The Great Disconnect

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That's a theme that Texas Governor George W. Bush uses in all his pep rallies. Around here, it's also the kind of thing that can happen fast and change someone forever. Kathy Currier was a state welfare worker on Nov. 13, 1997, when a mean, dirty drunk she had seen too many times came into her office, and she realized she was growing "a little hardened." Working for the government, she decided, would let her process many people but save very few. So she quit, took over the transients' flophouse and began its conversion into a rescue mission. The architect is a volunteer, as are the contractor, the electrician and the people who show up to help on Saturdays when the local restaurants send over food. Asked how she gets so many to pitch in with so much, Currier says, laughing, "It's the God thing."

Emporia Mayor Dale Davis, 63, owns a business that makes parts for oil refineries, which means the price of steel and what happens in Asia matters to him. And yet he is worried not at all that the scandal has engulfed the President and Congress for a full year. The distraction, he says, "may keep them from doing something that makes it all worse" for places like Emporia. As a boy during World War II, he had three heroes: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Especially Roosevelt. "People generally thought this one man was the difference between winning and losing that war," the mayor says. It wasn't until later that they learned he couldn't walk. And yet, Davis says, "I remember him, because my mother cried when he died, and that's the only time I ever remember my mother crying." Brownback is of a different mind, a different generation. "I don't look to a President to be my hero," he says. "Kathy Currier is my hero."

"The Union does not stand on who the President is," says pastor John Glennon, an ally of Currier's. "The State of the Union is a matter of heart. It's not a matter of persons." But Clinton, like every President before him, will do everything in his power to suggest otherwise. There was never much chance that Clinton would delay his speech until the trial was over. Never in memory has a President had so much to brag about and so many reasons to do it loudly. Clinton, forever the luckiest of men, is the luckiest of Presidents to be presiding over America in 1999, when everything that should be up--incomes, the markets, test scores, productivity--is up, while everything that should be down--inflation, crime, welfare rolls, teen pregnancies--is down. And he's lucky right down to the timing: he gets to give a nationwide address just as the prosecution rests and his lawyers begin cranking up his defense. David Kendall and Charles Ruff may have been up all weekend scribbling notes, preparing briefs and drafting their final statements, but when Clinton gives his speech Tuesday, he is taking the stand in his own defense.

His tormentors have set the stage to his liking: they're worrying about impeachment, he has been saying, and we're worrying about keeping guns out of schoolyards. While House managers tried to pin him in the Senate well, Clinton spent the week preserving wide-open spaces, proposing a 55[cents]-a-pack hike in the federal cigarette tax and helping disabled Americans keep their health insurance. However hard it is for him to give the speech, it may be harder for Congress to hear it. If all goes his way, the Senate will wake up on Wednesday wondering whose idea this trial was anyway.

What Brownback knew in his gut going into last week was confirmed in closed-door meetings by some cold, hard numbers presented to G.O.P. Senators by pollster Linda DiVall two days before the trial began. The party, she told them, was stuck with a ballooning bill for this ugly year. Approval of the G.O.P. Congress is in the 40% range and falling. Something had to be done quickly, so a group of Senators held a press conference Friday morning to announce plans to introduce the G.O.P. version of legislation for a patients' bill of rights. There will be more to come, in a hurry. "We are in a real hole here," says a G.O.P. leadership aide. "We are getting blamed for this, and we must become more relevant to what people's lives are about."

Brownback sat in for part of the DiVall briefing and came away thinking both parties, working together, had to come out of the trial with something big up their sleeves--fixing Social Security, reforming taxes, maybe a bipartisan education package. The people, he said, had moved past the trial. Passing something large, he added, "would catch us up with them."

Clinton has always danced with the disconnect--at first badly, when he lost touch with what Americans want from government (less, not more)--but since then he has been its darling, mastering its lessons and collecting its rewards. He waltzed to re-election two years ago when he became the first to figure out that Americans had so much change in their lives that the last thing they wanted from Washington was more of it. So he worked to make change easier to handle, to get those car seats standardized, to secure maybe a little time off to take the kids to the doctor, some help with college loans and long-term care as we all get older.