Has "Condit Country" Started to Crumble?

Three weeks ago Ed Roston was asked whether his congressman, Rep. Gary Condit, would ever fall out of favor with his loyal 18th district constituency. The Ceres, California, resident laughed and replied, "Let's put it this way: It'll happen when Ceres freezes over in July."

In politics, as Condit has recently learned, conditions can change abruptly, and July can turn awfully cold. Two days after Condit admitted to law enforcement sources that he had an affair with the missing 24-year-old Washington D.C. intern, the Congressman's once loyal body of supporters started turning on him. And as the D.C. police department issued searched Condit's apartment and made requests for lie detector tests, Condit's support wobbled again.

The intern vanishes

The Congresman has been under intense national scrutiny since the first inkling of Chandra Levy's April 30th disappearance. Levy, a Modesto native and an intern at the Federal Bureau of Prisons in D.C., planned to return home May 1st for her commencement from graduate school at USC. That last day in April, Levy cancelled her membership at a local health club and returned to her apartment. She hasn't been seen since.

Initially, Condit denied the allegations that he and Levy had an affair. Though such rumors have filled newspapers for close to two months, Condit's assurances that Levy was nothing more than a "good friend" were met with virtually unanimous acceptance in his home district.

"We know what kind of man he is," Charmaine Daniel, a Stanislaus County resident, indignantly told U.S.A. Today early in the investigation, "and it really upsets me that some of the newspapers have been very crude about the story when even the police don't know what happened."

The home fires have stopped burning

Last Thursday, however, admiration in "Condit Country" turned sour when Levy's aunt told newspapers that her niece had provided her with an extensive account of a relationship with Condit. She described how the congressman had gone to great lengths to keep the liaison a secret and warned that he would stop seeing her if she told anyone.

The reaction at home has been one of shock and disappointment. "We all stood by him," said Valerie Cornwall, a former Condit intern and resident of near-by Turloc. "He has been a great leader and a loyal public servant. But this news has caught us all off guard. The entire region has been left out in the cold. This is no longer Condit Country, and that is a hard reality to face."

Certainly not everyone at home is abandoning the congressman. There are still those who believe that a government official's private life is of no significance in evaluating his or her work.

But privacy is not the major concern for most of Condit's constituents. As Catherine O'Brien wrote in a letter to the Modesto Bee: "The fact that Mr. Condit made a clear, deliberate decision to withhold information pertinent to the investigation raises questions in my mind as to the congressman's sense of ethics and morals, and leads me to ask whether he actually values another human being's life less than he values his political career."

Can Condit salvage his reputation and his job? "He is a masterful politician," Cornwall reminds us, "who just may have what it takes to win back his peoples' support. The elections are this November and that's a long time away."

Until then, Condit is facing a politician's hell of questions and raised eyebrows — in short, what feels suspiciously like the start of a new ice age back in California.