Little big man for a week

For a guy who, just last Tuesday, was in Dublin assuring the concerned Irish public that Bill Clinton was perfectly safe, Mark Little had a pretty good week.

Given the volume of media output that hitches itself to the tails of hurricanes and flows east across the Atlantic, it's not always obvious why we need Washington Correspondents.

The cost of sticking RTE's Little in front of the White House so that he can trot out the pressroom consensus - a line that's widely available elsewhere - has not always seemed justifiable.

This question would apply to anyone, but Little's evident youth has sometimes strengthened the impression that he's a cypher.

While reserving the right to return to this opinion, I must say that he's been something of a revelation in the recent period of heightened obsession with all things Clinton.

Perhaps it was the US president's visit to Ireland that did the trick, turning a junior member of a vast White House corps into big man in the press tent: Little had an obvious leg-up on both his foreign colleagues - because of his local knowledge and contacts - and on the domestic hacks - because he regularly runs with the Prez.

Whatever. He sounds a more solid and confident correspondent, and this has been most evident on the radio. Sure, he still has his tics - "Absolutely" when "Yes, Aine" or just "Well . . ." would do - but the stuff that comes next is more likely to be relaxed as well as interesting.

While he was here, he turned in a eminently sensible performance on Liveline (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday). His statement that "while the Clintons don't have a marriage in the sense that you or I would probably recognise the term, it's not a loveless partnership either" wasn't earth-shaking, but it was compact and telling.

On last Sunday's This Week (RTE Radio 1) he spoke from Washington of his US journalist "friends" who were hunting fulltime for more of the president's women - a humanising insight into the culture that surrounds this story. Which is as good a reason as any to have a Washington Correspondent.

The weekend was, of course, a time when broadcasters and press journos alike reached for their Roget's. Tawdry, salacious, pornographic, lewd, sordid - and on Irish radio, ever-loyal, the words generally applied to Starr's ridiculous report rather than to Clinton's behaviour. I've heard that someone said on a Saturday programme (it was mid-social-chat, so I resisted my usual professional temptation to interrogate: "Which programme? Who said it? Are you sure?") that at the moment they'd rather be Clinton than Starr. Ironically, the detail included in the report has humanised the president - who emerges as childish, lonely, a bit pathetic - and discredited the creep who saw fit to publicly expose him in this way.

Eamon Dunphy on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Fri- day) has most busily pursued this story all year - in spite of a daily deluge of protesting phone calls ("tell those Americans that your anti-Clinton obsession represents only a tiny minority of Irish people"). Generally not one to argue on-air with his guests, Dunphy has made an exception lately for some good exchanges with our own Kevin Myers ("it's nobody's business") and Fintan O'Toole ("it's nobody's business and it's not impeachable").

It will be intriguing to see if Dunphy retains a stomach for it this week, when arguably the character question has given way - thanks to a big shove from Starr - to the privacy question. There's still room for the character question, with a different spin. Swamped by the porn, the most intriguing narrative in the Starr report concerns Dick Morris. Morris, you'll recall, was the adviser who guided Clinton to the right and got him and Hillary to embrace "family values" - i.e. attack single moms, teen sex etc - in 1995-96, as re-election loomed.

This was before Morris himself was swept from the scene by a scandal with a prostitute. It was also the same time when Bill and Monica were doing those "tawdry" things that people happily do. Now here's Morris, carrying this scandal's closest thing to a cover-up smoking gun (call it a lukewarm arrowhead): Morris testified that Clinton called him last January, told him the truth about Monica, then - after Morris gave him poll data on how the public felt about perjury - decided to stick with his truth-pinching story.

It's tame-enough stuff as far as "conspiracy" goes, but it gives this drama a Judas (Alan Rickman as Morris for the movie) and the spectacle of this pair of hypocritical philanderers cooking up statements and policies that threw the weight of the US government against moral deviation. Now that's what I call sordid.

Go for it, Eamon.