Absent a confession that he'd killed Chandra Levy and dumped her body into the gloppeta-gloppeta machine*, I thought Gary Condit did about as bad as humanly possible in his interview with Connie Chung the other night. No, I take that back: He actually managed to do worse in the interview he did right after that with a local reporter in his home town of Modesto. I caught it on my satellite dish…and he not only looked even sleazier, he made his performance with Ms. Chung look worse, because he kept robotically repeating the same answers he gave there, over and over, draining every last droplet of sincerity from them.
It was like a game we used to play in improv workshops where you're given two lines of dialogue and, no matter how the scene plays out, you have to answer with one or the other. In Condit's case, they were "Out of respect for the wishes of the Levy family, I'm not going to get into that" and "I've been married for 34 years and I'm not a perfect man." Since not one of the questions asked could have been a surprise to the guy, you'd think he'd at least have planned some different ways to not say anything.
I have relatively little interest in Mr. Condit and, while it would be nice to see Ms. Levy turn up alive and well, I have no more interest in her than I do in any of the hundreds of men and women who manage to vanish each year in this country without the media going on Red Alert. The law enforcement officials who are charged with searching for Chandra Levy must feel trapped between the proverbial rock and hard place: They are incessantly hectored for not doing more to find her, but they know there's no acceptable answer to the question of why they're doing more to find her than they do to find anyone else.
What does interest me, sort of, about all this is how gleefully irresponsible the media has become in all this. Bogus reports of other affairs…oddities in the Condit household…reports of phone calls that actually didn't take place? Doesn't matter. Condit, they've decided, is guilty of something; if he didn't break the law, he's at least a hypocritical wife-cheater…so he and his family are fair game and accuracy is not required, especially during Sweeps Week. Early on, I had a faint hope that he'd turn out to be the Richard Jewell of Public Figures but there's no way that's gonna happen, no matter how this thing plays out.
What also interests me is this: Gary Condit is not some schmuck who got caught cheating on his wife. He's a seasoned politician schmuck who got caught cheating on his wife. He's experienced at evading dangerous questions and double-talking his way past topics he'd rather not address. People are upset because they think he's weaseling past all the hard queries…but that's in the Job Description we've come to define for elected officials in this country.
We expect politicians to lie and evade and then, if they're people we like, we forgive evasive answers and fibbing as some necessity of elected office. How many people do you know who were upset about all three of the following: Bill Clinton's "I never had sex with that woman," George Bush's "I was not in those Iran-Contra meetings" and Ronald Reagan's "We did not trade arms for hostages"? Most folks expressed outrage about one or two of those…but when it's their guy caught mutilating the truth, they rationalize or change the subject or say "The other guy did worse" or mutter, "Out of respect for the wishes of the Levy family, I'm not going to get into that."
Mr. Condit is being no less candid than most politicians in America if you ask them a question that they know will cost them votes. If he really thinks he can survive and win re-election, it's probably because he knows that, in the end, honesty garners little reward at the ballot box. I don't think it'll work this time…but, sad to say, it usually does.
(P.S.: For the funniest comment so far on it all, check out what Joshua Micah Marshall had to say by clicking here.)
*An obscure reference to a joke in the Jack Lemmon film, How To Murder Your Wife.