The Gilded and the Unvarnished
            

            Good morning, Jodi:

            What a glorious, air-conditioned day here in Washington.

            Even though my Rotisserie baseball team (the Nattering Nabobs) is mired in
the second division, I began my reading rounds by checking the late West Coast
box scores in USA Today . My eyes then darted over to a comment by
Seattle Mariners superstar Ken Griffey Jr., in response to press comments
reportedly made by his father (baseball's original Ken Griffey). Said Griffey
the Younger: "My dad's been in baseball how many years? He knows what to say
and what not to say."

            Griffey's remark conjured up the famous scene in Bull Durham in which
Kevin Costner instructs a young pitcher in the art of answering all press
questions with innocuous sports cliches. These days, as even toddlers learn how
to practice "spin," virtually everyone quoted in the news knows "what to say
and what not to say." That's why I'm going to devote this morning missive to
the handful of brave souls who dared to tell truth in today's papers.

            Hats off to Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Dominici, who is trying to
put the brakes on the Republicans' heedless zeal to pass a tax-cut bill in
order to provoke a presidential veto they can then use in the 2000 campaign. As
the Washington Post puts it, "Dominici is concerned that the [GOP]
leadership may end up with an issue but no legislation." That, of course, is
exactly Trent Lott's game plan. The danger lurking just offshore like a
surplus-eating shark is that Bill Clinton will ultimately agree to something
like a $600-billion tax cut in order to clear the decks for some sort of grand
compromise on Social Security and Medicare.

            Buried inside the Post and the Times is the news that Al
Gore's chief of staff, Ron Klain, has resigned to become a partner with
O'Melvany & Myers. It had long been rumored that Klain was about to take
the fall for the snafus that have bedeviled Gore's campaign. Kudos to Katharine
Seelye, who didn't pull any punches on the Klain ouster in her short piece in
the Times . She quotes Gore staffers who recounted that in a recent
meeting Klain said he was "like a milk carton, and milk cartons have an
expiration date." But in his on-the- record comments, Klain gave a full Bull
Durham , claiming that "my heart said stay, but my head told me it was time
to move on."

            I was deeply saddened to read of the death of Willie Morris, someone I never
met but long admired. As a college student in the late 1960s, I remember how I
thrilled to read each issue of Harper's during Morris' tenure as editor.
Peter Applebome, who wrote the Times obit, wins truth-telling points for
a paragraph that began, "Mr. Morris drank too much bourbon and red wine, smoked
too many Viceroys, stayed up too late and caroused too much."

            Now for some unfinished business. Jodi, I awoke still feeling the stab marks
from your last entry yesterday. OK, my sentence about day trading being
emblematic of the "glitz-and-greed '90s" was not worthy of being included in my
collected works. But something weird is happening out there, which makes the
late '90s different from the "junk-bond era and the Las Vegas Strip."

            The Metro section of today's Washington Post features a sad story
about the money woes and vituperative divorce proceedings of local Congressman
James Moran. Court papers filed by attorneys for Mary Moran, the congressman's
estranged wife, allege that the northern Virginia legislator had a history of
"wasting the family assets on his stock market gambling." And the Wall
Street Journal , returning to the perils of day trading, begins a Page 1
leader with the tale of Barbara Harkness, a retired anthropology professor, who
"was seduced by the new Gilded Age." Harkness, who used to safeguard her money
in thrift accounts, claims to have made money in the market. But, the
Journal observes, "from cautious saver to citizen speculator in just a
decade--that's quite a trek across the spectrum of financial risk."

            Anyway, it's time for me to make a trek of my own off to a newsstand in
quest of my very own inaugural issue of Talk . Something tells me that it
won't shimmer anything like Willie Morris' Harper's .

            Eagerly awaiting your epiphanies from the F train.