Nightmare's End

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Reflecting later on the new mood, a bone-weary Lott told a few reporters, "We've gotten to know each other better as people, as individuals rather than Senator So-and-So from Minnesota or Senator So-and-So from Alabama. There's been a lot of holding of hands and slapping on backs and nuzzling of each other and trying to keep this from breaking out into a really nasty affair." Newly bonded, the Senators are hopeful. "It doesn't mean we won't get into fusses over tax policy or farm policy or foreign policy or whatever," Lott added, "but I think we will be a little less quick to question the other's motives or to publicly be critical of each other."

And finally, of course, there is the sheer benefit of its being over, which is incalculable and inexpressible, something you just know in your bones and feel grateful for.

A year that began with caricatures eventually produced some defiant icons. Thanks to Charles Ruff, we saw more of a powerful man in a wheelchair than most of us have in our lifetime. Gender stereotypes tumbled as Clinton was declared the country's first female President, the first black President, all empathy and soul with just a whiff of victimhood. Many women winced at a scandal that began with a lovestruck Valley Girl gossiping to her treacherous friend; by year's end those images had been diluted by some other women who took the stage: Cheryl Mills, all of 34, with her hypnotic legal lullaby; Nicole Seligman bleaching the House case; Democrat Dianne Feinstein trying to be genuinely stern with an adolescent President; Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins emerging from the back benches to call for a reasoned response. You could disagree with their positions and still respect their conduct.

The same can be said of the impassioned, impugned House managers, who, whatever the merits of their case, put a lie to the assumption that all politicians are driven solely by polls and survival instincts. One could wonder where their compass pointed, but no one mistook it for a weather vane. Henry Hyde argued that "there's no political profit in this. A President Gore would not be helpful to the Republican Party." But when Hyde faced the Senators, he challenged them to larger purposes: "I have always believed that there are issues of transcendent importance that you have to be willing to lose your office over."

If it seemed that we spent the year in the moral faculty lounge debating the weight of our principles, there was value in that exercise as well. You learn more about the views you hold when you're forced to defend them. Tom DeLay tried to frame the debate as a choice between relativism and absolute truths, but there were subtler arguments advanced by both sides. Smart virtuecrats like Bill Bennett argued that a leader who occasionally drank in the evenings was not impeachable, but one who drank before deciding on troop deployments maybe was. White House officials agonized in private over which was worse: that Clinton lied to them or that he failed to apologize for it. Censure ultimately died, in part because Senators decided that enough damage had been done to the President without adding any to the Constitution.

With so many values in play, hypocrites lost their footing the moment they seemed to be holding others to standards they themselves did not embrace: feminists who decried the pursuit of the President's personal life after years of declaring that the personal is political, Republicans who deplored Clinton's lies or affairs but then were confronted with lies or affairs of their own, presidential spinners who condemned the politics of personal destruction even as they practiced them--all were called to account. If there is a lesson for future candidates, it may be not that only saints need apply or that rising markets erase all sins, but rather that honesty is worth more than practiced perfection--there will be no secrets anyway, and you can trust the people to judge wisely.

Because in the Year of Perpetual Polling, the public never caught the fever of the combatants. Week after week the argument was framed by the extremes: the politicians and the pundits created a cross fire in which every action was cast as either a partisan plot or an assault on justice. Yet no matter how appalling the details, the public generally kept its distance from the shouting and weighed the evidence carefully.

That absence of outrage appalled many conservatives, who took it as evidence of widespread moral laziness among people too drunk on Internet stocks and cheap gasoline to care about their soul. But that diagnosis also invited a closer look. We call ourselves God's country, always scooping up lost religious rebels into a nation safe for people with strong moral views. This year revealed how strong and how varied those views turn out to be. Clinton has privately called the Congress that dared pursue him "Stalinist"; James Dobson, meanwhile, has said the American people can no longer recognize the nature of evil. But 1998 was a year of public corruption and private progress, of numbers that shouted of moral uplift as crime, abortion, teen pregnancy and drunk driving all dropped. There was no epidemic of perjury; in fact the evening news became an occasion to demonstrate in constant, clear terms that we take lying extremely seriously.