Thursday, August 27, 1998

Liberal calls on the president to resign

By Bonnie Erbe

Mr. President, you have outlived your welcome and your usefulness to progressive causes. It's time for you to step down. If you do not, you can rest assured you will only bring mountains of continued disgrace on the people who have supported you and stood by you in the past.

Most Americans still tell pollsters they support you, Mr. President, and do not want to see you impeached or to see you resign. And we, the "elite" Washington media, are seen as "out of touch" and trying to "influence the story" rather than "report it." But as one who espouses many progressive causes, and is provoked beyond mere ire by right-wing attempts to discredit you, I believe you were ultimately the master of your own undoing.

By staying in office, you are hurting those causes you espouse much more than you are helping them. And your own admission of lapsed judgment so far underestimates the neuroses that must have driven you to commit adultery in the White House that it is almost laughable.

The public still supports you for two reasons. First, most Americans are properly primarily concerned with their own lives and their own families. They look to Washington - when they consider Washington at all - to keep the economy strong and to set in place policies that provide them and their neighbors with steady employment. To the extent you should be blamed if the U.S. were suffering from a weak economy, you deserve all the credit for a strong one. But that economy won't continue to generate jobs and corporate profits if a besieged leader stays at its helm.

Second, the public is paying scant attention to the depth of your deception. Except insofar as it makes for interesting gossip, and competes with conversations that normally focus on what one daytime television soap opera character did to a fellow character, the lies that must surely have accompanied the one to which you have already admitted are yet to become public. Once the public sees this was not one little white lie, but a series of prevarications designed to keep the Monica Lewinsky tale from ever becoming public, your public support will erode.

Nevertheless, the following scenario is extremely likely to take place. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr will nail down a series of lies and obstructions on your part, in your dealings with friend and adviser Vernon Jordan to secure employment for Ms. Lewinsky. His report, including the evidence just mentioned, will be forwarded to Congress sometime after Labor Day, but just soon enough to have a negative impact on Democratic congressional candidates. Later this year (probably after the elections) Republicans will reluctantly be forced to heed increasing cries for impeachment proceedings; reluctantly, because the last thing they want to do is make Vice President Al Gore an incumbent, rather than a challenger, in 2000.

There is only one way to avoid this public spectacle. That is to do the right thing by the causes you espouse and the people loyal to you. Would your resignation be disruptive to the country? You bet. But it would be a whole lot less disruptive than your staying in office and watching the walls crumble down around you.

More importantly, it would be a whole lot less damaging to the Democratic Party, which has already been severely disabled by fund-raising abuses that occurred on your watch. And it would show the women who elected you to office (by a 10 percent spread, often referred to as the "gender gap") that you do not view wives as objects of disrespect and derision, nor single women as ingenues of whom advantage should be taken.

Bonnie Erbe is host of the PBS program "To the Contrary." E-mail her at is 102404,3317@CompuServe.com.

Scripps Howard News Service