Editorial on Clinton, Financial Times of London Jan 1st 1999
"IMPEACHMENT: A stain on America
Impeachment was an act of personal vengeance by Clinton's
enemies; resignation will only make matters worse
This was not about the sacred
constitution of the American Republic. It wasn't even
honest politics. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was
personal. It was an act of vengeance, stark testimony to
a political culture poisoned by partisan rancour. As Bob
Livingston, the Republicans' fallen speaker-elect, can
now confirm, to descend to this swamp is to perish in it.
Newt Gingrich could have told him.
Mr Clinton is ready, if need be, to face a protracted and
humiliating trial in the Senate. Until the last hour of the
last day, as he put it on Saturday night. Washington,
though, still has a chance to wake from the nightmare.
Sanity among Senate Republicans might yet prevail over
the self-destructive madness of their allies in the House.
Bob Dole, the president's honourable opponent in the
1996 election, has told us how. Impeachment was the
act of a lame-duck Congress. Some 40 of those who
voted to bring down the president will be gone when the
House is reconstituted in three weeks time. A smaller
Republican majority should give it a less partisan edge.
Mr Dole has suggested this might be the moment for the
Senate to set aside the impeachment vote in favour of a
speedy motion of censure. If not, and it may well be
probably not, better a crippled president than one
bundled out of office in this manner. Resignation, we
hear, would be the honourable course. (Though, we
might reflect here on the curious standard set by Mr
Livingston: the crime is not the adultery but being found
out for it.)
It is said too that Mr Clinton should spare the country
further trauma and paralysis. As beguiling as this may
sound, the logic is flawed. Yes, how nice it would be to
draw a line under this sad, surreal episode. But
resignation would not serve the constitution that Mr
Clinton stands accused of debasing.
The founding fathers wrote impeachment into the
constitution to protect the people from tyranny. In
decreeing that a president could be removed only by the
vote of a two-thirds majority in the Senate, they explicitly
foresaw the danger that the process might fall victim to
partisan expediency. And how it has.
Mr Clinton's tawdry affair and his subsequent lies are
inexcusable. But impeachment is wholly
disproportionate. As Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from
New York, remarked, it fails to distinguish between sins
and crimes. Were he to walk away, Mr Clinton would
invite every future Congressional majority to deploy the
politics of character assassination against a
troublesome president. Kenneth Starr would live on as
an eternal Peeping Tom. Entrapment would be
legitimised and Linda Tripp dignified.
Like I said, this was personal. Sure, there are many
Republicans, most even, who are genuinely appalled by
Mr Clinton's behaviour. They have cause. Yet for all its
soaring rhetoric and phoney propriety, the impeachment
debate dripped partisan venom. Mr Clinton's enemies
don't care about the cost. They stand against the will of
the American people, against the evidence that these
are low crimes and misdemeanors, against, and this
most bizarrely, their own long-term interest.
Occasionally we come across politicians who are quite
simply loathed by their adversaries. They are treated as
enemies rather than opponents. At such times, honest
dispute gives way to visceral hostility. Politics becomes
war. Of the handful of such leaders during the present
century, we might think of Richard Nixon, Margaret
Thatcher and, from the other side of the political street,
Franklin Roosevelt. Mr Clinton, though, is primus inter
pares.
There is no other way to explain the grotesque spectacle
of a commander- in-chief indicted even as US forces
went into action against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Only
spite stood in the way of a few days delay until they had
returned to safety.
As Richard Gephardt, the leader of the House
Democrats, put it (and as more Republicans with a past
face the prospect of paying the price for the moral
majority's sexual McCarthyism) this is the politics of
smear, slash and burn. If you cannot defeat your
opponent's argument, you destroy their character.
We can see why it's happening. Mr Clinton is a politician
as gifted as he is scarred. The recklessness sits aside
brilliance. Winning the presidency was an affront to the
Republicans' assumed hegemony in the south and
south-west. He has stolen his opponents' best ideas. He
outwitted Mr Gingrich. He turned government into a
permanent political campaign. And, yes, he is ruthless.
Thus we arrive at the mindset that says if he cannot be
beaten, he must be impeached.
There are deeper undercurrents here. The incivility of
Washington politics (we might note that outside the
capital few Republican state governors have backed
impeachment) speaks of a chasm between electors and
elected. The people have disengaged. Voting
participation is in long-term decline. Capitol Hill politics
has become the property of pressure groups and
activists. Ideology has elbowed out pragmatism.
Nowhere is that more evident than within the Republican
majority.
What counted most in the political calculations of those
who voted to impeach Mr Clinton was that it played well
to their district activists, to the Christian Coalition, to the
anti-abortion and school prayer lobbies. The arithmetic
and geography of the nation's congressional districts
leaves such Republicans more vulnerable to a challenge
in their primaries than to defeat at the hands of a
Democrat opponent. Thus the mood beyond the narrow
boundary of party falls outside such calculations.
The irony is that this laager mentality threatens
long-term exile from the White House. Mr Clinton won
twice because he broke out from his political base.
Unthinking obeisance to the religious right denies the
Republicans that possibility. Of those who voted for
impeachment, more than 60 represent districts that Mr
Clinton won in the 1996 campaign.
We cannot know whether Mr Clinton might yet resign.
The dynamics are too unpredictable. I recall a
conversation with someone who knows him as well as
any. The president, this ally said, still wanted to salvage
something of his place in history. If he thought
resignation best served that purpose, he might just do it.
I suspect we are beyond that. Yet this is a bitter-sweet
moment for Republicans. Rarely has a party shown such
contempt for those whose votes it will soon be seeking.
The people can take their revenge in the 2000
presidential election. That would be justice.
It's hard to credit now that all this began with a stain on
Monica Lewinsky's dress. What has happened since
has soiled the character of American democracy. |
