If there was ever any doubt that Ken Starr's daylong appearance before the House Judiciary Committee would not be an edifying experience for the nation, Michael Moore's presence in the room erased it. Moore, who makes a living satirizing the pompous and the hypocritical in films and on television, arrived last Thursday at the Rayburn House office building on Capitol Hill, site of the solemn Watergate impeachment hearings of 24 years ago, wearing a bright green baseball cap and trailing a cameraman. He was there to collect footage for his new cable-TV show, appropriately titled The Awful Truth. But he was having trouble mocking the independent counsel and the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton. Why? Because, explained a dejected-looking Moore as he slumped against a wall outside the committee hearing room, "it's difficult to parody something that's already self-parody."
It was difficult because every actor in the production played a preassigned role in a drama with a preordained ending. And because Starr--though he tried to portray himself as an earnest public servant guided only by his reverence for the law--couldn't help veering, sometimes coyly, into political finger wagging. In the middle of his sober presentation there was Starr embracing the three Democratic Senators--Pat Moynihan, Bob Kerrey and Joe Lieberman--who had dared go to the floor in August to say that Clinton's private behavior was a public offense.
It was also difficult for Americans to invest in the spectacle because committee members, Republicans and Democrats alike, checked all pretense of impartiality in the cloakroom, with Democrats aiming a fusillade of sneers at Republican chairman Henry Hyde within minutes of the opening gavel and with Hyde clapping approvingly as Starr left the room 12 hours later. What should have been an uplifting display of American democracy at work had become so tedious and so illegitimate to the Americans who bothered to tune in that even Starr suggested he might rather be elsewhere. If not for his commitment to duty, the witness said in a rare moment of self-revelation, he would have packed up and moved to Malibu, Calif. That's where he had a teaching job lined up, he said, "long before Monica Lewinsky ever walked into the nation's life."
Starr's pining for the quiet life was part of his attempt to appear inoffensive, just a purveyor of evidence who is eager to retreat from Washington's partisan wars. And to the extent that he remained genial and G-rated throughout most of the day, mentioning the words sex and sexual only four times in his opening remarks and prefacing his comments deferentially with "you may disagree with me," or "I want to be fair," he succeeded. But presenting himself as the Mister Rogers of the Washington legal elite did not aid Starr in his bigger task--persuading anyone who wasn't already convinced that the case he had built against the President was strong enough to merit impeachment. Said Democratic committee member Charles Schumer, who won a Senate race against Clinton nemesis Al D'Amato three weeks ago: "If this case is only about sex and lying about sex, it will never be found impeachable by Congress."