For that matter, if he was not mentally ill, why did he put himself through the insanity of running for president in the first place? When you examine that insanity, it becomes more and more obvious why no mentally healthy individual has much chance of winning the presidency by slogging through the whole horrible primary process, and that if we want a sane president, we’ll have to draft one. Calling Colin Powell. Or how about a woman? If you had the power to elect the next president all by yourself, picking anybody in the entire U.S. population, whom would you choose? And if that would be a man, whom would you choose if limited to the entire female population?

But seriously, you make a very good point (aagh, more consensus, alas!) about New York law firms–and other big institutions–not having black faces in big jobs. I don’t think this is necessarily racist–although sometimes it is–because the talent pool of people with elite academic credentials from which big law firms get their partners is no mirror of our society. I am struck, though, by the righteous liberals in those firms who view it as “pro bono” activity to litigate in favor of rigid racial quotas for fire departments and the like. I did a long piece in 1989 on such a case, in which what was then the richest law firm in the world (Cravath, Swaine & Moore) was litigating against white firefighters who thought that Birmingham, Alabama had gone too far in seeking to undo its legacy of discrimination by using extreme racial quotas. Cravath was supporting measures like taking the black firefighter who had ranked 96th on the promotional exam (and who had never personally been a victim of discrimination by the fire department, although his father may have been) and elevating him solely on the basis of race, above the white firefighter who had ranked third. When I called the Cravath partner and told him that my piece would also be discussing why his law firm had never had a black partner in its history, he seemed sincerely shocked and amazed that I would stoop to such irrelevancies. It was quite obvious to him that a law partner, whose job would consist mainly of using elaborate word games to make the rich richer, needed to have graduated at the very top of his class from one of the very best schools, whereas a fire lieutenant, with such mundane duties as making instantaneous decisions on what chemicals to use to put out a chemical fire before someone gets killed, need not have any book-learned expertise at all.

Shelby Steele has written something to the effect that racial preferences are motivated more by the desires of their white sponsors to feel virtuous (and by the narrow self-interest of the relatively privileged minority-group members who benefit) than by any good they do for true victims of discrimination or poverty. The evidence is all around us. What stops me from becoming an anti-preference absolutist is the difficulty of achieving much racial integration in the most elite sectors of our society without some (very limited) use of preferences. The only long-run solution is better early education. In the short run, all the policy alternatives are bad.

As to the NYT report about the governor of South Carolina denying (truthfully, I am convinced) the allegations that he had an affair with his former press secretary (my friend, who also denies this), I’ve learned more about what got it started. It’s a typical tale of scummy journalists and sleazy politicians racing hand-in-hand to the bottom. This was a 2-year-old rumor, but Time magazine this week became the first purportedly respectable publication to find a pretext to put it in print. Time’s pretext was its ongoing smear campaign against Kenneth Starr, plus a dollop of South Carolina politics. In a smarmy little piece under the headline “Catching the Starr Bug,” Time proceeded from the undocumented and transparently mendacious premise that what Starr is doing is conducting a fishing expedition through Clinton’s sex life, to the conclusion that “The Starr method, invented and deployed in Washington, has made its way to the states.” Next this: “[A]llies of Jim Hodges, the Democrat running against GOP Governor David Beasley, plan to ask Beasley about–you guessed it–infidelity.” These “allies” were, of course, anonymous. Once Time had opened the floodgates, the South Carolina press followed. Beasley, his wife, his former press secretary, and her husband hatched an unusual strategy to try to spike the underlying lie: The four of them held a joint press conference, and said that the Democrats spreading this rumor should be ashamed of themselves. So should Time Magazine, for more reasons than one.

Barbara Boxer won last time in part by smearing her opponent? Why am I not surprised? Tell me more about her.

As to the Clinton scandal, I note that you rightly fear the debate “will be conducted at the worst level. Cue Ball Carville against Dick Morris.” I also note that BOTH of these disreputable characters were brought to prominence by Bill Clinton, and that BOTH of them have been consulted and used by the president this year in constructing his defense: The toe-sucking Morris has testified that the president consulted him in January about how various responses to the Monica story would play with the public, and that after Morris had reported that his polls suggested perjury would not play in Peoria, Clinton responded: “We’ll just have to win, then.” Poll-tested lying. The increasingly rabid Carville, of course, lies every time he opens his mouth. Nations get the kind of governments they deserve, and if this nation decides that Clinton is good enough to stay in office, then it deserves the Carvilles and the Morrises who are part of the whole lowlife package.

I hope the Democrats don’t adopt your rally-around-the-liar strategy. It would make them the party of lying and coverups. And it would disgust a lot of (so-far-silent) politically active Democrats I know–people from whom I hear just about every day, and who are disgusted not only with their president but with their party. Unfortunately, the partisanship of the Republicans in Congress has enhanced the naturally polarizing nature of this battle, so that Democrats who denounce Clinton will be savaged for disloyalty (and for sexual peccadillos too, if the Clintonites can come up with any such mud to throw at them). That takes courage, which is in short supply in Washington. But I’m hoping to see some soon, from people like Sens. Pat Moynihan, Bob Kerry, and Joseph Lieberman, who made a good start a few weeks ago.

Best, Stuart

From: Susan Estrich
Subject: The Jesse Factor
Posted Thursday, Oct. 1, 1998, at 1:23 PM ET

Dear Stuart:

I love the Cravath story, which I am sure is just as true today, and could be repeated across the country. My great frustration is that so much political capital and energy has been devoted to the fight to save race-based preferences, when it is clear that the fight is certain to fail, and that preferences don’t accomplish what they should. And I believe that there are many in the Clinton administration who understand this as well as you and I, but that it is the worst sort of politics that makes Democrats unwilling to abandon the old-line politically correct position in support of preferences. Your old friend Jesse Jackson is making noises about running for president, which is almost certain to cow Democratic candidates into toeing the line so they don’t give him an issue.

What’s particularly ironic about this is that I’m convinced that one of the lessons Clinton clearly learned from 1984 and 1988 was the futility of trying to appease Jackson, and the huge price you pay for it. But what allowed Clinton to tell him off, as he did in ’92, was the fact that Jesse had no delegates to the Convention, and therefore couldn’t make trouble. This is why he’s making noises again about running, which might be why Gore will continue (although I hope not) to give offensive speeches like the one he did last January in which he compared opponents of affirmative action who hide behind the term “color blind” the way hunters hide in a duck blind, and fell into the trap of impugning the motives of those who disagree with him (which is to say, calling them racists . . . )

But I don’t think you can blame Clinton for Dick Morris, at least not entirely. What galls me about Morris is not just the charges he makes, but the way they’re dealt with by the media. He’s a “consultant” to Fox News and there he is, with the aura of legitimacy, libeling those he disagrees with today, making up a secret police force based on no facts to support it, and going unchallenged, invited back, much sought after as a guest. It’s the television scandal industry, and it depends on people like Morris. In print, you have an editor . . . on television, people say whatever they damn well please, accusing people of things that are unsupported by facts, and now it’s time for a break . . . We’ll be back with more in a moment. Balance? Facts vs. opinions? Give me a break. You and I have always acknowledged a point of view in writing columns. But your head could spin trying to figure out who is reporting, who is opinionating, who has any basis for actually having an opinion, and who just looks pretty.

As for the papers, my favorite story (I promise no Clinton this afternoon) was the so-called friends of Hillary Clinton who told the LA Times page 1, above the fold that the president lied to her back in January, and that she believed him. My queries: Why are her “friends” telling the papers this? Are these friends? She’s out there defending him, they’re out there trashing him . . . or is it that they are trying to make themselves look better? Are we supposed to like her more for hearing this, like him less, think they are both crazy, or that we are?

As for Dukakis, who seems quaint for firing John Sasso over what would now be considered laughable, the point is he lost. We had nobody investigating Bush’s sex life, as far as I know. It wouldn’t have occurred to me. It isn’t why I did politics. I didn’t want to be in that business, and Dukakis wouldn’t allow it. He didn’t even like negative ads. Now he teaches. Clinton won. Carville and the crap I don’t like was part of it. This is the game until someone changes it. So far, all the movement seems to be in the other direction..

But enough of that. I’m going to read my horoscope. In the LA Times, they label it as entertainment. At least they’re honest about one section.

Best, Susan

From: Stuart Taylor Jr.
Subject: Tall Men Always Win
Posted Thursday, Oct. 1, 1998, at 4:36 PM ET

Dear Susan:

We have reached total consensus on racial preferences, Jesse Jackson, Al Gore’s pandering to Jesse Jackson, etc.

Speaking of Al Gore, I just did a column arguing that he was not really in big legal trouble over his campaign finance activities and alleged lying to the Justice Department about same, because the evidence of possible lying does not rise to beyond a reasonable doubt, and because whatever fund-raising sleaziness he got into cannot, in my view, be teased into a plausible criminal indictment.

But can Gore be forgiven for his emotional exhibitionism at the 1996 convention about his sister’s 1984 lung-cancer death? “That is why,” he said, “until I draw my last breath, I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking”. Then reporters pointed out that he had taken $16,000 from Big Tobacco during the six years after his sister’s death, while continuing to grow tobacco on his own land and rhapsodizing at a 1988 campaign rally about how he had “shredded it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.” Gore’s explanation of this apparent inconsistency was a classic: “People are becoming more willing to give some respect to the importance of the way people feel and try to balance emotions and logic in a more artful way.” Read that twice, slowly, and ponder it, please. Then tell me: Where is H.L. Mencken when we need him?

You’ll get no argument from me about the TV talk shows failing to disclose the biases of their supposed “analysts.” But I think President Clinton could more plausibly be absolved of blame for Morris if he had stopped consulting him after his firing during the 1996 convention. He didn’t. Every time he was in trouble, it seemed–at least until Morris started publicly savaging the president this year–Clinton was on the phone to his amoral guru.

On the Hillary Rodham Clinton business, I wouldn’t be surprised if the people saying that her husband lied to her in January really were her friends. After all, the First Lady said in January, during her VRWC (“vast right-wing conspiracy”) number, that she didn’t believe the allegations that her husband had had an affair with Lewinsky; that they lies being maliciously spread by the VRWC; and that if a hypothetical president had done such a thing and lied about it, it would be an extremely serious abuse. There are two possibilities: She was cynically lying then; or she was a victim of his lies, and a credulous one at that, given his history. Which do you believe?

Dukakis: I’m not sure the reason he lost was his refusal to play dirty. At least, I hope not. Wasn’t he a lot shorter than the other guy? And wasn’t he fighting a long tradition of electing tall men as president? Especially during the Cold War, it seemed mandatory for our president to tower over everybody else on the podium, or our national prestige would have taken a dive. But the tall-men-always-win rule may not hold outside the presidential context. After all, if memory serves, I lost an election to you (among others) once even though I am, if recollection serves, much taller.

Could you check my horoscope too? I’m a Taurus. And I’m still hoping you’ll tell me who you would choose to be our next president, although I’ll understand if you don’t.

Best, Stuart

From: Stuart Taylor Jr.
Subject: Not Our Finest Hour
Posted Friday, Oct. 2, 1998, at 9:26 AM ET

Dear Susan,

Since I get up three hours earlier than you do, perhaps I could save you some time reading this morning’s papers: Don’t. When they’re not boring (e.g., explaining what a hedge fund is), they’re depressing (e.g., hinting how we will all follow hedge funds down to the pit of a new global Great Depression). When they’re not depressing, they’re about Monicagate, about which we are all required by good taste and peer pressure to feign complete lack of interest rooted in disgust.

What you should read is “Our Finest Hour,” by my National Journal colleague Bill Powers, who is perhaps the best media critic in the country. His piece this week is relatively light fare, collecting some of the most precious gems in the diadem of bad journalism (and bad law, and bad politics, and funny journalism) in the context of you-know-who-gate. Among my favorites are the striking prevalence of Nazi metaphors, which Powers collects under the subhead, “Adolph ‘R Us.” From MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann: “It finally dawned on me that the person Ken Starr has reminded me–reminded me of facially–all this time, was Heinrich Himmler, including the glasses.” (The next day, amid protests, Olbermann added a classically Clintonesque non-apology to people “who thought I was comparing Starr to Himmler and insulting Starr” or “demeaning the terrible importance of the Holocaust”; he explained that “I meant only what I said: facially, the two men look vaguely alike.”) From a news report quoting H. Ross Perot: ” ‘Watch my lips, the president is mentally and emotionally unstable. . . .’ Are there any other world leaders who had these mental defects? ‘Yes,’ he said, citing Hitler, Stalin, [Saddam] Hussein and [Fidel] Castro.”

From William Ginsberg, Monica’s first lawyer: “I’m the most famous person in the world.” From a headline in the Seattle Times: “Seattle Woman Looks Back Proudly on Her Internship–She Met President Clinton Only Once, She Says.” From former Time magazine journalist Nina Burleigh: “I’d be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.” Even Powers’ (and my) editor, Michael Kelly–who I should say is the finest, most judicious, and most sensitive editor I know, and a particular expert in the new field of “healing journalism”–gets dissed, for writing on Aug. 5 that we should disbelieve polls suggesting “that the public would be forgiving.” I’m grateful that Powers apparently overlooked my own storehouse of not-quite-prophetic predictions.

You should read the whole thing. By the way, if you want to subscribe to National Journal, it’s a mere $1,047 a year–less than $25 for each weekly issue! And if you’re too stingy to pay our usual bargain rates, maybe I can get you a deal.

As one who kind of likes the idea of humanely efficient (or efficiently humane) “third way” between mean-old-trickle-down-free-market-economics and failed-utopian-socialist-nostrums, I was deflated to read Charles Krauthammer’s typically trenchant op-ed in this morning’s Washington Post explaining why we Third-Wayers (including President Clinton, Britain’s Tony Blair, Germany’s new chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, etc.) are a bunch of BS: “It is the sound of the Left moving right but stopping 0.2 percent shy.” I hate it when he does that. (For Slate’s Explainer’s take on the Third Way in history, click here .)

So much for Third Way. Back to the Third World Expectation. By the way, a 14-year-old I know named Sarah got the lead part in her school’s production of “Peter Pan.” It’s a singing part, featuring “I won’t grow up–I don’t want to wear a tie,” etc. Now that’s good news.

Best, Stuart

From: Susan Estrich
Subject: Zippity–doo–dah
Posted Friday, Oct. 2, 1998, at 1:31 PM ET

Dear Stuart:

So how come the National Journal costs so much? Because serious journalism can’t survive except as an elite publication? Because the powers that be don’t want the masses as an audience? I’ve long admired the National Journal ; I think Michael Kelly is great (sorry Marty); but unless someone sends me an article, it comes and goes without me.

Keith Olberman, on the other hand, who could miss? Just kidding, of course, but it’s interesting that while a reporter is usually expected to cover something, and most columnists are assumed to know something (I’m not going too far), there is no substantive qualification for being a television pontificator, or a host, and no need to back anything you say up. Facial resemblances? Give me a break. He was a good sports guy. Maybe I should start doing sports.

But here’s a story for you, from my neck of the woods. On Wednesday, 300 people showed up to picket at Paramount against a television show that hasn’t begun airing yet because it supposedly makes light of slavery. “Slavery is not funny,” the signs said. The show is called The Secret Life of Desmond Pfeiffer. It’s about a black Englishman who is supposedly the butler to Abraham Lincoln. According to news accounts, the butler is the smartest guy in the White House; all the white people (except Lincoln, I guess/hope) are portrayed as buffoons. Perhaps you and I could organize a protest of white people who don’t like being portrayed as buffoons. But seriously. Another protest is scheduled for Monday, when the show premieres on UPN. Worse. Not only was the NAACP and the Brotherhood Crusade there yesterday, but also a member of the City Council, who wants the city Human Rights Commission to sponsor a debate, and called on the network to cancel the show before it began. Anybody heard of the First Amendment here? Artistic freedom? How dare someone say “slavery isn’t dead yet” in asking the butler to take his feet off the table?

According to Howard Rosenberg, one of the bright lights at the LA Times, the show isn’t racist, it’s just stupid and not very funny, which would not make it unique. I do believe producers and writers and directors should take responsibility for their work, should understand its power, should question themselves about issues of bias and prejudice that do permeate the media. But I hate these protests, much less government involvement in them; and dare I wonder, at a time when according to one new study five black men go to prison in this state for every one who goes to college, whether civil rights leaders might not have something better and more important to do with their time. The irony of course is that this will get attention for the series; but protests scare sponsors, and that produces the kind of mindless but politically correct garbage we see so much of on television. As for the producers of the show, they say it isn’t about race at all; it was really intended as a parody of the Clinton Administration …

Some years ago, a friend at Disney asked me to look at The Song of the South and tell me whether I thought they should re-release it. You remember zippity doo dah, and Uncle Remus, and the little slave children . . . I watched it with my daughter, who was then about 4 or 5, and began asking me all the questions you would expect about who Uncle Remus was, and who those little children were, and why they lived like that, and were they really so happy? . . . I wrote a memo saying they’d get killed politically, there’d be protests, people would accuse them of insensitivity, and greed, etc. even though it is, of course, also a classic. Someday, I hope, we’ll be able to deal with both sides, and even explain it to our kids. Anyway, after soliciting input (and realizing that black leaders who might privately support the decision would not publicly do so), they decided not to re-release it, though I’m told that Michael Eisner came to the decision reluctantly, precisely because he hated the sense of bowing to political correctness.

I might even watch Desmond Pfeiffer on Monday.

Best, Susan

PS. And not a word about the thousands of pages which you might be reading right now … anything there? Enough spinning to make you dizzy?

From: Stuart Taylor Jr.
Subject: Huckstering
Posted Friday, Oct. 2, 1998, at 4:56 PM ET

Dear Susan:

Your tale of the picketing of Paramount for racial incorrectness is reminiscent of the periodic efforts–which for all I know have been successful by now–to purge The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from all school reading lists. The complaint seems to be that Jim, Huck’s black friend and traveling companion, who is the most admirable figure in the book, is referred to by various racist whites in an epithet that has taken on such a hateful connotation that I dare not spell it lest I be picketed too. The message of the book, and its quality as literature, don’t matter to the PC censors; That Word is forbidden, so the book has to go. Perhaps it has been replaced in school curricula by the works of people like Toni Morrison, explaining stuff like how President Clinton is being persecuted for being black.

Huck himself had a line at the beginning of the book (a first-person narrative), describing his creator Mark Twain, that I have adopted as the highest standard of honesty that a cockeyed optimist in today’s America might ever hope to find in a viable presidential candidate: “There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”

How about the old cartoon classic Dumbo? It was one of my favorites as a kid, much as I tired of people comparing my ears to those that enabled the elephant to fly. But it’s got some scenes that seem racially insensitive (remember those singing crows?), scenes that I would be uncomfortable showing to my kids’ friends. Maybe they could do a remake without the crows. Maybe they already have.

As to the high price of National Journal, I suspect it has something to do with the facts that much of our circulation is concentrated within about a one-mile radius of the U.S. Capitol, that few of our subscribers pay out of their own pockets, and that some of them are the same people who appropriated other people’s money to buy those $600 toilet seats and the B-1 Bomber. What was the old Econ 101 concept of inelastic demand? More seriously, National Journal has a long tradition of something increasingly hard to find in any other publication that comes to mind: in-depth analysis of tough national policy issues, like how to save Social Security, that can be trusted to be fact-based, nonpartisan, and not slanted by ideological agendas. (Unfortunately, some of our readers think that new arrivals including me have detracted from that quality by writing columns of opinion with which they disagree.) No mass-circulation publication I can think of comes close to doing that, presumably because there’s not a mass market for what National Journal does. The smaller the market, the higher the price has to be to pay the people who write the stuff.

Sorry I can’t shed any light on today’s Monica document dump. At this stage, it’s easier to let the newspapers filter out the most interesting new stuff–THAT they do pretty well–than to comb through it all myself. In general, I think that 98 percent of the most important evidence Starr had on the whole Monica business–both inculpatory and exculpatory–was probably in the main body of his report, which was made public Sept. 11 and published verbatim by major newspapers next day. The buzzing about each new document dump, and the leaking in advance, reflect some combination of media pretense that what’s new is what’s important and of interested parties spinning. This doesn’t mean that the public already knows the evidence well enough to reach an informed judgment on the impeachment issue. Very few people have read the most important parts of Starr’s report: the evidence of the scope of the lying and witness-tampering and other coverup activity, not the cigar stuff). Even fewer have read it closely enough to understand how it all fits together. In this, as in many things, the most important evidence is hidden in plain view, while the media are off chasing titillating trivia and other matters of marginal relevance. And, of course, we have not heard much yet from the defense, other than diversionary attacks on Starr and on Republican partisanship. But I imagine that if the president had a decent defense on the merits, we’d have heard it by now.

Alas, I can’t seem to entice you into proposing our first female president. Maybe I can goad you. How about Phyllis Schlafly?

Best, Stuart

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