All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid (29 page)

And, of course, it didn’t take long for political operatives to grasp both the peril and the opportunity of this new order. If reporters were ever in search of the single embarrassing fact, however personal or trivial, that could destroy the hard-won reputation of your candidate overnight, then those same reporters could destroy your opponent just as quickly—if you could find his vulnerability first and slyly maneuver it into the right hands. Once politicians and operatives understood the destructive force that had been unleashed, like some sorcerer’s elixir, by this obsession with character, there was no containing it.

The second casualty of the 1988 campaign, after Hart, was Joe Biden, who was perhaps the most promising of the New Garys vying to fill the vacuum in the field. Biden prided himself on hailing from a kind of loquacious, freewheeling tradition of Irish storytelling, and in Iowa he had warmed to a riff from Neil Kinnock, the Labour Party leader in England, about being the “first in a thousand generations” of his family to graduate college. Normally, Biden would credit Kinnock when he got to this part of his shtick, but on at least one occasion, during a debate in Iowa, he carelessly neglected to source the citation. And so, less than four months after the Hart scandal, John Sasso, who was Dukakis’s chief strategist, quietly slipped a videotape of that debate to Maureen Dowd at
The New York Times
.

It took all of eleven days for the frenzy that followed this small story to claim Biden’s candidacy, during which it was revealed that he had also lifted isolated passages from the Kennedys in the past—which hardly differentiated him from any other Democrat of his generation—and that once, in law school, twenty-odd years earlier, he had been accused of plagiarism. (Sasso, too, would be forced to resign from the campaign after his role in the scandal came to light, although he later returned to help Dukakis during the general election.) In Biden’s case, as in Hart’s, all the truth was out. It just wasn’t clear that
all
the truth was actually illuminating.

In early 1989, after Bush survived rumors of his own infidelity and won the White House, he nominated John Tower, the former senator from Texas, to be his defense secretary. Confirmation hearings in the Senate were thought to be a formality—until the conservative activists who had long disdained Tower (mainly because he had supported Gerald Ford against Ronald Reagan in 1976) accused him of drinking and “womanizing” and turned the hearings into a referendum on his “moral character.” After weeks of debate and breathless coverage, Tower’s former colleagues, by a narrow margin, made him the first cabinet pick of any newly elected president to be rejected by the Senate.

In
See How They Run
, Paul Taylor pointed to the Tower episode as an example of admirable restraint on the media’s part, because reporters “let the Senate take the lead role” in investigating Tower’s personal proclivities. But this was probably beside the point. Senators and their ideological allies understood now, in the wake of the Hart scandal, that if they could manage to instigate a debate about someone’s character, whether having to do with sex or some other private lapse, the media would lock on to it like a laser beam, and nothing more substantive would ever be discussed. Reporters had “let the Senate take the lead” only in the sense that the guy who pins your arms down is letting another thug take the lead in beating the tar out of you. The relationship between personally ruinous politics and scandal-obsessed journalism was symbiotic.

If Tower’s implosion marked the start of a more personally perilous chapter in the life of the Senate, it was downright genteel next to what was transpiring down the hall in the House of Representatives. By end of 1989, as Taylor noted, “no fewer than four members of the U.S. House of Representatives were being investigated by the House ethics committee for alleged sexual misconduct.” (One of these was Barney Frank, who, it was revealed, had been allowing an escort he had hired and befriended to operate a male prostitution ring in his home.) Meanwhile, the Democratic House speaker, Jim Wright of Texas, was fending off a separate investigation into his own lapse in integrity, which centered on a charge that he had conspired to accept more money in royalties from his memoir than he was allowed to
accept under House rules. Wright resigned in June 1989, making him the only speaker in history to be forced from office by scandal. (It would be less than a decade before another man who was about to become speaker, Robert Livingston, would have to bow out over allegations of adultery.)

Historically speaking, the Wright scandal was as significant for the career it most elevated as it was for the man whose ambitions were dashed. It was a conservative and combative congressman from Georgia named Newt Gingrich who brought the initial charges against Wright and used the case as a platform. In some ways, Gingrich, while seven years younger, was Hart’s generational opposite. Erudite and reflective, with a doctoral degree in history, Gingrich embraced Hart’s concept for military reform early on, and like the Atari Democrats, he was enamored of the new digital technologies that were about to transform the American economy. Like Hart, he was a prolific writer who prided himself on being able to peer around corners—although Gingrich would long be ridiculed for some of the wackier predictions he floated, like the idea that American factories would soon be making metal alloys in space.

But where Hart studied military history and literature for insights into how he might win campaigns (he was fond, during the McGovern campaign in 1972, of citing the insurgent General Kutuzov from
War and Peace
, whose strategy was to “attack and retreat, attack and retreat”), Gingrich studied them mainly for the purpose of destroying his enemies. If Hart was Kutuzov, then Gingrich more closely resembled Napoleon. And after 1987, Gingrich clearly understood that the evolving political culture could work to his advantage.

Republicans had been a minority in the House for more than thirty years. But what Gingrich saw immediately in the post-Hart moment was that it would now be far easier to take your adversaries down in a surge of scandal—or, more precisely, multiple scandals—than it would be to unseat them at the polls. You were never going to get rid of a giant like Jim Wright by out-campaigning him, but you might succeed by finding the moral transgression that could be used to taint his character and tantalize the media. After Wright, Gingrich went after the entire Democratic majority this way, exposing
their personal venality when it came to writing bad checks off the House bank or using the Congressional Post Office for campaign mail. (In fact, about 320 members and former members of Congress from both parties had written checks that required overdraft protection on their account—including Gingrich himself.)

Eventually, Newt, as he was universally known, would lead a Republican takeover of the House and become the party’s first speaker since 1955. And history would cast him as the principal adversary of the first president of the boomer generation, a man whose own faulty character would obliterate all other political discussion in the waning years of the American century.

Among Democratic insiders of the period, it’s often been said that Bill Clinton could not have existed without Gary Hart. This is true in more than one sense. Hart’s essential argument to Democrats in the 1980s—that a party grounded in New Deal industrial policies and Vietnam-era pacifism had to modernize and rethink if it wanted to remain relevant—formed the basis of the electoral and governing philosophy that would come to be known as Clintonism. But just as important, Hart’s shocking ruination meant that the new culture of political journalism was no longer a shock to anyone else. Had Clinton, a notoriously flawed husband, been the first to encounter tabloid-style journalism and satellite-driven coverage of his private life, he almost certainly would have been consumed by the same kind of media inferno that claimed Hart. As it was, coming four years after the
Monkey Business
blowup, Clinton knew exactly what to expect, and he had a better sense of how to navigate it—or, more precisely, how not to.

In fact, Clinton was thinking hard about this issue in the run-up to his own presidential campaign. Sometime around 1990, Tom Fiedler spoke about media ethics at a panel in Little Rock, where state legislators happened to be meeting. Afterward, an aide to Governor Clinton approached and asked Fiedler to spend some time with the governor. In a suite at the Excelsior Hotel (the same hotel where Clinton would later be accused of having sexually harassed
a woman named Paula Jones), Clinton questioned Fiedler about where he and his fellow reporters would draw the line on extramarital affairs. Was it news, he wanted to know, if a presidential candidate had cheated on his wife in the past, but wasn’t doing it currently? (Fiedler thought not.) What was the media’s statute of limitations likely to be? Fiedler found himself in the uncomfortable position of being consulted as an expert on the new category of sex scandal—which, of course, he was.

Later, Fiedler, like many others, would consider Clinton’s career in national politics proof that the Hart episode had not, in fact, led to an era where imperfections of character would overwhelm everything else. Fiedler had maintained all along that it wasn’t the reporter’s job to decide which aspects of a candidate’s life or persona were relevant to his abilities and which weren’t; those decisions were best left to the voters, who would ultimately be able to work through these disclosures and put them in context. As Fiedler saw it, in the case of marital infidelity, the voters had taken four years to process what had happened with Hart, and by 1992 they had decided that simply having cheated on your wife (and even having lied about it) was not, by itself, a disqualifying factor for a presidential candidate. Hart was the first, and perhaps he was treated more harshly because of it, but America had not become the place he warned of in his acid farewell, where politics existed only as treacherous sport. Rather, we had quickly evolved into a more forgiving society with a more complex notion of character.

There was a lot of validity in this. In the years after Clinton won not one but two terms in the White House, the list of politicians who would manage to rebound from sex scandals that made Hart’s look quaint grew almost as long as the list of those who hadn’t. Americans became desensitized to scandalous revelation, whether it involved sex or drug use or cheating on a college exam. You could disappoint us, certainly, but we were now a very hard country to shock.

And when politicians didn’t rebound, you could generally make a pretty good case that their moral transgressions were worth our knowing about. Did Eliot Spitzer deserve to be New York’s
governor—and a moralizing one, at that—after it was revealed that he had routinely rendezvoused with hookers while traveling on the taxpayers’ bill? Should we not have cared that Anthony Weiner, the brash candidate for mayor of New York, was “sexting” young women, even after he had been drummed out of Congress for it and had promised to get the habit under control? It was reasonable to suggest that this hinted at some deeper compulsion or insecurity that was not unrelated to—and, in fact, was probably central to—his craving for public validation.

Perhaps, in the years after 1987, the electorate had become worldlier and more discerning, as Fielder suggested. At the same time, though, when it came to the presidency, mere survival had replaced any actual record as the central test of success. Sure, Clinton managed in 1992 to avoid the calamitous judgment that had befallen Hart an election cycle earlier. But despite presiding over a surging high-tech economy, his presidency would mostly be remembered as a series of personal scandals and evasive maneuvers that would have been unthinkable in another era—things like “Troopergate” and “Whitewater” and some silly affair involving the White House Travel Office that no one even remembers now, not to mention a blue dress with semen stains and the first actual impeachment in 130 years.

In the age of what Clinton himself termed, with notable clarity, “the politics of personal destruction,” independent prosecutors were far more numerous than significant triumphs of legislation. More than one Clinton aide would tell me, after the fact, that Clinton would have pushed hard to reform industrial age entitlement programs in his second term had it not been for the impeachment saga that sapped his presidency. Whether or not that was true, by that point Clinton could only hope to last out his second term and nothing more. It’s telling that the most authoritative book about Clinton’s presidency, written by the journalist John Harris, was called not “The Reformer” or “The Progressive,” as Clinton might have hoped back in 1992, but rather
The Survivor
.

Just as important, Clinton embodied a profound change in the nature of candidacies after Hart and how they were evaluated.
Clinton didn’t succeed where Hart had failed so miserably simply because a few years had passed and no one really cared anymore, as Fiedler suggested. He succeeded because he was an entirely different genre of politician, with an entirely different skill set. Hart was cerebral and certain of himself, prone to trust his own counsel, someone who clung stubbornly to his own idea of principle, even when it did him no good. He held himself at a certain emotional remove. These were qualities that, for most of the life of the republic, were considered the traits of strong leadership. This is why being called a loner in the media never alarmed Hart as much as it did his younger aides; to him, it conjured images of Lincoln and Kennedy and perhaps even Reagan—men of resolve, self-reliance, and at times a certain inscrutability.

Clinton was a whole other type. Like Hart, Clinton made a point of saying he didn’t think any candidate should have to discuss the cracks in his marital life, but then he did exactly that—at length, expertly and disarmingly, with his wife pointedly by his side. Clinton was all too willing to emote about the “pain in his marriage” on
60 Minutes
, to play the saxophone like some street-corner hustler on
The Arsenio Hall Show
, to share the intimate details of his underwear choices on MTV. Clinton openly yearned for approval and acceptance, for any kind of physical contact, any hand outstretched. He was famous for telling whoever was in the room last whatever he wanted to hear. As the country would find out later, Clinton was also willing to lie, outright, when it came to behavior he considered irrelevant or couldn’t face in himself. Clinton was a brilliant and complex thinker, a magnetic personality, but also frustratingly needy and malleable.