The Politics Of Yuck

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For once the federal government is going to produce a document that won't collect dust on library shelves. Sometime between now and the end of this month, the report of independent counsel Kenneth Starr is expected to be sent to Congress, where it will promptly explode. Washington is bracing itself for a text unlike anything it has ever handled, with interludes that describe, in all too fascinating detail, half a dozen or more anatomical engagements between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Depending on how vivid it is, Starr's report could be the closest thing to pornography ever issued by the Government Printing Office.

Even if the most embarrassing parts are walled off in a section made available only to selected members of Congress, nobody expects the wall to hold. Titillating stories that may or may not be from Starr's grand-jury room have been churning for weeks through the Internet and the supermarket tabloids, waiting for mainstream news outlets to pick them up, give them the luster of legitimacy and dispatch them to the wider world. Last week NBC Nightly News gravely confirmed a Drudge Report item that Clinton and Lewinsky once had sex after he attended Easter services. No big deal. More scabrous stuff than that bounces regularly from cyberland to Jay Leno without stopping for the niceties of confirmation.

Much as they might enjoy the President's deepening humiliation, and they do, even Republicans are wary. Playing in the mud is a messy game for everybody. Starr's report is likely to mean a new cycle of smutty particulars to be worked over endlessly by the news-entertainment continuum. A public already sick to death of unlaundered dresses and dirty jokes about cigars could blame Republicans for starting and prolonging the whole thing even as citizens turn away in disgust from the President himself.

Republicans have the comfort of expecting that in November voters will be more likely to punish the Democrats. After all, Clinton is the head of their party, while Ken Starr, a chronic loser in opinion polls, is not on the ballot. That's why a vocal and growing minority of Republicans, led by House whip Tom DeLay, is demanding that the full text of the report be made public as soon as it arrives. For different reasons, so did Democrat John Dingell of Michigan. Like many Democrats, he may figure that the details will come out anyway, so it's better to suffer a short, sharp shock than a prolonged drip of leaks.

Everybody else is in unexplored territory and knows it. With so much at stake Democrats in Congress are anxious not to be cut out of the process that decides how the report will be handled. And Republicans have to be careful not to let the whole thing look like a partisan funfest. So this week House Speaker Newt Gingrich will hold an unusual meeting with minority leader Dick Gephardt and other members of the House leadership to decide just who gets to see the dirty parts. The House rules committee has already drawn up a proposal that would have Starr's full text sent at first only to members of the judiciary committee, which has first jurisdiction over any impeachment process. All other House members would get an expurgated summary, though the entire report would be sent to them as well if the committee decided it provided grounds for impeachment.