Condit vs. Coelho
Resigning as the best media strategy.

By Tim Graham, White House correspondent, World magazine & former director of media analysis at the Media Research Center
July 30, 2001 8:40 a.m.

hile the Condittoheads lament the sorrier story angles of the Condit media extravaganza, it might be time for all the criticism of media excess to boomerang back into the intern-exploiting congressman's hyperactive lap. Ask yourself this question: Would Gary Condit even have this job if his predecessor, Tony Coelho, tried his Clintonesque media strategy of stonewalling until the media looks as tawdry as you do?

In the spring of 1989, as House ethics controversies began to sink the ship of Speaker Jim Wright, Coelho was caught hiding a $50,000 loan from savings and loan executive Thomas Spiegel which was used to buy $100,000 in junk bonds from Drexel Burnham Lambert. (That's a titillating two-fer for that era's future McCain groupies.) As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Coelho specialized in soliciting corrupt S&L barons. CNN reporter Brooks Jackson's book Honest Graft noted Coelho had free use of the yacht of infamous S&L crook Don Dixon with free food and drinks to entertain contributors.

Faced with the first inkling that he could be headed for the noose after Speaker Wright kicked and screamed up the political gallows, Coelho finessed his media-favorite status and resigned quickly. (He then assisted Condit's ascension to his office.) The seemingly unselfish exit took the media's investigators quickly off his trail, and led to a round of media breast-beating about how the "ethics wars" had gone too far.

"It seems to be a personal tragedy as well as, perhaps, one for the country," ABC star Barbara Walters mourned after Coelho's resignation in a guest-host stint on Nightline. Newsweek's Howard Fineman wrote, "Coelho…is the most dramatic victim yet of the Age of Accusation that now dominates American politics." A week later, the magazine's "Conventional Wisdom Watch" gave Coelho an up arrow: "Martyr to the cause of decency."

Soon, reporters moved from Coelho's offenses to blaming Republicans with who-lost-Coelho outrage. "Politics didn't just turn ugly. It evolved from a nasty presidential campaign that featured the GOP's famous Willie Horton ad," declared CBS's heavy-breathing Eric Engberg in one of his many obsessive explorations of the ad featuring the poor service-station slaughterer. Not to be left out, NBC's Bryant Gumbel stated the facts as he saw them to new House Democratic leaders Dick Gephardt and Bill Gray: "You two fill the voids left by those who were casualties of an ethics war Republicans started."

Meanwhile, Coelho moved on to exploit his political connections for millions of dollars as he retained his media-darling status for a more forgetful time. Within five years, he was resurrected to mastermind the Democrats' 1994 congressional campaign (oops), and then resurrected again in 1999 to direct the early earth-tones Al Gore campaign (double oops).

But his media friends allowed him to function easily at the top without rehashing those old stories, except to dismiss them. When he was named head of Gore's campaign, CNN didn't send Brooks Jackson, but Bruce Morton, who helpfully reported: "In Congress, Tony Coelho rose like a rocket…. But reports surfaced he had failed to disclose the purchase of some junk bonds, and in 1989 perhaps mindful of the scandal which had dogged Speaker Jim Wright, he resigned…. Coelho was never formally accused of anything improper." That shows some political brilliance. Leave quickly, before anyone nails you for improprieties, and you can be "never formally accused." Did we ever imagine that a shameless anything-goes fund finagler like Tony Coelho would be the symbol of a more dignified era?

Gary Condit, on the other hand, has learned the new rules written in the Clinton era. Stonewall long enough, rely on Clintonistas to rehash their favorite cable-TV game of building disgust with a sex-obsessed media, salvage your own career, and hopefully float over heavy media traffic to "never formally accused" status without resigning. But even if he makes it, Condit faces the same empty victory Bill Clinton received. You retain the office, but you're cemented in the public mind forever as a me-first Dirty Old Man. In this case, make that a me-first Dirty Old Man who at the very least mucked up the police search for a very misguided young woman who thought she could be Mrs. Condit.