“He’s the best qualified,” he said, adding that he had a long term friendship with the Cuomo family. “It’s nothing against Caroline, it’s not about that. It’s just that for me it’s not even close.”

One the web site, womenforfairpolitics.com, women may send a form letter to Barack Obama, asking him to make Hillary Clinton his pick for vice president.

Mr. Davis said that he did not know what she thought of this, despite their conversation.

So on Mrs. Clinton's last primary victory night, it was like all the Clinton surrogates had gone way off the reservation! Except they never do, so therefore they hadn't.

Mr. Davis rewrote some serious history, to the distress of reporters. "Everyone accused her of being negative," he said, but she never, ever had been! But what about remarks by Bill Clinton, and all that hubbub down in South Carolina? What about when Mr. Clinton said-- "I bet you he didn't mean that," Mr. Davis said. This was crazy. The press was getting gas-lighted!

"This night is a celebration for a candidate that has finished the course," said Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, one of Hillary Clinton's national campaign co-chairs. Surely she did not mean to use the word "finished"? Where is this reservation now? Are we near it? "She's had her fans," Ms. Jackson Lee said of Ms. Clinton. Oh had she?

Hillary Clinton finally gave her South Dakota primary victory speech, down in the weird, cellphone-dead zone of Baruch College's basement gym. Why? No one knew! "Our theory is that she's taking us hostage and releasing us in a one-for-one exchange for superdelegates," said a reporter.

Terry McAuliffe, chairman of Hillary Clinton for President, introduced Senator Clinton as "the next president of the United States." One reporter's mouth actually went Wha?

Mrs. Clinton wore an electric just-brighter-than-Yves-Klein-blue pantsuit. She began with praise of Barack Obama. She called him "my friend." The speech was good but a little manipulative. Like how she kept touting her 18 million votes, like a club. "The question," she asked near the end "is where do we go from here?" Then, after she needlessly invoked 9/11, the stage was stormed by some pals, like Governor David Paterson. Tina Turner's "Simply the Best" played. Her hair was extra-sleeked; it had no movement whatsoever.

"I just sent you an email," Lanny Davis said then, as the Clintons and friends were leaving the stage. Even as she had been making her victory speech, her best friend had been working the press regarding his campaign to get her selected as Mr. Obama's running mate.

Outside, a crowd gathered to watch her motorcade leave, at the corner of Third Avenue and 23rd Street.

Two Obama supporters were there with signs. One read "Unite For A Change." The other read "Drop Out Now."

"What do you think man, you feeling it?" one of the white Obama supporters asked a black man who was considering their proposal.

The man didn't answer for a while. Then: "All of a sudden you're all right?" he asked. "You're pulling my nuts out all year."

"Politics are dirty," said the Obama supporter.

"You rob me and treat me to lunch--that make you all right?" said the black man. He was in a panama hat and salmon-colored summer pants and shirt. "Fuck that," he said. "Get the fuck out of here."

I was reminded of Brooks's great insight watching a panel yesterday on C-Span of a December 8 conference at Yale on the Senate battle between Lamont and Lieberman, won by the wily Lieberman.

The panel was marked by a vituperative exchange between Liebermanite Lanny Davis, late of the Monica wars, and Lamontite Bill Hillsman of North Woods media, the populist genius behind Jesse Ventura. When Hillsman, wearing a striped western shirt, with his gut spilling proudly, called Lieberman a great liar who lacked independence, Davis in his blue suit became agitated and started yelling at the other panelist. When Hillsman accused mainstream Democrats of "sandbagging" Lamont by holding off on information and aid—in essence, dithering over its commitment to the official party nominee—Davis became apoplectic and prosecutorial. "Name names," he kept shouting. A former Connecticut Democratic party chair (whose name I didn't get) then named names, saying that Chuck Schumer and Bill Clinton had vacillated. Davis got even angrier, saying it was hearsay.

A good show. And it hardly mattered that the campaign was 6 weeks old. The wound is raw. David Brooks is dead on.

A few comments.

1. Brooks is an exponent of the globelites (as I am of the isopops); and let's be clear, his elite truly is an elite right now: it's a tiny minority. How many people maybe want to invade Iran? Or continue to rationalize the invasion of Iraq as a smart idea? Show of hands, please. Yet this elite is behind the wheel.

2. Brooks is our most sociological pundit, god bless him; but he is given to indirection, and he did not have the cojones to throw in my favorite metric, Jewishness. Lanny Davis is a classic arrived Jew; he broke ground in the 90s (along with me and Brooks and all the other Jewish meritocrats) and flowered in the establishment under the philosemitic Clinton. I have to assume Davis's view of Israel is diaspora-nationalist. Like the views of the Jewish financial heavies who left the Democratic party to stick with Lieberman. Like the views of Senator Lieberman's new in-law, Harvard's Ruth Wisse (rhymes with Weiss), a Jewish particularist to a faretheewell.

3. One of Brooks's professed idols is the late E. Digby Baltzell. The Penn sociologist will be forever famous for coining the term "WASP" in the 60s to describe the then-ruling elite. Forty years later, Brooks came up with his own acronym to describe the new elite: Bobos (for Bohemian bourgeois). Baltzell's acronym stuck, Brooks's is fast fading. Why? Bobos lacked WASP's sting. Bobos was a soft, lifestyle metric: Latte drinkers of the information age. By eliding the Jewishness of the new elite—and yes, Jews are just a component of the establishment, but a significant one—Brooks fell painfully short of his model.

Let's honor Baltzell's great work. In naming the WASPs, he turned on his own people, deriding them as a "caste" that was holding on to status—which Baltzell defined then as corporate exec positions and club memberships—in defiance of the talented. The elite must represent the true talents of the society, Baltzell said. Who were those talents? Jews, he said; brilliant Jews, lamentably camped in "gilded ghettoes," outside the establishment. Let them in! thundered the assimilationist Baltzell. And America did. Baltzell was blunt about the role of religion in elite culture; his 1964 classic was titled, The Protestant Establishment.

In Brooks's book Bobos In Paradise, there are countless reference to WASPs, as the bad old order. 12 lines in his index for WASPs. 0 for Jews (who are only glanced upon in the text). I know why Brooks doesn't want to talk about Jewishness, let alone turn on his elite. He worries, as many of my intellectual friends do, about the pogroms that will take place in Des Moines the minute the media elite say what any boob watching CSpan accepts: Jews are an empowered group, and deservedly.

J'accuse. By maintaining silence on this important matter that is close to their hearts, these journalists have violated their American oath: to inform the people.

As Brooks showed, and the Lamont-Lieberman debate confirms, this is a huge and important divide. Inasmuch as the globelite cannot admit that the war in Iraq was a tragic error, at a time when midstream America has come solidly to that conclusion, the elite is growing estranged from public opinion, and thereby violating Baltzell's democratic principle, that it's OK and necessary to have a ruling elite, but it must be representative. This divide plays out in terms of the Jewish presence in American public life. The Jewish leadership is globelite all the way. It is more implicated in the disastrous Iraq decisionmaking than the realists, and less implicated in the war's grimmest consequences (there are more Buddhists than Jews in the armed forces, as I reported). Lamont/Lieberman was one wedge. Now comes another: Talk to Syria. Any realist will tell you we have to do that; the (largely non-Jewish) Iraq Study Group said so too. But Jewish leadership is against it. Bush will be too—next year. To be continued.

On the outdoor patio of the Washington Hilton stood Presidential accuser Paula Jones, wearing a sparkly black prom dress, working off her nerves with a wad of green gum. Flanking Ms. Jones were the big hair of her adviser, Susan Carpenter-McMillan, her Billy Ray Cyrus–esque husband Steve Jones and some additional security muscle. On one side of the patio, an army of paparazzi stood on the ledge of a three-foot-high stone wall, jostling for a shot of Ms. Jones and her entourage.

As she posed and greeted, she caught sight of Mr. Dunleavy. With his gray S.O.S. pad of hair and leathery mug, the Postman has achieved that look of grizzled agelessness that nature gives to hard-living men who have managed to cheat the odds. Dressed in a vintage tuxedo with a magnificently thin shawl collar, Mr. Dunleavy looked like he would be right at home playing saxophone next to Keith Richards or Charlie Watts.

“You look familiar,” Ms. Jones said flirtatiously to Mr. Dunleavy. But when he introduced himself, Ms. Jones’ eyes registered uncertainty, even fear, and she did not pause to chat. As a crowd surged around her again, the smile returned to Mr. Dunleavy’s face.

“It’s just gorgeous,” he said, his Australian accent lengthening the syllables of the last word. “All these bloody Washington socialites falling all over like it was some Hollywood party.”

For the last several years, the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association has become an increasingly frenzied affair as celebrities of the moment--last year it was Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, George Clooney and Fred Goldman--are invited by the glossier magazines in attendance to sex up this annual sweaty-palmed gathering of journalists and policy wonks. For the most part, these celebrities are adornments, irrelevant to, as Bill Clinton noted in his speech that night, “this kabuki dance between the White House and the press.” Ms. Jones has been integral to that dance, however, and her presence at the White House Correspondents’ dinner pushed the event into the overheated realm of the Golden Globes.

There at the Washington Hilton on April 25, the woman Ms. Carpenter-McMillan describes as just a little girl from Arkansas was playing Pia Zadora. To be sure, Ms. Jones is the concoction of a conservative sugar daddy and the press, and she left the distinct impression that she is simply the latest game piece in the cynical chess match between the White House and the media. But everyone in the audience seemed too jazzed with the surreality of this media moment to ponder the fact that they’d created this pawn.

As she worked her way through the crowds, her fame seemed to temporarily confuse the other attendees’ common sense. So when Ms. Jones and her entourage descended upon Sonny Bono’s widow, Mary Bono, Ms. Bono posed cheerily for pictures with her and Ms. Carpenter-McMillan, then got defensive about it later. Ms. Bono carefully explained that Ms. Jones was simply “expressing condolences” regarding the skiing death of Mr. Bono.

“Everybody loved Sonny,” Ms. Bono said. “Even Paula Jones loved Sonny.” And ABC’s Prime Time Live co-anchor Sam Donaldson seemed positively blasé about Ms. Jones’ presence in the room. “If I don’t [get to see her], I’m sure it will be my loss, but I’ll bear up,” said Mr. Donaldson, who nevertheless managed to sniff out Ms. Jones’ table and pose for a picture with her. (Note to Mr. Donaldson: Ms. Jones wants a copy of the photo.)

Ms. Jones also seemed eager to determine if her moment in history was being written down. A source said that as scribe Dominick Dunne, who penned a novel about the O.J. Simpson trial, Another City, Not My Own, was tooling through the area where Ms. Jones’ table was located, he heard someone calling “Domineek Dunne! Domineek Dunne!” Apparently, it was Ms. Jones mispronouncing his name. When Mr. Dunne properly introduced himself, Ms. Jones asked him if it was true, as she had heard, that he was writing a book about her situation. The source said that Ms. Jones seemed taken aback when Mr. Dunne assured her that he was not.

Some of President Clinton’s own operatives were trying to work their voodoo in the crowd as well. Former White House special counsel and current spinmeister Lanny Davis was a guest at a Vanity Fair table that also included tough-guy journalist Robert Sam Anson, the Post’s Page Six editor, Richard Johnson, and The Transom. Mr. Davis dispelled any notion that morale might be down among the Clinton troops, given the White House’s annus horribilis. Mr. Davis, an annoying one-man whoopie machine, cheered and whistled (at a volume that landed him on the C-Span feed) during Mr. Clinton’s speech. Mr. Davis cheered and whistled any time White House press secretary Mike McCurry’s name was mentioned. The Transom even overheard Mr. Davis telling one of his tablemates that he’d never known two people more in love than Mr. and Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Davis’ dizzying spin cycles made The Transom long for a place at the Vanity Fair table that featured the brilliant seating arrangement of pundit John McLaughlin, flanked by Democratic fund-raiser Patricia Duff (formerly Mrs. Ron Perelman) and ex-model Catherine de Castelbajac (best known for her lawsuit against her former paramour, the financier William Koch, which unearthed a cache of Penthouse Forum–like letters written by “your X-rated Protestant,” as she billed herself, to Mr. Koch, whom she tagged “Big Beautiful Billy”).

Mr. McLaughlin seemed to devote most of his attention to Ms. de Castelbajac, although he had some competition in Henry Kissinger, who sat on her other side. (Thank God something interested Mr. Kissinger. He seemed to be fighting off sleep during Mr. Clinton’s speech.) Actor Ron Silver, who had come with Ms. de Castelbajac, was also at the table.

Up on the dais, Mrs. Clinton was looking a little dazed, perhaps from those five hours of questioning by Kenneth Starr earlier that day. And the backdrop of red curtains made Mr. Clinton’s face look unnaturally flushed, as if he were trying to contain some staggering anger. But as he delivered his prepared remarks, Mr. Clinton showed that, even with Ms. Jones in the room, he was a master of this media game. “Yes, this Washington is a special place, and Hillary and I will never forget our visit here,” Mr. Clinton said, as a punch line to his jokes about the Clintons’ numerous trips abroad during their scandal-plagued year. But in this humor there was truth, truth that the Clintons, even after having been re-elected, are still treated very much like outsiders.

Though Mr. Clinton joked that he had not read or watched the news since “the Pope went to Cuba,” he came loaded with plenty of barbs about the media, which, he noted, was “confident in its judgment and bold in its predictions.” At one point, Mr. Clinton held up what he said was an advance copy of Steve Brill’s new magazine, Content (which, he said, contained an article titled “Buddy Got What He Deserved” by New York Times editorial page columnist Maureen Dowd). First, he pronounced the word “content,” with emphasis on the second syllable of the word, and said, “Why would anyone want to call a magazine about the news media that?” Then, “corrected” by Mr. McCurry, Mr. Clinton pronounced the title as it was meant to be and repeated his question.

Mr. Clinton concluded by telling Helen Thomas, the dowager of White House correspondents who had been honored earlier in the evening, that she could ask him “anything.” (Her seniority, by the rules of the Washington press corps, allows her to throw out the first question at press conferences.) But, added Mr. Clinton, “in an even older tradition, I don’t have to answer.” With that, Mr. Davis and much of the crowd gave the President a standing ovation.

Mr. Clinton’s final words seemed to have become the mantra of the celebrity contingent that attended Vanity Fair’s post-dinner party at the Russian Federation building. A tense moment ensued shortly after Warren Beatty and his wife, Annette Bening, arrived at the party and immediately headed upstairs to the bathrooms. As the minutes ticked by and the couple did not descend the staircase, some began to speculate: Could Warren and Annette have somehow escaped via the second floor? (This would have been the second time that Mr. Beatty had gone AWOL with Vanity Fair, having blown off the magazine’s Oscar party.) Disaster was averted, however, when the couple eventually re-emerged and stayed until after 2 a.m., charming the pants off nearly everyone in the room.

The Transom’s face time with Mr. Beatty was minimal; too bad we can’t say the same for our encounter with the Earl Spencer. As we tried to ask Princess Diana’s brother if he’d thought the press had changed much since the damning speech he’d made at her funeral, he grabbed the hand in which we held our notebook and said something about being able to “smell” one (a notebook, not a journalist) a mile away. When we explained that we were not trying to hide the tablet from him, Mr. Spencer, who had come to the party with 20/20 co-anchor Barbara Walters (and had sat at the ABC News table), politely answered our question with the Clintonesque line: “I haven’t read the papers since my sister died.” He must have been watching TV.

G. Gordon Liddy was in a more talkative mood. Mr. Liddy, who once offered to take a bullet if it would save the honor of the Nixon administration, defended the appearance of Ms. Jones (who had sat next to him at the Washington Times’ Insight table). Mr. Liddy called her “vivacious,” and said that Ms. Jones had told him that she had wished she was seated closer to Mr. Clinton on the dais “so that she could stare him down the way that she did as she sat across the table from him at [Mr. Clinton’s] deposition.” Mr. Liddy said that Ms. Jones’ appearance was “not a political thing” but rather, as he said her husband had told him, a matter of “her reputation.”

Ms. Jones seemed to be forgotten, though, as Saturday turned into Sunday and the crowd loosened up. A few couples were dancing, and Lucianne Goldberg was shuttling drinks and a tray of hors d’oeuvres to friends who had not been allowed past the gate. Matt Drudge was inside. And down on the lawn, Ms. Dowd sat with a group that included Mike Ovitz’s former spokeswoman Anna Perez (now a Harvard fellow), Washington Post columnist Lally Weymouth, actor Michael Douglas and Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth.

Also hanging around was comedian Ray Romano, who had entertained the crowd following Mr. Clinton’s speech. Mr. Romano’s act is largely about his children, and before he went on, there was much talk that he had been picked because of his nonpolitical humor. Mr. Romano still killed, but one of the best moments of his routine was not a particularly funny one. Mr. Romano talked about how he had once caught his 5-year-old daughter daydreaming with a smile on her face and asked what she had been thinking about. “Candy,” came her reply. “When was the last time you daydreamed about candy?” Mr. Romano asked the audience.

Mr. Clinton didn’t crack a smile. For him and a lot of people in that room, it had been a long time.

No, Juanita Broaddrick is not dead, but she might as well be for Bill Clinton's defenders. For the Friends of Bill like Lanny Davis, her story just doesn't matter. Doesn't give them pause. It was so long ago it might have been in another country. She might as well be dead for all they seem to care about whether or not she was raped by their friend our President. After all his other lies they don't have time to look into this one. It's "too late in the day." It's hard, perhaps impossible, to know the truth, so why care? It's time to move on. We have scandal fatigue. Let's talk about saving Social Security.

I don't know whether it's true. I hope it's not. Nobody knows for sure except Juanita Broaddrick and Bill Clinton. But the Friends of Bill don't know either. And the difference is that they just don't seem to care. They don't care enough to hesitate for a nanosecond before going on the talk shows and telling us it doesn't really matter, it was all so long ago, it was in another country-and besides the wench is probably lying.

I think the time has come for the Friends of Bill like Lanny Davis to be held to account. Their Bill has come due. Three issues ago in these pages [Feb. 15], when the Juanita Broaddrick story was still being held by NBC, I suggested the Friends of Bill were making themselves hostages to fortune. That their disingenuous claims that their boy was being persecuted only for "consensual sex" ignored the more serious charges of nonconsensual sex from Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Jane Doe No. 5. I dislike Bill's puritanical inquisitors as much as they do, but attacking them, attacking the charges of sexual harassment and rape as "immaterial" to his impeachment, isn't going to cut it anymore. That's avoiding the real question, to which these charges of nonconsensual sex are material-the question of who Bill Clinton really is .

But they still don't seem to care. The Friends of Bill who so pathetically, obsequiously vouched for him until the stained dress of his lies was virtually rubbed in their faces, didn't even seem to blink when faced with this latest unproven but serious charge. You wonder: In their heart of hearts, when the MSNBC and CNBC cameras go off, don't the Friends of Bill entertain just the slightest doubt, after all the lies, after all the false denials, that this latest denial might not be the full truth? Or would such a doubt, even a tiny one, be fatal to their entire belief structure? Their perk and status life. Could the Renaissance Weekends be that great? Could the beds in the Lincoln bedroom be that soft?

I think about Lanny Davis, former chief of staff and now chief cable-news talking-head Friend of Bill. "Friend" in the sense Bill Clinton has friends: People he can lie to shamelessly, whose lives and reputations he can ruin callously and still count on to go on TV and defend him. I think about Lanny Davis attacking Juanita Broaddrick before he even got to see her tell her story . "How do we know she didn't lie to all her friends?" Lanny Davis asked in The Washington Post before the Lisa Myers interview aired.

Amazing! An absolutely astonishing revelation of the mindset of the terminal sycophant Friend of Bill. We don't know whether she didn't "lie to all her friends," he suggests. But we do know someone with a proven record of lying to all his friends. A proven record of lying to Lanny Davis, lying about Gennifer, lying about Paula (remember his first response: never heard of her, never in a room with her?), lying about Monica.

But now, without knowing the facts, without pausing for a moment to wonder "Gee, he's lied to me so many times before and I've looked like such a fool so many times before for defending him, wouldn't it be a good idea to hesitate for just a moment before smearing a woman who says she's been raped and calling her the liar? Don't I have any responsibility to think twice before mouthing off, just this once ?" Even if he (apparently) doesn't care whether Bill Clinton screwed Juanita Broaddrick, he knows Bill Clinton's screwed him repeatedly. But there he is lining up, assuming the position so eagerly, so readily, once again.

In some ways the case of Lanny Davis is special, more egregious, but perhaps more explicable. I blame Yale. Well not Yale University, precisely, but the Yale Daily News and the culture of Establishment suck-uppery it cultivates. When I arrived, an alienated outsider at Yale, Lanny Davis was already on his way to becoming the ultimate Insider, the chairman of the Yale Daily News , an exalted position that is not attained without strenuous sucking upward to the upperclassmen who hold the striving Yale Daily candidate's fate in their hands. I think it is not insignificant that the initial heated competition for a coveted place on the ladder to the chairmanship of the Yale Daily was, appropriately enough, called "Heeling." It is, you will notice, a term adopted from dog training. And not for nothing. Good dogs, compliant dogs, go far, although that may be Lanny's tragedy: so much heeling, so little to show for it on his own-until, relatively late in his career, his being a Friend of Bill, chief sycophant to the Commander in Chief, gave him a shot at the gold ring.

Yes, I think it must have something to do with the heeling process and the enormous sense of self-importance and entitlement the Yale Daily chairmanship inculcates; debasing oneself so profoundly demands profound recompense. And there is profound recompense: the coddling and cuddling by the silvery patriarchs of the Eastern establishment, the shining future assured by the old-boy network, the unspoken blandishments of promised power that waft through the nostrils of the triumphant heeler like fragrant incense so that an exaggerated sense of self-importance grows to proportions vast and fathomless, like the caverns of Kubla Khan, "measureless to man."

Even when an exalted News chairman would gesture at dissent from the Establishment, write a mild editorial questioning the War in Vietnam, say, the embrace by the silvery patriarchs would just grow warmer, more passionate. There would be the special little off-the-record chats with the Bundy brothers, who raced up to New Haven to reassure the exalted heeler that his voice was heard in the very highest circles, that his opinion was respected , that off the record, they even sympathized, but, even more off the record, there were very serious plans afoot to end the war in an honorable way and vulgar public protest was only helping the troglodytes dig in their feet. Better to leave it to the enlightened insiders. They all shared the same values, didn't they? It was just a difference over tactics . It was so flattering to be taken so seriously, if one didn't trouble oneself to look too closely at the lies of powerful people. And so one learned not to look too closely at the lies of very powerful people. An important lesson in getting ahead. You could call it self-heeling . Curbing the instinct to question those with White House passes, to bite the hand that pets you.

But the heady days of triumphant heeling didn't seem to pay off as well for Lanny Davis as they did for other News ies. Henry Luce, founder of a global media empire; Potter Stewart, Supreme Court Justice; William F. Buckley, influential ideologue; Joseph Lieberman, influential senator; Strobe Talbott, Secretary-of-State-in-waiting. And then there was Lanny Davis, Beltway lawyer, lobbyist, mid-level Democratic Party functionary and failed candidate for Congress. As it turned out, his only ticket to the exalted entitlement his heeling seemed to promise was the friendship he cultivated with Hillary and Bill that began at Yale Law School.

That really paid off, didn't it? You know I feel a bit bad talking this way. I wish I hadn't read Lanny's ugly quote in The Washington Post . I know friends of Lanny Davis think that there's at least a semblance of principle in his slavish defense of Bill and Hill. That it grows from a genuine antipathy to the Christian right who've fueled the anti-Clinton crusades. But as someone at least as distrustful of the Christian right as he, I can't help wondering: Just how long can the liberal Friends of Bill use that as a fig leaf to dismiss in a knee-jerk way any charge without examining it, even if it's rape? They risk destroying liberalism by making it mainly about the defense of Bill Clinton. I thought liberalism was about standing up for the powerless, rather than sucking up to the powerful. (And speaking of sucking up to the powerful, Senator Chuck Schumer should spend less time holding Hillary's coat and respond to repeated requests that he co-sponsor a resolution condemning the racist Council of Conservative Citizens. As the estimable Stanley Crouch reported in his Daily News column recently, such a resolution has been introduced in the House, and I've gotten Henry Hyde on record in support of it. If Henry Hyde is on board, where's Chuck? Too busy being a Friend of Bill?)

But being a Friend of Bill has been berry berry good to Lanny Davis, why start questioning it now? Why let the irritating claim of a woman like Juanita Broaddrick get in the way of savoring the impeachment acquittal triumph? It's so inconvenient, her coming forward. It's so over, so five minutes ago, to care about it-after all, it was in another country and maybe "she lied to all her friends," as Lanny Davis suggested to The Washington Post . After all, if you're deciding who's a liar about illicit sex, why look in Bill Clinton's direction? Why not smear a woman you've never met who can't help you get passes to White House dinners?

But if he had hesitated when The Washington Post asked for a comment, if he had declined the limelight of MSNBC to give the matter a moment's independent reflection, what would Lanny Davis have left? Being a Friend of Bill had given him a certain cachet as a Beltway lawyer, but being Defender in Chief had made him a virtual celebrity in his own right. An object of curiosity, yes; was there anything he wouldn't defend in a knee-jerk way? Now we know: No. But still a celebrity. He wasn't Commander in Chief, but sycophant in chief is something .

But it's unfair to pick on Lanny alone; I focus on him because he didn't even wait to see Juanita Broaddrick tell her story on TV before smearing her as a possible serial liar. But if Lanny's effusion was the most premature and egregious, what about the silence of some of the other, more conspicuous Friends of Bill?

What about his rich Hollywood friends? Will they continue to bankroll him-and the First Lady if she runs-unquestioningly, without bothering to know or to care whether the Juanita Broaddrick rape allegation is true? Will they hide behind, Well-it-was-20-years-ago-and-we-really-can't-know-so-we-won't-bother-to-think-about-it? That was in another country , wasn't it, that alleged rape, a country far from Hollywood with its self-congratulatory, unquestioning, indiscriminate Friends-of-Bill mentality. Where mental giants like the Baldwin brothers are elevated to statesman stature for their sycophancy.

And what about all the liberal defenders of Bill who opposed, say, Clarence Thomas? Consider a counterfactual situation for a moment: What if it had been Clarence Thomas? Let's imagine the bruising confirmation fight is over. Despite Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations (which, by the way, I believed) the Senate has confirmed Clarence Thomas as Supreme Court Justice. But late in the process, while the debate is still raging on the Senate floor, word leaks out that a major network was sitting on a far more explosive story than Anita Hill's. An interview with a woman who claims that 20 years earlier Clarence Thomas raped her in a hotel room.

But the network keeps the story in the can until the confirmation vote is over. Most of America doesn't know about it until a week after Clarence Thomas dons the robes of the nation's highest court. Then the woman's story comes out; she seems credible, but it's hard to prove one way or the other. So much time has gone by. She didn't report it at the time, she even denied it at one point because she didn't want her life further traumatized. How would Bill Clinton's liberal defenders have acted in that situation, how would they have treated an old rape allegation against Clarence Thomas? Would they have said, well it's so old we don't care, we're not going to look further into it, we're tired, we're fatigued by all the controversy, let's just pretend the allegation isn't there. Let's move on.

I don't think so. I don't think the liberal defenders of Bill Clinton would have given Clarence Thomas a pass. Would have dismissed a rape charge as irrelevant without looking into it just because it was old. But Bill Clinton, it seems, gets a pass on a rape allegation because, unlike Justice Thomas, he's good on the issues . (Good on the issues for those who don't care too much about the plight of the welfare mothers whose difficult lives he's made more desperate.) How comfortable can they feel, the Clinton defenders, telling us to chill, cool out, it was all so long ago, when they are, in effect, miming in their unthinking sycophancy the chilling phrase attributed by Juanita to Bill Clinton: You ought to put some ice on that.

Must we look upon the most brilliant skeptical minds among liberal democrats through the lens of the "beaten dog" metaphor I wrote about three weeks ago? The phrase was suggested by The Washington Post 's Michael Powell when speaking to me for a story he was doing on liberals like myself who don't trust Bill Clinton. He suggested that many liberals are acting like "beaten dogs," losers kicked around so long they will continue to fawn over Bill Clinton no matter what he does because he's given them some moderate electoral success. Are they so grateful that they'll continue to heel when he gives a silent whistle, no matter what the charge is?

And what about the Vice President: Will he continue to avert his eyes in fawning fidelity without even asking? Doesn't Al Gore, in some deep recess of his mind, wonder at least who's the real liar in the Juanita Broaddrick case? Doesn't he have a responsibility to ask? Or does he just accept Bill's word on faith? Has he, like the other Friends of Bill, adopted a policy of Don't Ask, Don't Tell?

And finally, what about the ultimate Friend of Bill, the Ultimate Voucher in Chief whose support for the President, no matter what the charge, has enabled and empowered her supporters to defend her husband, no matter what he does? Doesn't she, at this point, with a charge as serious as this, however unproven, have a responsibility to look into it a little more deeply? Just so she won't be shocked, shocked , if it turns out to be true, the way she was so shocked, shocked , when she found out the Monica story was true. At what point, after so many lies on lesser charges, after so many violations of her trust, of her privacy, of her dignity and faith, does she finally say: I'm not going to take his word on faith this time. I'm actually going to take it seriously. I'm actually going to look him in the eyes and see what I can see when I ask him if it's true. He no longer has the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to get to the bottom of this. She's so smart, so wise in many ways (except thus far when it comes to him), I have a feeling she could get the truth out of him. After so much vouching, so much enabling, so much standing by her man, she owes it to herself, she owes it to us. All the Friends of Bill do.

On the outdoor patio of the Washington Hilton stood Presidential accuser Paula Jones, wearing a sparkly black prom dress, working off her nerves with a wad of green gum. Flanking Ms. Jones were the big hair of her adviser, Susan Carpenter-McMillan, her Billy Ray Cyrus-esque husband Steve Jones and some additional security muscle. On one side of the patio, an army of paparazzi stood on the ledge of a three-foot-high stone wall, jostling for a shot of Ms. Jones and her entourage.

As she posed and greeted, she caught sight of Mr. Dunleavy. With his gray S.O.S. pad of hair and leathery mug, the Post man has achieved that look of grizzled agelessness that nature gives to hard-living men who have managed to cheat the odds. Dressed in a vintage tuxedo with a magnificently thin shawl collar, Mr. Dunleavy looked like he would be right at home playing saxophone next to Keith Richards or Charlie Watts.

"You look familiar," Ms. Jones said flirtatiously to Mr. Dunleavy. But when he introduced himself, Ms. Jones' eyes registered uncertainty, even fear, and she did not pause to chat. As a crowd surged around her again, the smile returned to Mr. Dunleavy's face.

"It's just gorgeous," he said, his Australian accent lengthening the syllables of the last word. "All these bloody Washington socialites falling all over like it was some Hollywood party."

For the last several years, the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents' Association has become an increasingly frenzied affair as celebrities of the moment–last year it was Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, George Clooney and Fred Goldman–are invited by the glossier magazines in attendance to sex up this annual sweaty-palmed gathering of journalists and policy wonks. For the most part, these celebrities are adornments, irrelevant to, as Bill Clinton noted in his speech that night, "this kabuki dance between the White House and the press." Ms. Jones has been integral to that dance, however, and her presence at the White House Correspondents' dinner pushed the event into the overheated realm of the Golden Globes.

There at the Washington Hilton on April 25, the woman Ms. Carpenter-McMillan describes as just a little girl from Arkansas was playing Pia Zadora. To be sure, Ms. Jones is the concoction of a conservative sugar daddy and the press, and she left the distinct impression that she is simply the latest game piece in the cynical chess match between the White House and the media. But everyone in the audience seemed too jazzed with the surreality of this media moment to ponder the fact that they'd created this pawn.

As she worked her way through the crowds, her fame seemed to temporarily confuse the other attendees' common sense. So when Ms. Jones and her entourage descended upon Sonny Bono's widow, Mary Bono, Ms. Bono posed cheerily for pictures with her and Ms. Carpenter-McMillan, then got defensive about it later. Ms. Bono carefully explained that Ms. Jones was simply "expressing condolences" regarding the skiing death of Mr. Bono.

"Everybody loved Sonny," Ms. Bono said. "Even Paula Jones loved Sonny." And ABC's Prime Time Live co-anchor Sam Donaldson seemed positively blasé about Ms. Jones' presence in the room. "If I don't [get to see her], I'm sure it will be my loss, but I'll bear up," said Mr. Donaldson, who nevertheless managed to sniff out Ms. Jones' table and pose for a picture with her. (Note to Mr. Donaldson: Ms. Jones wants a copy of the photo.)

Ms. Jones also seemed eager to determine if her moment in history was being written down. A source said that as scribe Dominick Dunne, who penned a novel about the O.J. Simpson trial, Another City, Not My Own , was tooling through the area where Ms. Jones' table was located, he heard someone calling "Domi neek Dunne! Domi neek Dunne!" Apparently, it was Ms. Jones mispronouncing his name. When Mr. Dunne properly introduced himself, Ms. Jones asked him if it was true, as she had heard, that he was writing a book about her situation. The source said that Ms. Jones seemed taken aback when Mr. Dunne assured her that he was not.

Some of President Clinton's own operatives were trying to work their voodoo in the crowd as well. Former White House special counsel and current spinmeister Lanny Davis was a guest at a Vanity Fair table that also included tough-guy journalist Robert Sam Anson, the Post 's Page Six editor, Richard Johnson, and The Transom. Mr. Davis dispelled any notion that morale might be down among the Clinton troops, given the White House's annus horribilis . Mr. Davis, an annoying one-man whoopie machine, cheered and whistled (at a volume that landed him on the C-Span feed) during Mr. Clinton's speech. Mr. Davis cheered and whistled any time White House press secretary Mike McCurry's name was mentioned. The Transom even overheard Mr. Davis telling one of his table mates that he'd never known two people more in love than Mr. and Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Davis' dizzying spin cycles made The Transom long for a place at the Vanity Fair table that featured the brilliant seating arrangement of pundit John McLaughlin, flanked by Democratic fund-raiser Patricia Duff (formerly Mrs. Ron Perelman) and ex-model Catherine de Castelbajac (best known for her lawsuit against her former paramour, the financier William Koch, which unearthed a cache of Penthouse Forum -like letters written by "your X-rated Protestant," as she billed herself, to Mr. Koch, whom she tagged "Big Beautiful Billy").

Mr. McLaughlin seemed to devote most of his attention to Ms. de Castelbajac, although he had some competition in Henry Kissinger, who sat on her other side. (Thank God something interested Mr. Kissinger. He seemed to be fighting off sleep during Mr. Clinton's speech.) Actor Ron Silver, who had come with Ms. de Castelbajac, was also at the table.

Up on the dais, Mrs. Clinton was looking a little dazed, perhaps from those five hours of questioning by Kenneth Starr earlier that day. And the backdrop of red curtains made Mr. Clinton's face look unnaturally flushed, as if he were trying to contain some staggering anger. But as he delivered his prepared remarks, Mr. Clinton showed that, even with Ms. Jones in the room, he was a master of this media game. "Yes, this Washington is a special place, and Hillary and I will never forget our visit here," Mr. Clinton said, as a punch line to his jokes about the Clintons' numerous trips abroad during their scandal-plagued year. But in this humor there was truth, truth that the Clintons, even after having been re-elected, are still treated very much like outsiders.

Though Mr. Clinton joked that he had not read or watched the news since "the Pope went to Cuba," he came loaded with plenty of barbs about the media, which, he noted, was "confident in its judgment and bold in its predictions." At one point, Mr. Clinton held up what he said was an advance copy of Steve Brill's new magazine, Content (which, he said, contained an article titled "Buddy Got What He Deserved" by New York Times editorial page columnist Maureen Dowd). First, he pronounced the word content , with emphasis on the second syllable of the word, and said, "Why would anyone want to call a magazine about the news media that?" Then, "corrected" by Mr. McCurry, Mr. Clinton pronounced the title as it was meant to be and repeated his question.

Mr. Clinton concluded by telling Helen Thomas, the dowager of White House correspondents who had been honored earlier in the evening, that she could ask him "anything." (Her seniority, by the rules of the Washington press corps, allows her to throw out the first question at press conferences.) But, added Mr. Clinton, "in an even older tradition, I don't have to answer." With that, Mr. Davis and much of the crowd gave the President a standing ovation.

Mr. Clinton's final words seemed to have become the mantra of the celebrity contingent that attended Vanity Fair 's post-dinner party at the Russian Federation building. A tense moment ensued shortly after Warren Beatty and his wife, Annette Bening, arrived at the party and immediately headed upstairs to the bathrooms. As the minutes ticked by and the couple did not descend the staircase, some began to speculate: Could Warren and Annette have somehow escaped via the second floor? (This would have been the second time that Mr. Beatty had gone AWOL with Vanity Fair , having blown off the magazine's Oscar party.) Disaster was averted, however, when the couple eventually re-emerged and stayed until after 2 A.M., charming the pants off nearly everyone in the room.

The Transom's face time with Mr. Beatty was minimal; too bad we can't say the same for our encounter with the Earl Spencer. As we tried to ask Princess Diana's brother if he'd thought the press had changed much since the damning speech he'd made at her funeral, he grabbed the hand in which we held our notebook and said something about being able to "smell" one (a notebook, not a journalist) a mile away. When we explained that we were not trying to hide the tablet from him, Mr. Spencer, who had come to the party with 20/20 co-anchor Barbara Walters (and had sat at the ABC News table) politely answered our question with the Clintonesque line: "I haven't read the papers since my sister died." He must have been watching TV.

G. Gordon Liddy was in a more talkative mood. Mr. Liddy, who once offered to take a bullet if it would save the honor of the Nixon Administration, defended the appearance of Ms. Jones (who had sat next to him at the Washington Times ' Insight table). Mr. Liddy called her "vivacious," and said that Ms. Jones had told him that she had wished she was seated closer to Mr. Clinton on the dais "so that she could stare him down the way that she did as she sat across the table from him at [Mr. Clinton's] deposition." Mr. Liddy said that Ms. Jones' appearance was "not a political thing" but rather, as he said her husband had told him, a matter of "her reputation."

Ms. Jones seemed to be forgotten, though, as Saturday turned into Sunday and the crowd loosened up. A few couples were dancing, and Lucianne Goldberg was shuttling drinks and a tray of hors d'oeuvres to friends who had not been allowed past the gate. Matt Drudge was inside. And down on the lawn, Ms. Dowd sat with a group that included Mike Ovitz's former spokeswoman Anna Perez (now a Harvard fellow), Washington Post columnist Lally Weymouth, actor Michael Douglas and Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth.

Also hanging around was comedian Ray Romano, who had entertained the crowd following Mr. Clinton's speech. Mr. Romano's act is largely about his children, and before he went on, there was much talk that he had been picked because of his nonpolitical humor. Mr. Romano still killed, but one of the best moments of his routine was not a particularly funny one. Mr. Romano talked about how he had once caught his 5-year-old daughter daydreaming with a smile on her face and asked what she had been thinking about. "Candy," came her reply. "When was the last time you daydreamed about candy?" Mr. Romano asked the audience.

Mr. Clinton didn't crack a smile. For him and a lot of people in that room, it had been a long time.