The focus now is on Condit and his secret life when it should be on Levy. If the media is going to render moral judgments, then the question should be posed: is it worse for him to be drawn to her for sex than for her to be drawn to him for power and status? He was not her supervisor; she was an intern for another government office, the federal Bureau of Prisons. When it was discovered she had graduated in December 2000 her internship was cut short.

Don’t get me wrong, Condit shouldn’t be let off the hook. Get his DNA, send his sheets to the FBI crime lab, search for any evidence that might implicate him in her disappearance. But let’s not denigrate Levy as a mindless young thing who didn’t know what she was doing. Anyone who watches “Sex and the City” on HBO, a series heralded for its raw insights into relationships from a female perspective, knows that young women are not pliable sex objects without a mind and a will of their own. Let’s not frame Levy in such a way that our preconceptions interfere with the search to find her.

If she is the victim of foul play, it is more likely that it was at the hands of someone she knew. Keep after Condit. Punch holes in his story. Check his alibi that his wife was in town during the time period Levy vanished. But don’t overlook the other 99 people the D.C. police say they have questioned. Levy left her apartment armed only with her keys. Perhaps she got in a car with somebody she knew, or she was out jogging and got hit over the head and dragged off. Do any of her friends know her well enough to recognize which shoes were missing from her closet? We ought to know about her secret life, if she had one.

What kind of moral guidance did her aunt and her mother give her if they suspected she was having an affair with a married man? The aunt told The Washington Post that Chandra liked older men, and that she didn’t press her about the affair because she didn’t want to make her nervous and disturb the “comfort level” they had established. What do the people who know her think about her having an affair with a congressman twice her age? The friend who worked for Condit and apparently introduced Levy to him has not been heard from since the initial story broke. Let’s hope she’s talking to the police since she’s not talking to the media. Where did Levy go five nights a week when she wasn’t with her man?

Cokie Roberts said on ABC’s “This Week” that interns are commonly viewed as red meat. True enough, but a lot of congressmen are viewed as good catches. Some marry younger staffers in their employ or in the employ of others. These May-December romances are so commonplace that they are unremarkable. In any class of interns, there are undoubtedly some who are open to having an affair, and some who are hoping to land a congressman who has outgrown his wife of 20 years. Levy imagined Condit would leave his wife and they would have a family together.

He was the one apparently breaking it off. As the other woman often finds out, he was not going to leave his wife. It’s an old story, and if Condit is as innocent of wrongdoing as he proclaims, it’s a nonstory.

But he is in the untenable position of trying to prove a negative-that he didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance. In the television series “Law and Order” the arrest is made at 25 minutes after the hour; the trial is well underway at quarter to the hour; and at five minutes of, the judge is doing the sentencing. In this real-life drama, there’s no end in sight.

KILL THE BILL

When President Bush met with House Republicans this week to rally support on various legislative measures, he never mentioned campaign-finance reform. Officially, the White House is taking a hands-off approach to the Shays-Meehan bill that would ban soft money from the political system. But behind the scenes, White House lobbyists are working hard to kill the bill. They’re warning members that if the ban becomes law, Republicans will lose control of the House in 2002. And they’re telling Republicans who have gotten Sen. John McCain to campaign with them on the promise of supporting reform that President Bush will make it up to them if they back off the bill. “Don’t worry about McCain,” they’re saying. “We’ll raise money for you.”

House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt is trying to keep a fraying coalition of mostly Democrats together. He cites the latest fund-raising statistics that show the GOP substantially outraising the Democrats in soft money as evidence the soft-money race is one the Democrats will never win, and that the “endless pursuit of endless money” is bad for the country, and the party. Until the Democrats lost control of the House in 1994, Gephardt says he had never asked anybody to write a check for $50,000 or $100,000. “Now I do that routinely. You have to-or you’ll be buried.”

‘SO DWEEBY’

Republicans worried about keeping their majority in the House cringed when they saw the photo of President Bush and Bush pere riding in a golf cart at Kennebunkport sporting baseball caps that said “41” and “43.” For a family that says they want to play down the dynasty, this looked liked an excess of family pride. “It’s so dweeby,” groaned a Republican House member.