If You Can't Beat 'Em...

By BRUCE HANDY

It was like listening to Pat Boone's recent heavy-metal album. It was like watching Steve Young, the square Mormon quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, try to do an end-zone dance. It was like--in fact it was--Ken Starr volunteering information about his own sex life on national TV. "The answer to the big question is, no, I have not been unfaithful to my spouse," he told Diane Sawyer on 20/20 last week, adding, "I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but I have tried to live by what I believe is my--my obligation and my responsibility." To my ears, this made it sound as if the special prosecutor views married life as a series of car payments. It was also one of the queerest surrenders in American history.

The calculation behind Starr's interview was painfully transparent even in his dress: casual-Friday blazer and open-necked plaid sport shirt, chosen as if to say, "You know me. I'm just the kind of apple-cheeked suburban dad you might see shopping for ugly sweaters down at the mall and not some scary-vindictive superprude out of The Crucible." Indeed, the fact that Starr wasn't seen wearing buckled shoes and a peaked black hat was probably a public relations victory in and of itself. In a separate interview, a group of Starr's hard-nosed assistants also appeared without suits and ties, looking like actors in the world's least pleasant Dockers commercial while they explained how standard prosecutorial procedures required them to make Monica Lewinsky cry.

But if his sole duty should be to "the truth" and "facts, facts, facts," as Starr has sanctimoniously and, I think, accurately reminded us, what is he doing chatting with the woman who once abetted a similar Hail Mary p.r. effort by Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley? In going on ABC less than a week after visiting the House Judiciary Committee and appealing directly to the American people on matters both of substance ("There is no excuse for perjury. Never, never, never") and style (Starr confessed to having seen "any number of" R-rated movies), the special prosecutor was practicing the sort of age-of-Oprah personality politics of which his nemesis Bill Clinton, that great white whale of a President, is master. Not only is this ethically dubious on Starr's part; it's stupid: Would Ahab challenge Moby Dick to a swim meet? Would Leon Jaworski?

Sawyer turned up little actual news beyond Starr's admission that his office should have kept Linda Tripp on a tighter leash. The real revelations were in Starr's sense of self. Having previously compared himself to Joe Friday, Atticus Finch, George Washington and the Lone Ranger, Starr upped the ante on 20/20, when he tacitly likened himself to Sir Thomas More ("He took the law very seriously") and, half-jokingly, to Jesus Christ (Starr said his reaction on first hearing of Lewinsky was "a little bit of 'Let this cup pass from me'"). The More reference was actually kind of snarky, what with its parallel suggestion of Clinton as a slovenly, appetite-riven Henry VIII. Still, it would take someone with image-making skills far beyond Starr's to pass off the prosecutor as a martyr. It would take someone, say, with the ability to turn a cheeseball philanderer into a victim. It would take--well, it would take Ken Starr.