Graham’s Speech Offers Relief but Nothing for the Ages

Shortly after Rep. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) rose Saturday to speak to the Senate, an aide raced through the press gallery plopping on reporters’ desks the thick closing statement of Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), who leads the House team prosecuting President Clinton.

“But where’s the Graham text?” asked one reporter, throwing aside Hyde remarks that wouldn’t be delivered for another three hours.

“No text. He’s letting it fly from note cards,” the aide responded.

And let it fly he did.

Unlike the 12 lawyers who preceded him, Graham chose to do the folksy Southern country lawyer thing. Instead of reading from a prepared text, the congressman worked from notes he rarely used. Rather, he kept his eyes on his listeners, even walking around the podium, Oprah-style, to get closer to them a few times.

And for the first time in three days, all the senators seemed awake at the same time. At least they stopped scribbling and squirming and scanning their date books.

Perhaps Graham’s plain-spoken style and fluency in understandable metaphors captured their attention, a relief from three days of dry lawyerese.

“If this is a football game,” he said at one point, “we’re almost to halftime.”

He began with a pat on the back for the 98 listening senators (two were out of town for funerals).

“This has been billed as a constitutional drama by some of the pundits,” Graham said. “That’s called a snoozer.”

He seemed set on spicing things up. But first he poured on the honey, praising just about everyone within reason. The senators were awesome, courageous, tradition-bound for showing up. The public, despite its apparent support for Clinton, wouldn’t punish the Senate for removing the president because Americans are trustworthy and love their country, he said.

Graham even praised Clinton as “articulate” and “a civil rights advocate” before he ripped him for having “failed miserably” in the Monica S. Lewinsky matter. (Graham also plugged NBC anchor Tom Brokaw’s new book, raising the question of how long it will be before he is on the “Today” show.)

He discussed the history of civil rights by reaching into his own past. He noted that when he was in elementary school there were no blacks in his class, and he recalled his parents’ “beer joint,” where blacks were not allowed to drink. “That’s just the way it was. And it was wrong.”

Graham did not mention that there are no black members of the current U.S. Senate. The only African Americans in the Senate chamber were two women on the sidelines: a White House attorney and a Texas congresswoman who has been attending the trial each day.

In the end, while several senators assessed Graham’s presentation as the “heart” of the prosecution’s case, the South Carolinian did not leave them with any memorable lines. There was no “ask not what your country can do for you,” no “we have nothing to fear.” Not even an “it depends on what you mean by the word ‘is.’ ”

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While some senators have complained about sitting still for long periods this week, they have not faced half the physical challenge of the official reporters who keep tabs on the proceedings for the Congressional Record.

These court reporters stand a few feet from the speaker in the middle of the chamber, with their stenotype machines harnessed in front of them at their hips.

It is hard not to admire their endurance as they stand, their fingers dancing, staring intently at the speakers’ lips and looking like those women in old movies selling “cigars, cigarettes, Tiparillos.”

Even though it seems an anomaly not to record Senate business electronically, it apparently is more efficient to have it done by court reporters, according to Ronald Kavulick, who heads the Office of the Official Reporters of Debates in the Capitol basement.

In fact, each stenographic machine contains a computer chip that stores the reporter’s shorthand notes. When the data are fed into the computer, the shorthand notes are quickly converted into English.

The reporters, carrying about 10 pounds on their hips, work for 10 minutes at a time. After each recording stint, each reporter rushes back to the basement office to transcribe and edit. Within an hour, the proceedings are in Senate computers and on the way to the Congressional Record. (Senators’ aides are allowed to take a look at the transcription before it goes to the printer to clean up grammar and make other so-called “improvements.”)

The real challenge for these reporters is in catching all the rhetoric and government acronyms without getting distracted by a sneezing senator or a baby crying in the gallery.

“The art is in the concentration,” Kavulick said. “It’s one of those things like Michael Jordan doing a triple turnaround shot: The reporters have to concentrate.”

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There is more than one juror in Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s family these days.

Hutchison’s husband, Ray, a Dallas attorney and former chairman of the Texas Republican Party, has been in the Senate public galleries watching the impeachment trial the last few days. He has a deal with his wife that he flies to Washington whenever she cannot make it home for the weekend, and this was a weekend she had to be in the nation’s capital.

But Ray Hutchison will be rushing back to Dallas today to serve in a trial of another sort. He’s been summoned to be a juror in traffic court.

Wearing a gray suit and fuchsia tie, he took a cigarette break on the Capitol steps and talked about how impressed he was with one of the House prosecutors who had just referred to his all-time favorite political speech, one made by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

“I know next week I’ll be thinking about MacArthur when I ask that fellow who ran the stop sign if he understands ‘duty, honor, country,’ ” he said.