This was a curious document. It was reported by The New York Times, on the day after its initial and partial release, to have been written in part by Stephen Bates, identified as a “part-time employee of the independent counsel’s office and the part-time literary editor of the Wilson Quarterly,” an apparent polymath who after his 1987 graduation from Harvard Law School “wrote for publications as diverse as The Nation, The Weekly Standard, Playboy, and The New Republic.” According to the Times, Mr. Bates and Mr. Starr had together written a proposal for a book about a high school student in Omaha barred by her school from forming a Bible study group. The proposed book, which did not find a publisher, was to be titled Bridget’s Story. This is interesting, since the “narrative” section of the Referral, including as it does a wealth of nonrelevant or “story” details (for example, the threatening letter from Miss Lewinsky to the president that the president said he had not read, although “Ms. Lewinsky suspected that he had actually read the whole thing”), seems very much framed as “Monica’s Story.” We repeatedly share her “feelings,” just as we might have shared Bridget’s: “I left that day sort of emotionally stunned,” Miss Lewinsky is said to have testified at one point, for “I just knew he was in love with me.”
Consider this. The day in question, July 4, 1997, was six weeks after the most recent of the president’s attempts to break off their relationship. The previous day, after weeks of barraging members of the White House staff with messages and calls detailing her frustration at being unable to reach the president, her conviction that he owed her a job, and her dramatically good intentions (“I know that in your eyes I am just a hindrance — a woman who doesn’t have a certain someone’s best interests at heart, but please trust me when I say I do”), Miss Lewinsky had dispatched a letter that “obliquely,” as the narrative has it, “threatened to disclose their relationship.” On this day, July 4, the president has at last agreed to see her. He accuses her of threatening him. She accuses him of failing to secure for her an appropriate job, which in fact she would define in a later communiqué as including “anything at George magazine.” “The most important things to me,” she would then specify, “are that I am engaged and interested in my work, I am not someone’s administrative/executive assistant, and my salary can provide me with a comfortable living in NY.”
At this point she cried. He “praised her intellect and beauty,” according to the narrative. He said, according to Miss Lewinsky, “he wished he had more time for me.” She left the Oval Office, “emotionally stunned,” convinced “he was in love with me.” The “narrative,” in other words, offers what is known among students of fiction as an unreliable first-person narrator, a classic literary device whereby the reader is made to realize that the situation, and indeed the narrator, are other than what the narrator says they are. It cannot have been the intention of the authors to present their witness as the victimizer and the president her hapless victim, and yet there it was, for all the world to read. That the authors of the Referral should have fallen into this basic craft error suggests the extent to which, by the time the Referral was submitted, the righteous voice of the grand inquisitor had isolated itself from the more wary voices of his cannier allies.
That the voice of the inquisitor was not one to which large numbers of Americans would respond had always been, for these allies, beside the point: what it offered, and what less authentic voices obligingly amplified, was a platform for the reintroduction of fundamentalism, or “values issues,” into the general discourse. “Most politicians miss the heart and soul of this concern,” Ralph Reed wrote in 1996, having previously defined “the culture, the family, a loss of values, a decline in civility, and the destruction of our children” as the chief concerns of the Christian Coalition, which in 1996 claimed to have between a quarter and a third of its membership among registered Democrats. Despite two decades during which the promotion of the “values” agenda had been the common cause of both the “religious” (or Christian) and the neo-conservative right, too many politicians, Reed believed, still “debate issues like accountants.” John Podhoretz, calling on Republicans in 1996 to resist the efforts of Robert Dole and Newt Gingrich to “de-ideologize” the Republican Party, had echoed, somewhat less forthrightly, Reed’s complaint about the stress on economic issues. “They do not answer questions about the spiritual health of the nation,” he wrote. “They do not address the ominous sense we all have that Americans are, with every intake of breath, unconsciously inhaling a philosophy that stresses individual pleasure over individual responsibility; that our capacity to be our best selves is weakening.”
That “all” of us did not actually share this “ominous sense” was, again, beside the point, since neither Reed nor Podhoretz was talking about all of us. Less than fifty percent of the voting-age population in this country actually voted (for anyone) for president in 1996. The figures in the previous five presidential-year elections ranged from fifty to fifty-five percent. Only between thirty-three and thirty-eight percent voted in any midterm election since 1974. The figures for those who vote in primary elections, where the terms on which the campaign will be waged are determined, drop even further, in some cases into the single digits. Ralph Reed and John Podhoretz had been talking in 1996, as William Kristol and Mary Matalin would be talking in 1998, about that small group of citizens for whom “the spiritual health of the nation” would serve as the stalking horse for a variety of “social,” or control-and-respect, issues. They were talking, in other words, about that narrow subsection of the electorate known in American politics as most-likely-to-vote.
What the Christian Coalition and The Weekly Standard were asking the Republican Party and (by logical extension) its opponents to do in 1996 was to further narrow most-likely-to-vote, by removing from debate those issues that concerned the country at large. This might have seemed, at the time, a ticket only to marginalization. It might have seemed, as recently as 1996, a rather vain hope that the nation’s opinion leaders would soon reach general agreement that the rearming of the citizenry’s moral life required that three centuries of legal precedent and even constitutional protections be overridden in the higher interest of demonstrating the presence of moral error, or “determining whether a crime has been committed,” as Kenneth Starr put it in the brief he submitted to the Supreme Court in the matter of whether Vincent Foster’s lawyer could be compelled to turn over notes on conversations he had with Foster before his death. Yet by August 1998, here were two of those opinion leaders, George Will and Cokie Roberts, stiffening the spines of those members of Congress who might be tempted to share the inclination of their constituents to distinguish between mortal and venial sins: