A VIEW FROM HERE
by deb weiss

The First Couple's Chamber Pot
August 5, 1999


"I haven't made any excuses for what was inexcusable," said a truculent Bill Clinton on Wednesday, engaging in some hastily-contrived White House damage control, "and neither has she, believe me." All that was missing was the waggling finger.

By "she," he meant, of course, his wife, whose oozily confessional "Talk" magazine interview with Clinton-friendly journalist Lucinda Frank had created something of a nasty little stir all week long.

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It wasn't supposed to do any such thing. As we all know by now, it was designed to woo older female voters in New York State (where the gender gap isn't working for Hillary, primarily because most women know deep down that there's got to be something radically wrong with anyone who'd stay with a guy like Bill).

The calculation was that Mrs. Clinton could win those ladies over by hinting that her husband's appetite for oral sex with dumpy White House interns wasn't really his fault at all, but was, instead, the natural outcome of his Southern Gothic childhood, torn between two women: his mother and his grandmother. Mom and Supermom.

Dutifully, Mrs. Clinton worked it in. It swiftly became Topic A. Thanks to some shrewdly-leaked excerpts and a lot of pre-publication buzz, the premier issue of "Talk" was the talk of the town days before it hit the newsstands.

For icing, a Hillary staffer simultaneously informed the press that the First Couple had rediscovered physical passion, and were spending hours together in bed. It seems the image of a troubled presidential childhood ("touching") combined with hints of wild but distinctly conjugal lust ("sexy") was supposed to turn our collective heads and send those poll numbers skyrocketing upward.

Which raises only one real question: what are these people smoking?

As a marketing ploy, mind you, hatched to launch a brand-new magazine, the hubbub was remarkably clever.

As a political gambit, though, designed to launch a Senate candidacy, it was almost unimaginably stupid, and the public just plain didn't buy it.

Which is the real news of the political week that was. The whole silly business marked a deliciously catastrophic failure of those smarty-pants tactics that have plagued our national politics for nearly a decade now.

However the focus group may have responded: whatever the pollsters and consultants may have claimed: however eagerly the network news-readers may have labored to transmute this tawdry ploy into a Hallmark moment, the fact was, it didn't work. Boy, oh, boy, did it not work.

By Tuesday evening, Mrs. Clinton was late-night red meat, tanking rapidly on the Leno-meter (a sharper gauge of public opinion than those overnight polls, say what you will). The response ranged from raucous laughter to groans of downright disgust. White House players knew they'd have to revise history fast, before the First Lady suffered permanent damage.

Which is why, by Wednesday afternoon, we saw both Clintons, a swarm of spin-artists, and large herds of domesticated journalists, busily insisting that Mrs. Clinton never said any such thing, that Mr. Clinton had a wonderful childhood, that Mr. Clinton's mom and granny were sterling women, that the bad old right-wingers had, as usual, completely distorted everything in a sinister attempt to make the Clintons look bad, and that Mrs. Clinton wasn't going to answer one more impertinent question about personal matters, no matter who tried to make her.

I'm left thinking about Ð of all things Ð Bernardo Bertolucci's flawed but fascinating 1987 epic, "The Last Emperor." This film told the story of Pu Yi, who held the Manchurian throne from 1908, when he was only three years old, until 1945, when he was swept from power in a tidal wave of war and revolution. (After being "rehabilitated" by the communists, he would serve as a humble gardener until his death.)

The movie is rich with odd biographical tidbits, including the fact that every detail of the emperor's life Ð even the most intimate Ð was subject to ceaseless scrutiny and interpretation. For instance, in early childhood, in one of the weirder daily rituals of palace life, court physicians would publicly examine the contents of Pu Yi's chamber pot to make sure his diet was adequate and his health was good.

This week, the First Couple's courtiers tried to hold up the Clintons' chamber pot for our edification, hoping to persuade us that its contents were a measure of health.

But in a heartening display of good old American commonsense, we soon made it clear to anyone who cared to listen that we knew exactly what was in that pot.

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A VIEW FROM HERE archive

Lifetime's Woman of the Year -- August 2, 1999

Thinking Over This Tax Cut Thing -- July 29, 1999

The John John Show -- July 26, 1999

America's One China, Two Alka Seltzer Policy -- July 22, 1999

The Politics of Speaking Ill of the Dead -- July 19, 1999

The Nasty Legacy -- July 15, 1999

All in a Slow News Week... -- July 12, 1999

Traps For The Young -- July 8, 1999

Remembering Michael Dukakis -- July 5, 1999

R.I.P., O.I.C. -- July 1, 1999

Mr. Clinton's Post-War Vengeance -- June 28, 1999

Guns, Cuisinarts and the Bill of Rights -- June 24, 1999

Attack of the Concerned Advocates -- June 21, 1999

FTC Nation -- June 17, 1999

The Very, Very Coincidental World of Bill and Hillary Clinton -- June 14, 1999

Water-boiling in Our Time -- June 10, 1999

Crisis and Peace -- June 7, 1999

Reinventing God -- June 3, 1999

On This Memorial Day -- May 31, 1999

The Un-McCarthy Era -- May 27, 1999

Unspeakable Spin -- May 25, 1999