Impeachment Redux
Pop
Quiz:
1. Why were Betty Currie's
cell phone records important?
2.
What was the Gorton-Lieberman plan and what happened to it?
I'll wager that 1) you don't know the answers; and
2) you don't care. And that is the news. (If you are genuinely curious about
the answers, click .)
An anniversary passed strangely and happily without
notice this week: Six months ago, the president was impeached. During the
Flytrap hullabaloo, commentators promised that the country would spend years
pondering the meaning of this impeachment. They could not have been more wrong.
It's been half a year since impeachment and four months since acquittal, but it
might as well be a generation for all that America has thought about it.
Americans don't gossip about it, pollsters don't poll about it, pundits don't
pund about it, the torrent of Nexis articles has dried to a trickle, and even
the mythical Washington dinner party is devoid of impeachment talk.
"Even the senators I
have been talking to say they haven't thought about it at all. They had an
active desire to rid their memory of it. The level of traumatic amnesia is
quite remarkable," says Ross Baker, a Rutgers University political scientist
who studies impeachment.
Flytrap followed the increasingly typical pattern of the
modern media event. It was exaggerated beyond reason while it was unfolding.
America overdosed on it. As soon as it ended, the sand castle washed away,
supplanted by the next big thing. (See also: the Gulf War. Supposedly the
defining event of the post-Cold War world, the Gulf brouhaha disappeared
moments after the fighting stopped and left no lasting impact on American
politics.)
Impeachment may be
forgotten, but it's not gone. It lingers sourly but not in quite the ways
anyone expected. There were two consensus predictions about how Flytrap would
change American politics: It would make Clinton a lame duck and murder
congressional Republicans at the polls in 2000. But the president's approval
ratings remain high, and he has been able to prosecute a war almost
single-handedly. And Democrats have all but surrendered the idea that
impeachment can be a campaign winner. They fund-raised off impeachment
immediately after the trial, but Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
Chairman Rep. Patrick Kennedy has abandoned his plan to make impeachment the
centerpiece of Democratic House campaigns. "People are not so focused on
impeachment that they would come into the voting booths in November 2000 and
say, 'Aha, he was for impeachment,' and vote against him," says Democratic
pollster Mark Mellman.
Impeachment continues to distort politics, but not as
itself. It is Masked Impeachment, Sublimated Impeachment. The House
Republicans, seething with rage at the lech in chief, are the most potent
example. They didn't trust Clinton much before Flytrap. Now they don't trust
him at all, and they yearn to nail him once and for all. During the Kosovo
crisis, which Republicans privately called "Clinton's war," GOP opposition to
intervention stemmed as much from a desire to beat Clinton as from any
principle. "The House Republican effort to undermine the war was a continuation
of impeachment," sniffs one White Houser.
Flytrap also bears some
responsibility for Washington's paralysis. The personal rancor fomented by
impeachment blocks bipartisan cooperation. Republicans and Democrats on the
House Judiciary Committee remain at each other's throats. The president, still
furious at the House's indictment of him, doesn't work with House Republicans.
And Democrats, who want to run against the do-nothing Republicans in 2000, are
happy to stall major legislation. (Impeachment, of course, is hardly the sole
cause of paralysis. Some Republicans are content to delay big legislation till
George W. Bush's presidential inauguration. Kosovo intruded during the few
months when major bills could have been considered. And the GOP majority is so
thin and fractured that passing contentious legislation was almost certainly
impossible, even if there had been time.)
Impeachment has also frozen the Senate but for a less
ominous reason. Unlike the House, which finished impeachment in December, the
Senate lost the first two months of its current session to the trial. This
massively delayed planning and bill-writing, a traffic jam that still has not
cleared.
Impeachment is twisting
the presidential race, too. Al Gore, born to suffer for Bill Clinton's sins, is
bearing the cross for Flytrap. Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center cites
Gore's poor ratings in head-to-heads against Bush as evidence that the veep is
a victim of "Clinton fatigue." And the only discernible reason Bill Bradley--a
Gore clone in both middle-road policy and stump awkwardness--is polling 25
percent of Democratic voters is that he is independent of the Clinton scandal
machine.
Impeachment so haunts Gore that he has designed his entire
campaign around neutralizing it. Had Flytrap never occurred, Gore surely would
be running on the Clinton-Gore economic boom. Instead, he has placed family
values and personal morality at the heart of his platform, and the first act of
his campaign was to schedule a series of interviews in which he denounced
Clinton's behavior.
The Republican presidential campaign is being
shaped by the I-word as well. Anti-Clinton rage benefits House Republicans in
the conservative districts they represent. But anti-Clintonism is not a tenable
national strategy. Party leaders have anointed Bush because he is mercifully
disconnected from Flytrap. In Bush, they have a candidate who can preach the
winning message of Flytrap (morality good, lechery bad) but isn't associated
with the screeching House impeachers who are so unpopular nationwide.
Impeachment may be, in the words of pollster John
Zogby, the "Great Unmentionable." Politicians will make it a hidden foundation
of their strategy, will imply and suggest and insinuate. Republicans will hint
at Democratic immorality, Democrats will poke at Republican obsessive
nuttiness. The points will be scored obliquely, but almost no one will risk the
word itself.
