The View From Congress

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As Jim Moran sat at home with his wife on Monday night, he wondered what to do about two of their children, ages seven and nine. Bill Clinton was moments away from delivering a televised address to the nation, and Moran, a Democratic Congressman from Virginia, "didn't want to say to the kids, 'You have to leave the room--the President's coming on.'"

The kids, as it turns out, may have been less troubled than their dad by what they saw. "This whole sordid mess is just too tawdry and tedious and embarrassing," said Moran on the morning after, his voice a subdued monotone. "It's like a novel that just became too full of juicy parts and bizarre, sleazy characters." Characters like Bill Clinton, the leader of Moran's party, the President he had followed loyally for six years? "I guess part of this is finding out that everyone is far more human than we'd like to believe," conceded the Congressman. "I guess there are no real heroes."

If Moran's reaction was disturbing, what Clinton heard from some other Democrats in Congress was even worse. Dianne Feinstein, the highly regarded Senator from California, recalled how she believed Clinton back in January when he denied having had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. With the President's change of story, she said, "my trust in his credibility has been badly shattered." Paul McHale, a retiring third-term Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, went even further. Declaring that the President "lied under oath" and "almost certainly" encouraged Lewinsky to keep silent, McHale bluntly called on Clinton to "resign or face impeachment."

It's one thing for Republicans to call for Clinton's resignation. (Some, like conservative presidential aspirant Senator John Ashcroft, did so quickly, and predictably.) But congressional Democrats form the President's outermost--and most important--ring of defense against his enemies. Which is why Clinton got on the phone to offer personal explanations and apologies to more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday. For the most part, those Democrats who said anything at all in public stuck to White House-inspired spin, expressing "disappointment" in the President, but satisfaction that he had taken responsibility for his actions, and a strong desire to see Starr's investigation come to an end. In private, however, Democrats were saying that the President's hold on his party has never been so fragile. "We stood by this guy for seven months while he lied to us," complained one bitter House Democrat. "Now we're supposed to happily keep defending him? I don't think so."

Neither did the party's congressional leaders, most of whom were conspicuous in their absence from the airwaves in the aftermath of Clinton's speech. (In a stroke of luck for the President, Congress is on summer recess, its members dispersed across the country and the world.) House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt, celebrating his 32nd anniversary with his wife in France, declined CNN's offer to dispatch a satellite truck so he could appear on Larry King Live. His Senate counterpart, Tom Daschle, was spending the week cruising around his home state of South Dakota, alone and, as one aide emphasized, "out of cell-phone range." Cornered at an event in Sioux Falls on Tuesday, Daschle admitted he was "disappointed in not being told the truth" when the President denied the affair. But, he said, "it's time we get on with it."