The Great Disconnect

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With their earnest comments and starchy bearing, Republican Senators have tried to make it clear how seriously they take their oath to sit in impartial judgment of a President. But in private last week, that wasn't their immediate concern. The talk in the G.O.P. cloakroom was about a more awkward judgment: What to do about Bill Clinton's State of the Union speech Tuesday night? Almost a year to the day after the Monica Lewinsky story first broke, a disgraced President is on trial in one chamber of Congress, being called a liar, a cheat and a threat to the rule of law, while in the other he will stand and claim credit for the best year in a half-century, and the audience will rise and shout amen. Republicans wonder, Do they clap, stand or walk out on the speech? Should they even show up at all?

Sam Brownback of Kansas, for one, has made up his mind. "The country will forgive a lot," he notes, "but not bad manners." Yet whatever Clinton says, and whatever Congress does, neither side can take much credit for the luminous State of this Union, since they have spent the year in a locker room, arguing about sex. And in the year in which the phrase divided government came to refer to a government divided from its people, says Brownback, that "is the biggest disconnect of all."

A good many Senators are still having trouble swallowing the notion that their decisions don't matter to the public, but Brownback understands this as well as anyone in Washington. He has been thinking about it for years, since the day he saw a bumper sticker in Topeka that said: I LOVE MY NATION, BUT I FEAR MY GOVERNMENT. As he sat at his back-row desk last week, Brownback listened carefully to the House prosecutors making their case and wondered about his duty to a President he wants to treat fairly, the laws he swore to uphold and the people of Kansas whose interests he promised to defend.

Except what if those people are too busy to care? A man who takes his faith so seriously that he once washed a departing staff member's feet as a gesture of thanks, Brownback has an idea about what his constituents are praying for these days: "They just want it over with," he says. And however it turns out, they tell him, it will have no effect whatever on their lives. "That," he says quietly, "is an amazing thing."

To plot those crosswinds, TIME sent a team of reporters to a small city in Brownback's home state to watch the political trial from a distance and the public response to it up close. Emporia, Kans., is as good a place as any to see what devolution looks like, how it works and what it means. People here haven't merely fled politics in disgust because of the scandal; they have been strolling away for years. Prosperity has made this possible, conservatives made it fashionable, and the scandal has at last made it visible.

"Disconnect?" asks Emporia city manager Steve Commons. "You make the assumption there was a connection in the first place. In the end we function on our own."