Making Scenes and Making Laws

As pop culture goes gaga over teenage vampires, Washington's idea of infusing new blood is a Congressional coup with 69-year-old Henry Waxman wresting chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee from 82-year-old John Dingell.

Such generational change is stirring hopes on the left and fears on the right that Detroit will be pressured to stop making gas guzzlers as a start toward energy independence that could help the economy and slow global warming.

But the difference between the new chairman's Hollywood constituency, which feeds on trends like popcorn, and Washington, where inertia is a way of life, should give pause to those reading too much into the ascendance of Waxman, whose rise to power has been marked by championing such causes as expanding Medicaid coverage for children, helping AIDS patients and making generic drugs widely available.

But he is no Frank Capra hero, constantly grabbing attention with such stunts as horning in on the Valerie Plame publicity and hauling Roger Clemens in front of TV cameras for alleged steroid use.

In the Bush years, Waxman has had ample opportunity to strike poses, but how will he do at making deals that lead to legislation?

The Wall Street Journal is convinced that "Mr. Waxman, speaking for the upscale precincts of Beverly Hills, wants to phase out coal and cars that use gasoline. The coastal elites who now dominate Democratic politics will happily trade the blue collar for the green collar...It's obvious who now pulls the Democratic levers of power, and anyone in the energy or health-care business had better erect the barricades."

Nice imagery for a Hollywood movie, but how will it play out in Washington?

Democracy at Work

Our taxpayer dollars were spent yesterday embarrassing Larry Craig and humiliating Roger Clemens by people who are siphoning off millions of it to reelect new members of their own party.

That snapshot of Congress comes from the lead items on the website of The Hill, which chronicles the workings of our government:

"The Senate Ethics Committee publicly admonished Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) late Wednesday for attempting to use his public office to get out of his arrest last summer in a Minneapolis airport restroom sting..."

"Roger Clemens, the New York Yankees’ star pitcher, had barely taken his seat Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee when Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) stunned an already tense hearing into near silence...'Someone isn’t telling the truth,' said Waxman in his opening statement in a hearing that lasted most of the day..."

"Democratic leaders have sent tens of millions of dollars to freshman lawmakers’ districts in hope of protecting the party’s newfound majority..."

There was other news, too:

"President Bush on Wednesday signed the $152 billion stimulus package that he hopes will jump-start the economy in the coming months..."

"Congressional Democrats headed into another clash with President Bush over torture as the Senate cleared a bill Wednesday to force spy agencies to comply with the military’s ban on waterboarding and other harsh techniques..."

"A House committee is expected to vote soon on a program that would allow Hill staff working late to take taxis home and have the cab fares paid out of office expenses..."

It's good to know that our elected representatives are hard at work.

Congressional Circus Back in Town

They still don't know who destroyed the CIA interrogation tapes or ordered the firing of US attorneys, but Capitol Hill bloodhounds will stop at nothing to find out if Roger Clemens used steroids.

On January 15th, the House Oversight Committee starts two days of hearings to pursue this pressing national issue, a month after the well-publicized Mitchell Report was issued and ten days after Clemens appears on 60 Minutes.

"It could be a circus with players, true," the Committee's minority staff director, David Marin, admits. "But if you tailor it right and invite people who clearly have pertinent information about the substance of the report, then it's anything but a circus. It's substantive."

The lawmakers will be following in the footsteps of Mike Wallace, whose grilling of Clemens to be shown tomorrow night elicits testimony that he only took legal injections of Lidocaine and B-12, not steroids.

"Swear?" Wallace asks Clemens. "Swear," Clemens answers. Would the Rocket lie to CBS' 89-year-old icon? Congress will put him under oath to find out.

In 2005, the same panel questioned other baseball stars and got blanket denials, but this time with 400 pages of documents and rumors compiled by a former Senate Majority Leader and paid for by anxious team owners, the results may very well be different.

One of the eagerly anticipated witnesses will be former New York Yankees All-Star second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, who intrigued observers of the national pastime some years back by suddenly losing the ability to make an accurate throw to first base without the aid of a Seeing Eye dog. Could steroids have had anything to do with that?

Naming Names and Playing Games

One afternoon when I was 13, a crowd gathered at an old movie studio near where I lived in the Bronx. Policemen stretched their arms to open an alley for people getting out of limos. A tall man in fitted yellow sports shirt and slacks, striding ahead with no expression on his tanned face, Joe DiMaggio got out of a car, crossed the sidewalk and disappeared into the building.

I had never been to Yankee Stadium a mile away so I knew him only from grainy newspaper pictures and jumpy newsreel clips. The sudden texture and color of his face and clothes shocked my senses into a sweet awareness that he actually lived in the same world I did. For weeks, I kept replaying those vivid few seconds in my mind. Beyond the baseball cards and box scores, Joe DiMaggio was suddenly real. I had seen him six feet away.

Today's baseball players are familiar figures in our living rooms, but their mythic quality remains, and the news about their use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs is even harder to take than it might have been back then when they lived on a distant planet.

Roger Clemens and Andy Pettite have been part of my grandkids' lives since they were old enough to sit in front of a TV set or eat a hot dog at Yankee Stadium. How are they to understand what is being said about the men they try to emulate in their Little League games?

As troubled as all of us are about the use of steroids by the role models for millions of kids, there is something reckless about publicly indicting so many men on the kind of evidence, much of it from informants trying to save their own skins, that is the basis of the Mitchell Report. There is a flashback to the times when Congressional committees named names and ruined careers that way.

Those who control and profit from the game should protect their investments by setting new rules and enforcing them by all means. But they have had years to do that. Are 400 pages of hearsay about 89 Major League players the best or the only way to move ahead now?

My nostalgia for Joe DiMaggio and other idols of his time may be clouding my mature judgment but, in those days, we still believed in the presumption of innocence before we plastered people's names all over headlines that would ruin their reputations.