DESPERATELY SEEKING COMPLETION

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/3664/30/

Topical Take
Wednesday, 26 January 2011

In the old days, my non-US papers used to be very partial to analyses of the State of the Union, British Commonwealth editors carelessly assuming it was the equivalent of a Speech from the Throne - ie, a list of stuff that's actually going to happen. So I'd often find myself trying to wring some life out of dull laundry lists of poll-tested micro-initiatives. The one genuinely dramatic SotU was Bill Clinton's in January 1998, a week after the Monica story burst onto the front pages. This is how I wrote it up in the Speccie:

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For six days, Bill Clinton kept his head down, a position usually reserved for his womenfolk. But on the seventh the President ventured out - to Congress, for the annual State of the Union address.

Last year, he had to share the spotlight with the O.J. Simpson civil trial, which, with exquisite timing, had chosen the President's big night to reach a verdict. The networks, torn between Clinton boring on about his bridge to the 21st century and O.J. getting taken to the cleaners, restrained themselves and went to a split screen, dutifully sticking with Washington in one corner while all eyes were on California in the other. ABC's star anchorman Peter Jennings had been warned not to use the word 'guilty' in connection with O.J.: for this second trial, ,the correct word was 'liable'. He almost got it right. `Mr Guilty has been found liable,' he announced sonorously.

This year, the President decided to come as his own O.J., singlehandedly bridging last year's split screen. He has yet to pledge that he won't rest until he tracks down the real adulterer, but otherwise the approach is much the same. In lieu of Johnnie Cochran, Mr Clinton has the First Lady. So just as the brutal murder of a battered wife turned out instead to be a racist conspiracy by the LAPD, apparently perjury about oral sex is really, according to Mrs Clinton on NBC's Today show, part of 'a vast right-wing conspiracy' by the Reverend Jerry Falwell and shadowy groups of Clinton-haters. Both theories depend on a mind-boggling suspension of disbelief: How did the LAPD get the victims' blood inside O.J.'s locked car? How did Rev Falwell plant the young daughter of a wealthy Democratic par
 ty contributor inside the White House late at night?

Mr Clinton isn't saying. His strategy on Tuesday was to replace the pants-dropping, frock-staining, phone sex-crazed fellatio junkie of the past week with the windy, platitudinous, butt-numbing yawneroo of old. Traditionally, the State of the Union address begins at 9 p.m. Eastern time and wraps up just before 10 o'clock, after which there's a brief Republican response and then the network pontificators analyse the President's proposals on Medicare and defence spending until it's time to hand back to the local affiliate stations at 11 o'clock. This time, Mr Clinton stepped to the podium just after 9 o'clock, and began to talk ...and talk ...and talk.

`If we join together, we can finish the work at hand,' he declared boldly.

'Preparing for a far-off storm that may reach our shores is better than waiting till the sound of thunder is overhead,' he continued.

'I say to you it is a journey we can only make together,' he added.

Ten o'clock came and went with nothing more than a dull thud - probably a new intern, installed under the lectern, falling to the floor with lockjaw. But the President was only warming up: `We must work together, learn together, live together, serve together... We are many. We must be one.' His speech should have been one (hour). Instead, it was many. 

For a week now, commentators have been deploring Mr Clinton's descent into lawyerly English: `There is no improper sexual relationship. . . ' What does he mean by 'is'? Is he saying that there was one? And what's an `improper sexual relationship'? How does it differ from a proper one? On Monday morning, he was more emphatic: 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman.' But that only sent everyone scurrying to the dictionary: 'sexual relations - intercourse, copulation (esp. of a man and a woman); insertion of the penis into the vagina....' So does that rule out oral sex?

But Tuesday was a reminder that, when President Clinton stops being precise and evasive and becomes generalised and evasive, he's even worse:

`While we honour the past, let us imagine the future,' he droned, as the clock struck 10.20.

`An uncharted sea of limitless mystery': 10.25.

`The unbroken connection between the deeds of America's past and the daring of America's future...'

He'd lost the room by now, but what did he care? He knew every network had a studioful of pundits waiting to talk about subpoenas and impeachment, and he ran 'em out. He sat down, the networks hurried away to the Republican response, and that left about three minutes for the `Can this presidency be saved?' discussion.

`The President went longer than anticipated,' sighed Peter Jennings, signing off as ABC handed back to its local affiliate, and suddenly we were into heartwarming stories about how dairy farms were clearing up after the ice storm. Brilliant.

Monica Lewinsky isn't the only one sitting there open-mouthed. The President's understanding of the media is amazing: he succeeded in keeping the sex stuff out of prime time. Puffy-eyed and unusually stiff (in the Al Gore sense), he was nevertheless doing what he does best - boring the story into the ground, the approach that's worked so well for him over Whitewater, the FBI files, the Indonesian money men... This year's Mr Guilty may yet be found liable, but the bland torpor of the State of the Union was the most explicit signal yet that he's prepared to do whatever it takes to cling on, figuring that even an oral sex scandal can't be dragged out all year: one swallow doesn't make a summer, as they say in Arkansas.

from The Spectator, January 31st 1998


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