Back in February, after the revelation of Bill Clinton’s frolics with Monica Lewinsky, 68 percent of Americans said they didn’t want him to resign or be impeached. But that was before he made transparent efforts to mislead a grand jury and admitted lying to the public about the affair. That was before Ken Starr filed an exhaustive report laying out the case for Clinton’s impeachment. That was before Clinton gave answers to the House Judiciary Committee that many members took as an insult to their intelligence.
This steady unfolding of the scandal has had a great impact on how the American people view of the president’s fitness for office. It has convinced them they were right all along.
At every stage, the great majority of the electorate has taken the position that even if Clinton is guilty as charged–as most of us assume he is–he is doing a good job in the White House and ought to stay right there. In a New York Times/CBS News poll published this week, 69 percent of those surveyed still think he should remain in office. His approval ratings are higher today than they were before the sex scandal erupted.
Not that it makes any difference in the outcome. We have a strange democracy. In winning a second term, Clinton got 49.2 percent of the popular votes and 71 percent of the electoral votes. But he may be impeached this week to satisfy the preferences of 24 percent of the people.
Most Americans do believe the president should be censured–a sanction that expresses the nation’s disgust with his reckless deceptions in a more temperate fashion. Even Bob Dole and Gerald Ford support censure over impeachment. But House GOP leaders have done everything possible, short of calling in a phony bomb scare, to prevent members from even considering that option.
Why? Because they know it would be approved. They’ve concluded that the only way to get the House to vote to remove Clinton is to give it no alternative–except to do nothing. They are deathly afraid of letting the public be heard.
A lot of commentators have expressed amazement at the general lack of interest in the House Judiciary Committee’s deliberations. But why should anyone be surprised that most Americans have tuned out?
They have told pollsters repeatedly that the president’s wrongdoing does not justify his premature exile to Little Rock, Ark. (On the eve of the House Judiciary Committee’s 1974 vote to impeach President Nixon, by contrast, only one-third of Americans opposed impeachment.) For anyone who wasn’t paying attention, they forcefully reiterated that message on Nov. 3, handing House Republicans a shocking loss of five total seats and sending Newt Gingrich into retirement.
Republicans members have responded to this roar of disapproval by closing their eyes, covering their ears and humming loudly to themselves. So the citizenry has largely given up. Why should ordinary people care about a process that cares nothing about them?
GOP partisans insist that they have a duty to stand on high principle, deaf to political expediency and the wishes of the mob. They like to portray themselves as the equivalent of grand jurors, obliged to follow the evidence toward implacable justice, whatever the cost. Please. If this were a grand jury, they would all have been disqualified on grounds of gross bias against the defendant. Dick Armey and Tom DeLay would have been willing to impeach Clinton for playing the saxophone badly if they could have gotten their colleagues to go along.
In a sense, democracy may ultimately prevail: Two years from now, the voters can punish the Republican Party by electing Al Gore and giving him a Democratic Congress. But that would be cold comfort to the 47 million people who chose to give Clinton another four years in the White House and who may see his term abbreviated–not to mention the many Americans who voted for Dole but oppose Clinton’s removal.
And a more likely reaction to impeachment is not retribution but alienation. More people will simply abandon the hope that Congress will serve their needs or that their votes can make any difference in what goes on in Washington. They will decide that elections mean nothing more than the ability to choose the person who will ignore them.
In the end, the chief result of the impeachment crusade could be a permanent loss of faith in the value of democracy. No one should be surprised that when the House tells the American people to butt out, they may actually do it.
