WHO was that Democratic senator carrying water for resident Clinton last week on This Week with Sam and Cokie, with his no-holds-barred condemnation of independent counsel Kenneth Starr? Why, it was none other than the moral colossus from Englewood, N.J. -- Robert "I was deeply moved by the Kefauver hearings on a flickering TV when I was five days old" Torricelli.
Torricelli, you may recall, made a name for himself last year during the Thompson hearings by being the only senator sensitive enough to discern the potential for anti-Asian racial prejudice in the campaign-finance investigation. This was because, he said, he remembered how hurt Italian- Americans had been by the Kefauver organized-crime hearings -- which turned out to have started before he was born. By the Torricelli standard, a Senate that uncovers illegal donations to the DNC from agents of the Chinese government had better pursue with equal fervor the mysterious Swedish Bikini Team-Haley Barbour connection, lest it give offense to Asian-Americans.
Here, in short, is a senator with just the right amount of moral gravity to defend the president in his hour of need. But the Trentonian's chief political writer, Sherry Sylvester, pointed out, two days before Torricelli charged into battle on Clinton's behalf, he was shocking an audience of 1,200 at the annual New Jersey Chamber of Commerce dinner with off-color jokes about the commander in chief. Here's one of Torricelli's jokes, as Sylvester recounts it:
"It seems one of his colleagues in the Senate had been casually chatting with the president and said that before he and his wife had married they hadn't had sex. The senator then said to the president, 'How about you?' The president replied, "I don't know. What was your wife's maiden name?'"
Ha ha. Sylvester reports that many of Torricelli's constituents were " confused about why the Democrat, who has been a staunch supporter of the president throughout the current investigation, would make fun of him so publicly."