I bring this up not as a comment on the two men’s comparative wit or a warning against the perils of exhaustion campaigning or anything else but this: the fact that so much in our political reaction is superficial, opportunistic, tactical, the-blues-versus-the-greens, my-guy-over-your-guy-no-matter-what. It is, in other words, wanting in anything that could be called a single standard of judgment. This is something you at least ought to acknowledge and keep in mind, even if you can’t avoid indulging in the double-standard responses yourself, as we head into what is certain to be a very heavy-duty scandal season.

There is a sense around Washington that the Newt Gingrich investigation by the House ethics committee is poised to become a bigger and more serious affair than it has been to date. There are mutterings about false statements that may have been made. But all this has yet to quite form up. The administration campaign-finance scandals, on the other hand, have already reached the classic drip, drip, drip stage. This is the leakage out into public of an embarrassment a day. The process is self-perpetuating, for once it becomes clear that there is a sizable body of questionable-to-downright-squalid stuff being hidden, the press will get on the case in a big, competitive way, guaranteeing the continuous drippage. And although people in Washington always solemnly profess to be shocked and/or dismayed by the revelations, they are, in fact, pretty much to a person, titillated by them.

It is my observation that all administrations contribute to their own misery on this score, doing much more than we in the press could ever hope to do to keep the process going. They create the framework for the drama in the first instance by a series of dodges and feints and denials and plain falsehoods that set them up for exposure. They then continue to let the truth out only under pressure and in dribs and drabs, each time having to admit a little more and also explain a lot more about their previous, now discredited assertions. What they thus build into the situation is plot, suspense–assuring an ever increasing and more attentive audience for the story. They also create growing anxiety among a group of people on their side who work for them and who begin, even if only ever so daintily at first, to distance themselves from the situation, to signal their own innocence to the press and investigators. This they generally do by hinting at their own detachment from or resistance to what was going on, which, of course, by implication, anyway, seems to confirm the charges against others. This is happening in relation to some of the administration scandals now too.

It is neither to put all scandals on the same scale or to prejudge the guilt of anyone to say that there is a depressing sameness to the way our political leaders both get into trouble and try to get out of it–and thereby get into even more. People forget now how eerily like everything we have heard in extenuation of this administration’s troubles were the responses made over a couple of years by the Nixon administration and every administration since that had serious misconduct to account for. There is the argument that the other side does it too. There is the argument that the whole hing was a low-level snafu by someone that nobody who matters in government ever heard of–this one nearly always gets exploded, to great embarrassment. There is the impatient reminder that the inquiries and investigations have yet to turn up the goodss, never mind that whoever is making the reminder has been doing everything possible to impede the discovery of the goods. There is the allegation of malevolent political motivation on the part of those trying to get at the truth. And always there is the optimistic assertion that no one outside Washington can even understand the intricacies of the alleged malfeasance and no one outside the press even cares, because the talk of it is taking time away from the issues. In the late 18th century, Dr. Johnson said ““patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’’ Today he might be tempted to substitute for patriotism a professed devotion to ““the issues.''

It was also the case with the Nixon scandals, and those that came after him, that each episode seemed to be taken seriously by the public in waves; that is, there were numerous seeming, but false, reprieves, periods in which it would be said that whichever administration or leader it was had prevailed and the nasty business was closed. Then it would be reopened. And that, alas, was because with all its individual variations and gradations of seriousness, the core problem was remarkably the same: not what had been done in the first place, dreadful and even criminal as it might have been in some cases, but what had been done after the original offense to avoid facing the music.

Note that precisely what has made people in Washington start taking the Gingrich investigation more seriously is the hint of allegations being sorted out behind closed doors that he was not truthful with the House committee doing the investigation. Note also the source of the mounting interest in pursuit of the somewhat surreal Clinton campaign-fund scandals: the vast gap between the original responses out of the White House and on the part of others accused and the developing and wholly different reality they now have to account for. When you get to the drip, drip, drip stage, you can no longer count on tactical, us-versus-them reactions to get you out of trouble. ““Everybody does it’’ doesn’t do it. The drip, drip, drip tends eventually to erode that reflexive our-guy-versus-their-guy loyalty of the faithful which had simply rejected the possibility that any of this was serious. It usually means that you’re going to have a pretty big water bill to pay.