No admission

If Gary Condit had hoped his media blitz would revive his political career and win over the public, he -- as usual -- wildly miscalculated.

By Joshua Micah Marshall

Aug. 24, 2001 | Going into Thursday's oh-so-hyped interview with ABC's Connie Chung, most pundits assumed that a carefully coached Gary Condit would act out that most familiar of '90s-era rituals: The nationwide contrition TV interview, with general statements of regret, perhaps a few tears for good measure and eighth-rate philosophizing about how it's made you a better person.

Obviously it didn't turn out that way.

Condit was well-prepared and on message, but resolutely refused to discuss his relationship with Levy or even concede any errors on his part in the months since she disappeared. In fact, while Thursday night's interview was the first time the American public got to hear Condit speak, his statements were not materially different from what his camp has been doing for months: avoiding answers to questions about his relationship with Levy and insisting he's been entirely cooperative with the police investigation, even though there are very good reasons to believe that this is not true -- starting off with statements to the contrary from the police.

That Condit would pursue such a strategy was telegraphed early Thursday in the letter he mailed to his constituents, in a People magazine story that went online earlier in the day, and later in leaks out of ABC about what he would and wouldn't admit in his television interview. If there was a surprise of the evening it was how poor an interview Connie Chung conducted and how few questions of substance she managed to ask.

Chung spent roughly half the allotted 30 minutes asking and re-asking a question Condit made it clear from the start he would not answer: whether he had had an affair with Chandra Levy. For a while, this tack worked well to drive home the point of Condit's evasiveness. But her persistence eventually became tedious and, for a few fleeting moments, even managed to make Condit appear a sympathetic character before a national audience.

In truth, there is and always has been only one real issue that matters about Gary Condit's involvement with Chandra Levy, and that's whether he had anything to do with her disappearance. On that front, there were more than enough questions to ask to take up the full interview, questions that might have pinned Condit down on specific points of the case and given us a clearer idea of whether his denials of involvement in Levy's disappearance are credible. Those might have included questions about his whereabouts at key moments on May 1, the whereabouts of his aides on the same day, whether he would release copies of his own phone records and so forth.

The cost of wasting endless time on asking and re-asking whether Condit had an affair with Levy was revealed during the second-to-last segment, when Chung moved off the did you/didn't you questions. (These Condit had a plausible rationale for not answering: He wanted to spare both his and Levy's family any undue invasions of privacy.) Then Chung finally asked some of the detailed questions that bear directly on the case -- and that Condit had a more difficult time evading.

Next page: I did not have sexual relations with those women!