Public In No Mood For Impeachment
The more Congress talks about impeachment hearings and the more editorial writers urge President Clinton to resign because of his actions in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the less taste the American people appear to have for the whole process.
There may never have been a time in American history when politicians and opinion-makers inside the Beltway were more out of touch with what folks were saying on Main Street.
Just Monday, the nation’s largest general-circulation newspaper, USA Today, called on Clinton to resign and spare the nation the further embarrassment of impeachment hearings. One of the top Republicans in Congress, House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich of Ohio, also asked the president to quit.
But while the impeachment machine grinds ahead in Washington, voters seem happy with the job that Clinton is doing in the White House, even if they’d have second thoughts about letting their daughters work there.
In fact, the latest round of public-opinion polls indicates that the president’s job-approval rating - the gauge of how the public views Clinton’s job performance, not his personality - is still at more than 60 percent.
A Gallup poll for CNN and USA Today over the weekend showed that Clinton’s approval rating actually rose slightly during the weekend to 64 percent, even though at the same time 56 percent said they didn’t respect him.
Every major national poll conducted over the weekend - and there were five of them - showed that Americans oppose impeachment by about 2-1.
The only action that the public seems to support right now is the notion of a censure - a rebuke of the president that carries no sanctions - that would allow him to serve out his term until January 2001.
Clearly, there’s a disconnect between the way this story is playing out on Capitol Hill and in the news media and the reaction of the voters who’ve elected Bill Clinton twice.
But why?
There’s no easy answer.
With interest rates and unemployment at record lows and no immediate risk of a major war, Americans are largely happy about the direction the nation is headed.
More abstractly, American voters’ cynicism about politics has been steadily growing since the Vietnam War and Watergate to the point where many expect the worst about politicians. That’s in contrast with journalists and elected officials, many of whom have staked a lot in the political system and feel betrayed by Clinton’s reckless actions.
Experts say that the political culture of Washington and its special interests have tended to make the Democrats and Republicans who’ll be deciding Clinton’s fate more partisan, even as mainstream voters are dropping out of the political parties in record numbers.
“People are getting less and less partisan and more and more people are registering Independent - because the people in Washington are stuck playing by the same rules and governed by the special interests,” said Neil Oxman, a Philadelphia-based Democratic consultant.
“There’s a huge gulf between what I call the ‘chattering class’ of Congress and the news media - and the public,” said William Schneider, political analyst for CNN and the American Enterprise Institute.
Schneider said that the political elites of the nation feel personally “betrayed” by Clinton’s sordid Oval Office affair because a fellow member of the governing class didn’t play by the rules.
“The public doesn’t have the same sense of betrayal,” Schneider said. “The public is cynical about politicians, thinks that they’re all bums. They say, ‘So what? He got caught.”’
That doesn’t mean that some people aren’t interested.
Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee report a huge wave of anti-Clinton sentiment - running roughly 7 to 1 against his continuing in office since the public release of Starr’s report. The surge could make it more likely for the sharply divided committee to vote for impeachment and ignore the milder rebuke that most Americans are telling pollsters they favor.
Outside of Congress, local politicians aren’t hearing much about the Clinton saga.
This leaves many journalists, who gauge public opinion for a living, puzzled that so many people can give Clinton such low marks for honesty and integrity and yet approve of his performance as president.
“The greatest surprise in this whole story is the ongoing gap between the elites - who now almost uniformly despise Clinton - and the people, who have stuck with him so far,” writes Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter.
“The average American has common sense,” said Oxman, whose firm is handling about 30 candidates this fall, mostly in congressional races. “They’ve always known that this thing was about sex, and that the lies were about sex.”
Indeed, some surveys of the American public that were taken years before Monica Lewinsky became a household name suggest that many Americans share Clinton’s view that oral sex is not necessarily the same thing as sexual relations.
Some have suggested that in a nation where half of all marriages end in divorce and where millions have committed adultery, Clinton’s sexual follies may be easier to understand and forgive than something like covering up an illegal bugging by campaign workers.
However, Robin Kolodny, a Temple University professor who specializes in congressional issues, said that the Starr report does seem to raise serious questions about misdeeds like perjury and obstruction of justice, and that it may take some time for the gravity of the allegations to sink in.
“People didn’t get excited early in Watergate - it took until the second year,” said Kolodny, who also noted there’s no guarantee that future revelations won’t come from Starr.
In that case, members of Congress would certainly have to weigh in on the impeachment issue - whether their constituents want it or not.