The Political Year In Review

Second Acts

Interest in most news stories (O.J. excepted) fades after a week or two. But lives, cases and issues keep unfolding.

By David van Biema and Steve Wulf with bureau reports

Still In Contempt

(TIME, December 30) -- Even a real estate huckster like Susan McDougal would have a hard time selling this Los Angeles home: a 6-ft. by 9-ft. cell in the county jail with a metal-frame bed and no television or reading material. This was where McDougal, a former partner with Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater Development Corp., spent the week before Christmas. She was awaiting a pretrial hearing related to charges that she embezzled money from the family of renowned conductor Zubin Mehta. But last Friday she was granted permission to return by year's end to the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, to complete tests for possible breast cancer. There she has been serving a sentence of up to 18 months on a contempt of court citation for refusing to testify before independent counsel Kenneth Starr's grand jury--a matter on which she has shown no signs of relenting.

According to McDougal attorney Bobby McDaniel, the former friend of Bill told her Belgian-born mother the night before she went off to jail of her decision not to testify. Her mother, who had served in the Resistance during World War II, supported the decision, telling her daughter, "If I could stand up to Hitler, you can stand up to Kenneth Starr." As if that weren't formidable enough, McDougal also faces a two-year sentence for her conviction on four felony counts related to Whitewater--a conviction that is being appealed.

Liddy's Turn

Don't get rid of those DOLE FOR PRESIDENT buttons just yet. While former Senator Bob Dole's electoral career is at an end, wife Elizabeth's may be near to beginning. "If at some point it seemed feasible, that there was an opportunity to run at whatever level, it is an option I might well consider," she says. This is Washingtonese for, Don't count me out in 2000.

On Jan. 2, Mrs. Dole returns to her position as president of the American Red Cross. The view out the former Cabinet member's office window will surely be a distraction: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Back In Ohio

One of the endearing things--perhaps the only endearing thing--about the scandal that ended consultant Dick Morris' career as Bill Clinton's election-year Svengali is the fact that the prostitute who allegedly rode Morris around his Jefferson Hotel suite was more of a working woman than a working girl. Now 37, Sherry Rowlands may have represented fantasy to Morris, but the more charitable sectors of the public could imagine her as just another middle-aged single gal trying to make ends meet.

Her life continues to seem a good deal more earthbound than her apparently unsinkable ex-client's. For several months Rowlands has been living in Fairborn, Ohio, helping her older sister care for their mother, who is dying of liver cancer. Rowlands is also working on a book proposal about women who are abused by men in power. "You know there is something strange about this person," she says of Morris, "but he has something you really need." She's not the only one he affects that way: it was reported last week that Rudolph Giuliani briefly flirted with Morris about helping run the New York City mayor's 1997 re-election campaign.

She Voted For Dole

Last October, TIME used Lori Lucas, a single mother in Shrewsbury, Missouri, to personify the suburban swing voter courted by all parties in this year's presidential election. Lucas, like many fellow moms, was undecided when she appeared on our cover. Afterward, she began researching the candidates at the local library and decided against Bill Clinton because of the character issue. Says she: "I think he is crooked, more so than I'm willing to put up with." (She was somewhat bewildered at TIME readers who assumed that "because I smoked pot [in high school] and had a baby out of wedlock, I'm voting for Clinton.") It took her longer to decide in favor of Dole, and went with him largely because she thought him trustworthy. On exiting the voting booth, however, she suddenly wished she had pulled the lever for Ross Perot.

By this time, of course, she was no longer a typical voter. Thanks to her fame as a TIME cover subject--and her potential to become a high-profile convert--she found herself engaged in long phone conversations with the head of Dole's state campaign several nights' running. The Perot people sent her a book. The Clintonites never called.