From press accounts in the Washington Post and elsewhere, it appears that a prisoner already in jail for attacking two women joggers in the same park where Chandra Levy was killed, in the same year she was killed, and close to the same time she was killed, will soon be charged in her murder. The new emerging conventional wisdom is that her lover, then-Congressman Gary Condit, had nothing to do with her murder.
The allegations and insinuations of Condit's involvement in the murder--from the National Enquirer to the mainstream media--rested essentially on Condit's reluctance to detail his sexual history with Levy and other women despite a marriage of long standing. Condit clearly had things he wanted to hide or obscure, and therefore he was unable to clear himself in the media-driven court of public opinion.
But it was more than Condit's evasiveness that did him in. The fact is that the narrative asserting that he was the likely killer served powerful interests in Washington and California.
After George Bush had achieved the Presidency, in essence, by a 5 to 4 vote of the 7 to 2 Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court, Republican Party legitimacy was low in many circles. A widespread belief that Congressional Democrats had a murderer in their ranks certainly provided a counterweight delegitimizing Democrats.
The focus on Condit's sex life, like the focus on President Clinton's sex life, also served to promote the right-wing populism of "Washington politicians are no better than anyone else. How dare they pass laws taxing us and telling us what to do!"
The similarity of age, occupation, education, social class and religion of Chandra Levy with Monica Lewinsky served to also as a reminder of the Clinton's sex scandals. It had the added bonus of portraying Washington Democrats as a corrupter of American youth. The fact that Condit had attacked Clinton for his behavior with Lewinksy added the exposure of hypocrisy to the justifications for the dominant narrative.
Finally, Condit's status as a conservative Democrat who often voted with the Republicans undercut any hopes he may have had of rallying Democrats behind him. California state legislators greased the skids for him by giving him a substantially different Congressional district, and doomed California Democratic Governor Gray Davis publicly attacked him. Washington Democrats, too, often seemed to feel that the legal and media troubles could not be happening to a nicer guy.
The reporter who comes out of this looking the best is Dan Rather, who steadily refused to air the Condit story on CBS because he felt the accusations were unsubstantiated. For this act of heresy, he was often pilloried by right-wing extremists who of course had many other grievances against him as well.
There is clearly a market for political scandals focusing on personal moral and ethical failures that exceeds the number of such publicly revealed scandals. So there are all too few with Rather's guts to just say no to a juicy offering.
The Conditmania of the national press was going strong until 9/11. After 9/11, Gary Condit was superfluous to the national debate. George W. Bush's legitimacy skyrocketed, and sex scandals took a back seat to the "let's unite and rally around the President" narrative. Condit made a limited comeback of sorts, carrying the old part of his Congressional district narrowly, and losing the Democratic primary in the new part.
Condit is said to be writing a book on the episode. If it is published, it will probably enjoy respectable sales. Free of criminal taint, Condit may return to Washington as a lobbyist, consultant, or pundit. It is even possible that he, or, more likely, one of his sons could get elected to something in California.
The more fundamental question is how this incident will influence the news media, if at all. America desperately needs a media that focuses on what government actually does to affect the lives of our citizens, and the endless search for scandal in a world of limited political attention is a counternarrative, a junk food narrarative, that tends to drive out real focus on what government does and fails to do.
Whether or not the Condit case actually affects media coverage in the future, it certainly will force an internal debate among television talking heads, bloggers, editors, reporters, and journalism professors. Long after most of his Congressional peers have been forgotten, Condit will remain a person that many Americans have heard of and have opinions about.