The Great Disconnect

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.