In Polarized Capital, Need for Normalcy

“The question of the day is which capital city sustained more damage Friday: Baghdad or Washington?”

At least that was what Marshall Wittmann, the head of congressional relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation, wanted to know--not to diminish the human damage in Iraq but to emphasize the political savagery ravaging the American capital.

“The rest of the country looks in disgust upon us,” he said, nodding at one of five television sets tuned to impeachment at the influential think tank. “What you’re seeing is Washington’s version of the Hatfields and the McCoys. . . . Whatever your views are, I think everybody is wondering: ‘Why has it come to this?’ ”

Many Clinton defenders would blame the likes of Wittmann, as well as the dozens of talk-radio hosts who have been in full rant about the president’s alleged lying and were going at it again Friday in a forum at the foundation’s Capitol Hill headquarters.

But Wittmann said that Clinton clearly brought this chaos on himself. Yet even he seemed ready for a Washingtonian notion of normalcy: “What we need is a good tax bill,” he said.

Friday, the capital was a cocoon where everything was exploding. In the public gallery at the House of the Representatives, at the presidential memorials on the National Mall, even at a noon Mass at a Catholic church, it was hard to escape the fact that the capital, unlike any other place in the country, is possessed in a high pitch.

In the early morning, the head of the private Georgetown Day School looked sadly upon an auditorium of parents anticipating a Christmas pageant and knowing that what lay ahead was a day of impeachment and war.

“This is a really remarkable day in terms of our country,” Peter Branch told the parents, awaiting the sweet voices of angels and animals in the manger. “This may be the best part of our day.”

There were islands of calm, a few places that seemed out of time and place. One was the staterooms of the White House that have been transformed into a “Winter Wonderland” with dozens of shimmering trees spray-painted in gold and silver and mantels decorated with icing carved into fantasy Christmas scenes.

“It was surreal walking into the White House all gilded and beautiful,” said Maridith Sandler, among the thousands of tourists who squeezed past each other to gawk at the glittery world. “It was so sad to think about all that the people who live in that house must be going through because of what’s going on in the House.”

However, Sandler, who lobbies in Washington for the state of Alaska, said that there really was no escaping the talk of scandal. When she heard Thursday night’s revelation of infidelity by Speaker-elect Bob Livingston (R-La.), she said, “It was almost more than I could take.”

In fact, several spectators in the House gallery watching lawmakers making their C-SPAN appearances said that the anger in the rhetoric reminded them of the 1960s, when people just seemed to hate each other, and of the shock of events like the killings of Kent State University students demonstrating against the Vietnam War by national guardsmen.

“I’ve never seen such open bitterness,” said Boston businessman Mark LaFarge after he heard Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.) end his two-minute speech with the ominous threat to Republicans that “what goes around comes around.”

“These guys really despise each other, don’t they?” said LaFarge, who sat through an hour of debate in the oddly half-empty gallery. Several tourists said serendipity rather than design had landed them there. Perhaps it was the predictability of the outcome of the impeachment vote expected today, or the quality of the oratory, that kept people away. There were few if any moments that would make Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

“We had tickets for a White House tour,” said Mike Deruosi, a businessman from Richmond, Va., who brought his three teenage children to the capital. “We just got fortunate that this was going on so the kids could see history come alive.”

Jim McCormick, a motivational speaker from Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, was one of the few who was excited about the debate.

“I wanted to be in the gallery today. I was here when Ronald Reagan gave the State of the Union [speech] in 1982 and it was so exciting.”

McCormick said he wants Clinton impeached for lying. He wants him banned from the city for violating “our institutions. If a president is allowed to lie under oath, the course of action that follows is profound,” he said.

For federal bureaucrats who have been on the sidelines for the last 11 months of the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, the only way to escape the din of C-SPAN on office television sets was to go Christmas shopping in a mall like the one in Union Station, where the sounds were dissonant mixes of canned Christmas tunes, school choirs and whistles from a huge electric train display.

Laurie Sears, an attorney for the comptroller of the currency, came to the mall to shop for her two children. Picking through velvety leggings for her 9-month-old daughter, she said that she was eager to “put the impeachment to the back of my mind. It puts me in this horrible mood to think about it.”

But she thinks about it anyway. She talked about this as “an impeachment in search of a real crime” and about her disagreements with her Republican father in the Midwest, who reviles Clinton.

“His feelings for Clinton remind me of how I felt about Ronald Reagan,” said Sears. “He might have said something good but I just stopped listening.

“You know what? I just want to shop here. You know it’s Christmas, even in Washington.”

Across town, the television set behind a busy restaurant bar was alternating between the House debate and the green-tinted scenes of Baghdad’s destruction.

Harry Rouf, the bartender, looked up occasionally from the limes he was slicing. “That’s where I went to elementary school,” he said matter of factly, pointing to a Baghdad building engulfed in smoke. “It’s a Mormon school.”

For him, the debate about the timing of war is more than academic. Although he is an American citizen and has been gone from Iraq almost 20 years, his sister still lives there. “She’s probably OK or I would have heard,” he said. “But I’ll be glad when this is over.”