The Great Disconnect

By NANCY GIBBS AND MICHAEL DUFFY

With their earnest comments and starchy bearing, Republican Senators have tried to make it clear how seriously they take their oath to sit in impartial judgment of a President. But in private last week, that wasn't their immediate concern. The talk in the G.O.P. cloakroom was about a more awkward judgment: What to do about Bill Clinton's State of the Union speech Tuesday night? Almost a year to the day after the Monica Lewinsky story first broke, a disgraced President is on trial in one chamber of Congress, being called a liar, a cheat and a threat to the rule of law, while in the other he will stand and claim credit for the best year in a half-century, and the audience will rise and shout amen. Republicans wonder, Do they clap, stand or walk out on the speech? Should they even show up at all?

Sam Brownback of Kansas, for one, has made up his mind. "The country will forgive a lot," he notes, "but not bad manners." Yet whatever Clinton says, and whatever Congress does, neither side can take much credit for the luminous State of this Union, since they have spent the year in a locker room, arguing about sex. And in the year in which the phrase divided government came to refer to a government divided from its people, says Brownback, that "is the biggest disconnect of all."

A good many Senators are still having trouble swallowing the notion that their decisions don't matter to the public, but Brownback understands this as well as anyone in Washington. He has been thinking about it for years, since the day he saw a bumper sticker in Topeka that said: I LOVE MY NATION, BUT I FEAR MY GOVERNMENT. As he sat at his back-row desk last week, Brownback listened carefully to the House prosecutors making their case and wondered about his duty to a President he wants to treat fairly, the laws he swore to uphold and the people of Kansas whose interests he promised to defend.

Except what if those people are too busy to care? A man who takes his faith so seriously that he once washed a departing staff member's feet as a gesture of thanks, Brownback has an idea about what his constituents are praying for these days: "They just want it over with," he says. And however it turns out, they tell him, it will have no effect whatever on their lives. "That," he says quietly, "is an amazing thing."

To plot those crosswinds, TIME sent a team of reporters to a small city in Brownback's home state to watch the political trial from a distance and the public response to it up close. Emporia, Kans., is as good a place as any to see what devolution looks like, how it works and what it means. People here haven't merely fled politics in disgust because of the scandal; they have been strolling away for years. Prosperity has made this possible, conservatives made it fashionable, and the scandal has at last made it visible.

"Disconnect?" asks Emporia city manager Steve Commons. "You make the assumption there was a connection in the first place. In the end we function on our own."

A hundred years ago, when politicians from the East Coast wanted to know what America was thinking but did not have time to go find out for themselves, they would scour the pages of the Emporia Gazette, produced by Republican patriarch William Allen White. The Sage of Emporia, as White was known, urged the G.O.P. to move beyond the bitter arguments of Reconstruction and focus on a new century, the 20th. Today, with the party apparently again fixated on a single issue instead of on the next century, White's town is worth another look.

A visit to Emporia suggests that it may be years before anyone really understands all the solvents at work at the end of this century. With no cold war or domestic crisis or money for moon shots, it has been less immediately clear what government was really good for, except diversion. If Americans began leaving their leaders behind years ago, nothing--not shrinking voter turnout, not Ross Perot, not a yearlong campaign-finance scandal that resulted in no changes--nothing has brought home the gap between the governed and governing classes as much as the impeachment that doesn't matter.

Emporia is a town of 25,512 people 110 miles southwest of Kansas City, with wide streets, big porches and the nation's smallest accredited zoo. This is not Clinton country: Republicans here outnumber Democrats almost 2 to 1. In 1996 Emporia went for the local guy, Bob Dole, over Clinton, but everyone here would stand up on instinct if Clinton walked in on them at the diner. People here have always had better things to do than worry about Washington. On Dec. 19, the day the House was voting to impeach the President, the incoming Speaker was burned at the stake and bombs were falling on Baghdad, Brownback was standing on the porch of what just a few weeks earlier had been a reeking, roach-infested flophouse near the heart of town. Now it was midway through a gut renovation, newly painted Crayola yellow and beginning to shine. Brownback was talking about how if you really want to change people's lives, you have to change hearts, one on one, one at a time.

That's a theme that Texas Governor George W. Bush uses in all his pep rallies. Around here, it's also the kind of thing that can happen fast and change someone forever. Kathy Currier was a state welfare worker on Nov. 13, 1997, when a mean, dirty drunk she had seen too many times came into her office, and she realized she was growing "a little hardened." Working for the government, she decided, would let her process many people but save very few. So she quit, took over the transients' flophouse and began its conversion into a rescue mission. The architect is a volunteer, as are the contractor, the electrician and the people who show up to help on Saturdays when the local restaurants send over food. Asked how she gets so many to pitch in with so much, Currier says, laughing, "It's the God thing."

Emporia Mayor Dale Davis, 63, owns a business that makes parts for oil refineries, which means the price of steel and what happens in Asia matters to him. And yet he is worried not at all that the scandal has engulfed the President and Congress for a full year. The distraction, he says, "may keep them from doing something that makes it all worse" for places like Emporia. As a boy during World War II, he had three heroes: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Especially Roosevelt. "People generally thought this one man was the difference between winning and losing that war," the mayor says. It wasn't until later that they learned he couldn't walk. And yet, Davis says, "I remember him, because my mother cried when he died, and that's the only time I ever remember my mother crying." Brownback is of a different mind, a different generation. "I don't look to a President to be my hero," he says. "Kathy Currier is my hero."

"The Union does not stand on who the President is," says pastor John Glennon, an ally of Currier's. "The State of the Union is a matter of heart. It's not a matter of persons." But Clinton, like every President before him, will do everything in his power to suggest otherwise. There was never much chance that Clinton would delay his speech until the trial was over. Never in memory has a President had so much to brag about and so many reasons to do it loudly. Clinton, forever the luckiest of men, is the luckiest of Presidents to be presiding over America in 1999, when everything that should be up--incomes, the markets, test scores, productivity--is up, while everything that should be down--inflation, crime, welfare rolls, teen pregnancies--is down. And he's lucky right down to the timing: he gets to give a nationwide address just as the prosecution rests and his lawyers begin cranking up his defense. David Kendall and Charles Ruff may have been up all weekend scribbling notes, preparing briefs and drafting their final statements, but when Clinton gives his speech Tuesday, he is taking the stand in his own defense.

His tormentors have set the stage to his liking: they're worrying about impeachment, he has been saying, and we're worrying about keeping guns out of schoolyards. While House managers tried to pin him in the Senate well, Clinton spent the week preserving wide-open spaces, proposing a 55[cents]-a-pack hike in the federal cigarette tax and helping disabled Americans keep their health insurance. However hard it is for him to give the speech, it may be harder for Congress to hear it. If all goes his way, the Senate will wake up on Wednesday wondering whose idea this trial was anyway.

What Brownback knew in his gut going into last week was confirmed in closed-door meetings by some cold, hard numbers presented to G.O.P. Senators by pollster Linda DiVall two days before the trial began. The party, she told them, was stuck with a ballooning bill for this ugly year. Approval of the G.O.P. Congress is in the 40% range and falling. Something had to be done quickly, so a group of Senators held a press conference Friday morning to announce plans to introduce the G.O.P. version of legislation for a patients' bill of rights. There will be more to come, in a hurry. "We are in a real hole here," says a G.O.P. leadership aide. "We are getting blamed for this, and we must become more relevant to what people's lives are about."

Brownback sat in for part of the DiVall briefing and came away thinking both parties, working together, had to come out of the trial with something big up their sleeves--fixing Social Security, reforming taxes, maybe a bipartisan education package. The people, he said, had moved past the trial. Passing something large, he added, "would catch us up with them."

Clinton has always danced with the disconnect--at first badly, when he lost touch with what Americans want from government (less, not more)--but since then he has been its darling, mastering its lessons and collecting its rewards. He waltzed to re-election two years ago when he became the first to figure out that Americans had so much change in their lives that the last thing they wanted from Washington was more of it. So he worked to make change easier to handle, to get those car seats standardized, to secure maybe a little time off to take the kids to the doctor, some help with college loans and long-term care as we all get older.

Now, with the trial under way, he knows that all the expectations and coincidences of luck and timing work to his advantage. Last week he took every opportunity to drive the wedge a little deeper. "The important thing for me is to spend as little time thinking about that as possible and as much time working on the issues we're here to discuss as possible," he said. "They have their job to do in the Senate, and I have mine, and I intend to do it."

White House aides boast that their man is the only guy in town with an agenda or a list of things to do; they also admit Clinton recently asked a long list of intellectuals--writers E.L. Doctorow and Henry Louis Gates, scientist David Ho, historian Robert Dallek--to fill his tank. Their written suggestions, which varied in length from three paragraphs to 30 pages, helped provide the millennial rhetoric to go with the usual Clinton cafeteria of small fare: funds to improve food safety, hire more police officers, replace aging school buildings and provide more help to minority entrepreneurs. Brownback smiles when he thinks about the litany of little things Clinton will suggest on Tuesday. "It's beautiful politics," he says. "But it isn't significant. It doesn't change the world. It just keeps the people happy."

A dozen men are sitting around a table Friday morning at Coburn's Family Restaurant, drinking coffee and talking about the trial. Clinton's removal would be just another form of change, they figure, something new to worry about in an age of permanent impermanence. Who wants to wrestle that one to the ground too? "If the President is removed, there won't be huge applause," says Jeff O'Dell, 46, news director for kvoe radio. "It's like if you get a new boss at work. You're not sure what will happen next." He digs into a stack of pancakes. "People here still have their lives to attend to," he says.

When people who do look to Washington for help don't get it, the news travels. Donna Newkirk's eyes flood as she tells how her 45-year-old husband Randy was killed in an accident last year. She received a $255 death benefit from the federal Social Security Administration--exactly $5 more, she discovered, than her grandmother got 31 years ago when her husband died. "I was absolutely stunned. I mean, that didn't even buy embalming fluid," she says. "It was like getting a dime tip after you've worked for an hour for a table of 15." Instead came food and prayers, in a humbling wave, from her friends and neighbors. "We take care of our own," she says.

Maybe the reason Americans don't care that the lines are down between them and Washington is that in the past few years, so many new lines have gone up; people have put out leads, cables, wires, dishes and high-speed traces connecting them to just about everything else. In a hyperconnected digital age, the last thing anyone can afford is an analog connection to a government that doesn't get it, can't keep up and is probably only going to make things worse if it finds you. Gordon Smith, the freshman Republican Senator from Oregon, is worried that a government engineered more than two centuries ago risks irrelevance in the Internet age. He and Democrat Ron Wyden held a series of bipartisan town meetings earlier this month, thinking they might be a good antidote to the bickering. But what Smith heard from voters surprised him. "I expected to be deluged with questions about the scandal," Smith said. "But it was the opposite. I got questions about everything but this."

Nobody's talking impeachment at the Emporia Livestock Sale Barn on Friday. It's almost noon, and a cattle auction is in progress. The drone of the auctioneer tells the story, head by head. Cows are going for between 27[cents] and 31[cents] per lb.--salvage price by local standards. "Should be 40[cents]," mutters Loren Wagaman, 79, a rancher taking a coffee break. Philip Bender chimes in. "They're not working for us in Washington," he says, paying for a cinnamon bun. "We're little peons to them. They don't give a dang about whether we make it or whether we don't." Bender, 79, an eye snapper in his orange Sunglo hat and cherry-red windbreaker, didn't bother to tune in to the trial. "I kept the TV off yesterday," he says. "I was working on my books to see if I could go another year."

Brownback got a lump in his throat two weeks ago when he raised his right hand and swore "to do impartial justice." It's the President of the U.S., he thought. This is serious. "But I had a keen sense of sadness too," he recalled later. "You tell your kids not to do things that are wrong, but whatever they do, you tell them, 'Don't lie about it.' Americans all over the country say that every day to their kids. That's the reason we're here. That's the reason the Chief Justice is here, 100 Senators are here, and all this time and money is being spent. Because of that one admonition."

When they retired to the cloakrooms on Saturday night, the Senators had to admit the House managers had done better than expected. On Day One, Henry Hyde was brief, James Sensenbrenner was solid, Jim Rogan was compelling if strident, and Asa Hutchinson stole the show. Ed Bryant was incoherent, "shockingly bad," as one Senator said later. Most of the other presentations were forgettable or repetitive, even annoying. But on Saturday, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham struck an empathic chord. Instead of insisting, as others had, that the case was clear-cut, he acknowledged that the Senate faced a difficult decision. Then Hyde closed with a stirring summation. Said a Republican Senator who had been skeptical about the House managers: "We were impressed with how well prepared they were and the passion they conveyed."

Hutchinson and Rogan marched the Senate briskly through the two articles of impeachment: the President, they claimed, had obstructed justice in the Jones case, caused other witnesses to provide false testimony to Kenneth Starr's grand jury and then knowingly lied under oath in order to maintain the deception. Hutchinson fashioned a compelling narrative from this too familiar tale. The obstruction, he alleged, began when Clinton learned that Lewinsky was to be subpoenaed in the Jones case; he drafted Vernon Jordan to help find her a job and get her back on Clinton's side; once that was under way, he approached Lewinsky with his plan to have her sign a false affidavit in the Jones case. As Hutchinson explained it, Jordan was recruited once more to find her a lawyer, hold her hand, get her out of town. But when it turned out that the Jones lawyers knew far more about Clinton's relationship with Monica than the President expected, Clinton hid behind his secretary, Betty Currie, who he claimed had been the object of Lewinsky's visits. The next day he met with Currie to go over his testimony, encouraged her to recall events as he had sworn to them and, the House contends, asked her to reclaim the gifts he had given Lewinsky. In places the testimony is contradictory; that, the House managers insist, is why the Senate needs to hear from Jordan, Currie and Lewinsky.

Many legal scholars believe the President is more vulnerable to charges that he lied about an affair than that he confected a conspiracy to conceal it. But the perjury charges do not throw open the doors to witnesses, and witnesses are what the House prosecutors want above all: witnesses are their last chance to sway opinion. The obstruction case, the Republicans realized, was the fastest way to convince Senators that the major players had to be called. "Let me ask you two questions," Hutchinson said. "First: Can you convict the President of the United States without hearing testimony of one of the key witnesses? Second: Can you dismiss the charges under this strong set of facts and circumstances without hearing and evaluating the credibility of the key witnesses?" How, he inquired, could the Senate figure out the punishment without truly knowing the crime?

Later Brownback sounds as if he is wrestling with issues of justice and mercy. "You sit in those hearings, and it's a sad role, but you realize none of us is perfect. There are consequences to actions, but none of us is perfect. If you're in a civil society, you have to dispense justice but also forgiveness."

The headlines last week in the Emporia Gazette were not about a President's disgrace; they were about the revered principal of a local grade school who had just resigned after being arrested on suspicion of marijuana possession. A public figure who everyone thought was doing a wonderful job was accused of doing something petty and dumb--and in so doing gave the town a chance to wonder about its standards and its sense of mercy.

No one approves of educators who use drugs, the Gazette editorialized last week. But in the fog of charges, it warned, don't lose sight of the principal's record. The paper recalled the August day when a house burned down; the principal helped the firemen lug hoses and waited there until the children, his students, came home. He wanted to help them cope with their loss. Or the time he was quick to arrive at the scene of a school-bus crash, comforting victims and helping the rescuers. But most important, the paper said, was his morality and courage under fire: the moment he was accused of wrongdoing, the principal resigned rather than cling to his job. "What was probably his last act as an educator--his resignation--may carry the strongest lesson," city editor Joel Mathis wrote. "Actions have consequences."

And then, of course, Mathis administered the coup de grace. Some people, he wrote, have already suggested that by accepting the consequences of his actions, the principal "has actually set a better example for our children than a certain scandal-plagued President."

And so the town of Emporia, a Republican stronghold where people generally agree that it would be better if Clinton disappeared, has supported the principal's decision to resign: reaching out to him in this painful moment but not trying to change his mind. "It's been a tough week," says Kathy Dreirer, whose daughters attend the principal's school. "The big thing at our house is lying," Dreirer says. "The kids ask, 'Why can the President get away with it, and we cannot?' I can't explain it. So I have to tell them, 'Because we're not his parents.'"

--Reported by Ann Blackman, Karen Tumulty and Mark Thompson/Emporia, Jay Branegan, James Carney and John F. Dickerson/Washington

With reporting by Ann Blackman, Karen Tumulty and Mark Thompson/Emporia, Jay Branegan, James Carney and John F. Dickerson/Washington