Clinton's Final Escape
Slate
has brought back its Clintometer, and once
again, skeptics are complaining that our estimate of President Clinton's
political peril is too low. (For the latest update, click .) The new, gutless
conventional wisdom is that Clinton's fate is "uncertain." Pundits observe
grimly that he has refused to offer the necessary confession or contrition,
that his impeachment by the House has put him within one step of expulsion, and
that the resignation of incoming Speaker Bob Livingston over his newly
disclosed adultery has turned up the pressure on Clinton to follow suit. But,
once again, the pundits are wrong. The threat to Clinton is over. To understand
how he will get out of his latest predicament, consider how he got into it.
1.
Catharsis. The chief
reason moderate congressional Republicans voted to impeach Clinton is that he
got cocky after the election. Emboldened by what he perceived as a popular
mandate to end the impeachment inquiry, he infuriated ambivalent lawmakers by
refusing to admit that he had lied. He answered the House Judiciary Committee's
81 questions with maddening evasions, and in remarks at the White House Dec.
11, when everyone was expecting a definitive apology, he failed to acknowledge
his public lies, as opposed to his private sexual misconduct.
Many Republicans decided
to impeach Clinton to send a message that the law must be obeyed and that the
unrepentant president must be punished. "We must draw a line between right and
wrong ... so every kid in America can see it," said one. Another said he was
voting to impeach because Clinton was acting as though he were "above the law."
But if delivering that message was the motive for impeachment, then there's no
need to go further and expel Clinton from office. Republicans have joined the
media in portraying his impeachment as a devastating, permanent scar on his
presidency. In so doing, they have vented the outrage against him and have
relieved the pressure to convict him. Already, Republican senators have
stipulated that the House has scarred Clinton, that the Senate will never
muster the 67 votes to convict him, and that a censure deal should be worked
out instead.
2. Partisanship. The next reason Clinton was impeached
is that the elections didn't change the congressional math. There were still
228 Republicans in the House, enough to pass two articles of impeachment. But
these party-line victories came at a price. The more Republicans pushed
impeachment, the more Democrats resisted. A Democratic congressional aide
admitted that many Democrats dislike Clinton, "but the Republicans have done a
good job at uniting us--and driving us into his arms." And the more tenuous the
Republicans' majority became, the more they resorted to behavior that was
easily portrayed as partisan. The final straw was House GOP leaders'
suppression of a resolution of censure. White House aides promptly went on the
Sunday talk shows to call the impeachment vote "partisan" and "unfair."
The "partisanship"
message has destroyed public faith in the legitimacy of Clinton's impeachment.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents in the latest New York Times poll say
the GOP pursued the case for purely partisan reasons. Moreover, by failing to
persuade more than a handful of Democrats to vote for impeachment, the GOP
failed to trigger the kind of bipartisan collapse necessary to bring down a
president. Democrats have gleefully used the party-line House vote to
distinguish Clinton's situation from that of President Nixon in 1974. And most
important, a partisan split in Congress guarantees that Clinton can survive in
the Senate, where Democrats have more than enough votes to save him.
3. Backlash. Pundits think another reason for
Clinton's impeachment was that Republicans ignored the polls. Actually, the
polls conveyed two opposite threats. House Republicans faced a backlash from
many independent and Democratic voters if they voted to impeach Clinton. But
they also faced a backlash from conservative voters if they voted not to
impeach him. (Several Republican consultants pointed out that the greater
political threat to moderate House Republicans in 2000 was a primary challenge
from pro-impeachment forces.) So the Republicans played it both ways. They
escaped the first backlash by voting to impeach Clinton, and they counted on
the Senate to spare them the second backlash by refusing to convict him.
Polls suggest that
Clinton's expulsion would shock and infuriate much of the electorate. By
Sunday, only 26 percent of respondents in the Times poll expected the
Senate to remove Clinton from office. In the latest Washington Post
poll, only 33 percent said the Senate should remove him, whereas approximately
60 percent said they would be angry or dissatisfied if he were ousted. The
Republicans aren't stupid. They know that if they go all the way and depose
Clinton, all hell will break loose on them in 2000. In voting to impeach him,
they shot to wound, not to kill. Already, four House Republicans who voted for
impeachment have written a letter asking the Senate to censure Clinton rather
than remove him.
4. "Personal Destruction." Realizing that they
couldn't get away with shooting Clinton fatally, Republicans sensibly deduced
that the only other way to extinguish him was to make him commit suicide. They
have pursued this strategy in two ways. The clever, premeditated way was to
push the impeachment process so far forward that Clinton's resignation became
the quickest way out. The bizarre, unpremeditated way was to oust their own
leaders and demand that Clinton take the same exit. First Speaker Newt Gingrich
resigned, and Republicans held him up to Clinton as a model. Then incoming
Speaker Bob Livingston resigned, declaring, "I must set the example that I hope
President Clinton will follow."
Both these tactics were ill-advised. Clinton's
impeachment makes it less likely than ever that he will resign. The point of
resignation was to escape the humiliation of impeachment. Now that he has been
humiliated, his only hope is to seek redemption in the Senate.
Furthermore, the GOP's
resignation-by-example argument has backfired. Clinton and congressional
Democrats have hijacked Livingston's resignation and turned it into a moral
argument against Clinton's resignation. "We must stop the politics of
personal destruction," Clinton declared at the White House after the
impeachment vote. When reporters asked whether Clinton should resign, White
House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart replied, "He believes it would be wrong to
give in to the politics of personal destruction."
Livingston's resignation has also backfired by diverting
public attention from perjury back to sex. For months, Clinton's defenders had
successfully dismissed the scandal as being "just about sex." After the
election, Clinton squandered this victory by continuing to deny that he had
lied about the affair. The more he lied about his lies, the more people focused
on his lying and forgot what the original lies were about.
But since Livingston's
sins were about sex, not perjury, his assertion that he was setting an
"example" suggested that Clinton should resign not for lying but for adultery.
Democrats persuasively called Livingston's resignation "a surrender to a
developing sexual McCarthyism," portrayed Clinton as a fellow victim of this
McCarthyism, and argued that Clinton should be spared expulsion as a first step
toward ending the madness.
The "personal destruction" spin is a big winner.
Four-fifths of respondents in the Post poll disapproved of the current
scrutiny of politicians' adultery. In the Times poll, 65 percent said
Clinton should complete his term rather than resign. Even Republicans are
susceptible to this spin. Since they blame Democrats for outing Livingston, and
they don't think his adultery should have ended his career, they agreed on the
Sunday talk shows that "personal destruction" has run amok and that politicians
shouldn't be judged by their past indiscretions. Both these conclusions play to
Clinton's advantage.
The ultimate perverse
consequence of Livingston's resignation is that it has allowed Clinton to
appear magnanimous. He has joined congressional Democrats in urging Livingston
to reconsider his decision. Once upon a time, Republicans derided Clinton for
fantasizing that in order to win forgiveness, he first had to find a way to
forgive his enemies. Now they have made that fantasy come true.
Recent "Frame
Games"
"": The debate over Clinton's Iraq attack blazes new frontiers in cynicism.
(posted Saturday, Dec. 19)
"": William Saletan says Democrats could blow up the impeachment process by
crying "coup." (posted Wednesday, Dec. 16)
