G.O.P.'s Officials, Feeling Boxed In, Keep Looking for a Way Out nytimes.com
But there is no way out. Nobody gets out of here alive! You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike! I tried to cut this story down to an excerpt or two, but it was hard to pick and choose among all the delectable morsels.
A telling sign of the impeachment troubles confronting the Republicans is that they are so fearful of ceding the White House and the Democrats a political advantage that they would not dare boycott President Clinton's State of the Union address on Tuesday night, though some considered doing so. This is no time to seem whiny or pettily partisan.
Republican leaders seem trapped. They are struggling to lure the impeachment genie back into the bottle, but they have had no success yet. Many in the party hope that by the 2000 elections, voters will have long forgotten impeachment. But they concede that the longer the matter drags out, the more the party is bedeviled.
The Senate Republican leader, Trent Lott, tried mightily to avert a full impeachment trial, but failed. Lott's critics say his predecessor, Bob Dole, a decided pragmatist, would never have let the matter veer out of control that way. Others call that judgment unfair, saying the maneuvering over the president's fate is so huge, so politically complex, that its outcome is far beyond any one person's control.
Within the party, "you've got the pragmatists who say, 'Look, we don't have the votes to convict this guy, so let's just stop it before we do any more damage to the party,"' said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster. "You've got the principled side, they're saying, 'This guy should go,"' and that shutting down the impeachment case would only infuriate the party's base of conservative voters.
"And so who is right?" Fabrizio said. "They're both right. The question is, Who wins the struggle?"
The real winner -- if such a notion is possible -- may well be the Democrats. For now, at least, it appears that a Republican in a competitive 2000 race who votes to convict Clinton could suffer more political damage than a Democrat who votes to acquit.
Many Republicans liken their current circumstances to an intractable and unpopular war: there seems no way out, and, ultimately, no one can declare a satisfying triumph.
"This is the dance that doesn't end," said Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican media consultant. "The biggest price we're paying for this is the failure to advocate our agenda."
Polls suggest that even if Clinton had never met Monica S. Lewinsky, the Republicans would still be on the defensive in matters of public policy. A survey released Monday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that the Democrats held a huge advantage over Republicans on the public's top-priority issues, from improving education to protecting Social Security to regulating managed health care. On the Republicans' favorite issue, tax cuts, 45 percent of Americans say the Democrats have the best ideas; only 32 percent say Republicans do.
Some White House officials are boasting that the address on Tuesday night could further lift Clinton's own already impressive poll numbers. The Pew survey found that the public was no less critical of the Senate Republicans' handling of impeachment than of the House's. Americans gave congressional Republicans a 32 percent approval rating for their conduct of the investigation; Democrats got 44 percent on the issue. The survey, of 1,200 adults from last Thursday through Sunday, had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Beyond what seems to be a collective decision to show up for the State of the Union, Republicans find themselves debating how they ought to behave once they get there.
"This is Clinton's chance to put the Republicans in a no-win position," said John J. Pitney Jr., a former Republican Party official who is now a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College in California. "If they cheer and applaud, they look like wimps. And if they sit in silence, they look like jerks."
The White House seemed gleeful as it plotted to put the Republicans' predicament -- and the president's political skills -- to their best advantage. One option that was considered was to ask the parents of Matthew Shepard, the gay college student who was slain in Wyoming last year, to sit in the box with Hillary Rodham Clinton as a way to promote hate crimes legislation. But White House officials decided that such a move would, as one of of them put it, appear too much like an "in your face" dig at Republicans, many of whom have opposed such bills.
I think "This is no time to seem whiny or pettily partisan" might be the best bit. The dignified Republican Representatives and Senators will just have to leave the whining and petty partisan garbage (not to mention the ever popular "partisan hatred") to the faithful Clinton haters here. He's the Antichrist, you know. Lott and Barr can always let loose with the whining at their next white supremacist keynote address. |
