BOXER SHORTS DOWN, POLLS UP

Mark Steyn on why being brazen seems to have worked for Mr Clinton (so far)

New Hampshire HAS BILL CLINTON snatched victory from the jaws of Monica? His minders seem to think so. He's been let out in pub- lic again; he's making speeches again; he's playing golf again. He may even be dating again. The Hollywood pals are back on side, too: by the time you read this, the Lear jets will be revving up to bear Tom Hanks and Barbra Streisand to the White House for dinner with Tony Blair — a grand celebration of the 'special relation- ship'. Tony's relationship with Bill is, indeed, special among all the President's bewildering array of nuanced relationships. This is one which, as far as one can fore- see, is unlikely to end in Tony being fixed 11P with a job at Revlon or, if that doesn't work out, being trashed by presidential advisers as a deranged tramp. On the other hand, Tony doesn't enjoy the same access to Bill as Monica. William Ginsburg, Miss Lewinsky's lawyer and, er, Mouthpiece, has been making himself available to every single talk-show in America and amazingly manages to take a subtly different tack every time. This week, he was talking to other White House interns to see whether the 90- minute late-night phone calls and weekend visits to the West Wing were not more than, as he put it, 'normal interaction between colleagues'. Miss Lewinsky must be quite a colleague for President Clinton to spend more time interacting with an entry-level Pentagon public affairs clerk than with the chairman of the Federal Reserve or the six other G7 leaders com- bined. But who knows? Maybe that is 'nor- mal interaction' in the Clinton Administration.

At any rate, Mr Ginsburg has decided to try the flavour du jour: brazen. You'd think the public would find the 'normal interac- tion, guff even harder to swallow than . . . oh, never mind; even the fellatio gags are beginning to wear thin. My point is that Mr Ginsburg, an amiable Californian, has Spent a week in Washington watching the First Lady blame it all on 'a vast right-wing conspiracy' and the President promise that he's doing his best to 'get all the facts together' and his attack dogs dismiss Miss Lewinsky as an erotomane (talk about an ever-boiling kettle calling the pot black) • Try these at home when your loved one catches you with the au pair: `Honestly, darling, it's just a vast right- wing conspiracy.'

`So you didn't have sex with her?'

`You're entitled to full answers to these questions. That's why I'm working as hard as I can to get all the facts together and release them to you as quickly as possible.'

By the time poor old Dick Morris, the disgraced presidential pollster and now a sex addiction treatment survivor, justified Mr Clinton's behaviour by suggesting that it was all because of the First Lady's alleged lesbianism, this seemed one of the less ludicrous Clinton defence strategies.

But, amazingly, brazen works. According to Gallup and co., the President's standing with the American people has never been higher. His poll numbers rise in inverse proportion to his collapsing boxer shorts. A couple more interns and he'll be off the graph. Of course, polls can be wrong: the other puzzler of recent days, a survey pur- porting to show that the most educated Americans had the least sex, has been sin- gle-handedly scotched by Mr Clinton, a Rhodes scholar. Still, flummoxed by the findings, America's news shows have returned to their traditional preoccupa- tions. CBS News has reinstated its 'El Nino Watch', a nightly feature about a weather system in the Pacific, in which a meteorolo- gist explains that the weather might be very bad; on the other hand, it might be very good.

`And is that due to El Nino?' asks veter- an anchor man Dan Rather, portentously.

`Well,' says the meteorologist, 'it might be due to El Nino. On the other hand, it might just be the weather.'

This is the kind of news the networks prefer. On Tuesday, with the sex scandal apparently, ah, spent, even the most famous intern in America needed a helping hand from El Nino: 'Monica Lewinsky', announced Entertainment Tonight, 'was greeted by El Nino as she came home to visit her father.' Which means: it was rain- ing at the airport.

A week and a half ago, ABC's Sam Donaldson, the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol and even our own Daily Telegraph were predicting that the President could be 'gone within days'. That was never going to happen. Mr Clinton has every incentive to cling to office until he's prised from his desk: if he resigned in shame this week, it means he'd have to face the Paula Jones suit as a private citizen; in theory, he could go to jail; certainly President Gore would be unlikely to take the political risk of giving his predecessor a Nixonian par- don. And, if the President won't go, who can make him? Mr Clinton knows that the independent counsel won't indict and that Congress won't impeach. The only thing that could force him out is a total collapse in public support — if he was derided everywhere he went as a buffoon and a liar.

But it hasn't happened. The polls now show more people think Miss Lewinsky is a liar — though, as National Review's Kate O'Beirne mused in Washington the other day, what sort of woman fantasises about performing hurried, unreciprocated oral sex on a guy who obviously doesn't care about her. But even those who do think Mr Clinton's lying about the sex still think he's doing a grand job as President. Seek- ing to reconcile these apparent contradic- tions, some commentators have said it reflects America's hypocrisy towards sex. The statistics are startling: how many American men earning $70,000 or more per year admit to cheating on their wives? Seven out of ten. How many men earning $50,000 or more per year confess to having had sex with at least six co-workers? One in five.

Six co-workers? In such a world, it's no wonder that, as Clinton confidante Ver- non Jordan remarked to an acquaintance at a cocktail party recently, he and the President, when they're playing golf, spend most of the time 'talking pussy'. It's true that, compared to Britain, America can sometimes seem bafflingly schizophrenic about sex. On the big three TV networks, nary a solitary pert nipple heaves into view. But, if you're in the big city, you've got the transsexual dating show, the gay lubricant hour and much else. Respectable journals carry pages of ads for unspecified services available by calling 1-800-890-TITS or 1-800-333-ANAL (we still have letters on the phones here). What I find most unsettling about these services is the thought that, when you call up the phone company to set up a new line and the service representative asks whether 1-888-GAY-REAR is still avail- able, the phone company — the heirs of Alexander Graham Bell simply says, `1-888-GAY-REAR? No problem, it's yours.'

But, granted the phone sex and the $11 billion that America spends annually on pornography, I don't think tacit sexual approval is behind the poll support for the President. If anything, the opposite is true. Mr Blair, if he gets a chance to slip among the people, might appreciate what's hap- pening. At the time of the Princess of Wales's death, Clinton loyalist George Stephanopoulos observed, 'Isn't Tony Blair doing a fantastic job? This is his Oklahoma City.' The Princess, so we were told over here, as her final gift to the British people, had unstarched their stiff upper lips: she had made them emotionally open and enabled them to shrug off the repressed baggage of Empire and swarm weeping into the modern Oprahfied world.

`Stiff upper lip', as I mentioned back then, is an American expression, and this week it's been reclaimed. These famously talkative, open, unrepressed people, who line up to fill the zillions of confessional talk-shows — 'Transvestites Who Date Their Wives' Fathers', '400Ib Women And The Men Who Love Them' — from dawn to dusk, these people have finally stumbled on a subject they don't want to talk about. When the wise men of the vast right-wing conspiracy were asked why Whitewater or the FBI files or the fundraising abuses had never sparked with the American people, they replied that it was all too technical and complicated: once something simple and vivid came along, it would all be differ- ent.

You couldn't get much more vivid than the President in the White House with his pants round his ankles and an accommo- dating schoolgirl bobbing away below. For- tunately for the President, it's proved too vivid. And so, like millions of dysfunctional families across the fruited plain, the Ameri- can people prefer not to talk about it. The former education secretary William Ben- nett put it best: if the polls are low, the President's in trouble; if the polls are high, the country's in trouble. The polls are high- er than they've ever been.

What has happened in the last fortnight is unprecedented. First, the President lied. Those closest to him knew he was lying and could barely conceal that knowledge. But, within a week, they rallied to their tattered, DNA-stained banner and went out to spread the lie. And now, two weeks on, they've co-opted the rest of the country, so that we're now like one of those dusty hardscrabble families in a Sam Shephard play, refusing to acknowledge that there's a dead baby buried in the yard, even as our collusion in the dark secret corrodes our soul. It is a fabulous achievement, a tribute to the sheer force of Mr Clinton's personal- ity.

On Tuesday, as Miss Lewinsky left Washington, Charlie Trie showed up and was promptly arrested. He's one of those shadowy Orientals whose illegal cam- paign contributions put most Americans to sleep. But his presence on the evening news was reassuring: back to the old scan- dals; business as usual.