Saturday, August 29, 1998

Impeachment issue may hurt ability to govern

It was almost as if Newt Gingrich were trying to buck up the president the other day when he said "a single human mistake" was insufficient for impeachment, that there would need to be "an overpowering case" of "a pattern of felonies" and that the presumption should not only be one of innocence, but of the nation's need for authority and stability.

But what the Republican speaker of the House was giving, the Democratic House minority leader was soon taking away.

Describing President Clinton's lies about sexual escapades with Monica Lewinsky as "wrong" and "reprehensible," Richard Gephardt refused to reject impeachment and expulsion as perhaps being ultimately required. The main thing, he said, was that all facts be known and that the process be non-partisan and credible. You had the sense he just might be telling the president to get out of Dodge while the getting was good.

Political motivations

Political motivations have been known to lurk close by the utterances of congressmen, and there's a possibility that Gingrich, having read the polls showing the public still opposed to impeachment, figured the public might also be opposed to Republicans who preach it. He might have been concerning himself, too, with setting up Vice President Gore as President Gore and thereby enhancing his prospects of election to that high office in 2000.

Gephardt has presidential aspirations of his own, obviously cares about Democratic prospects in the November elections and must know the polls also show the public no longer respects Clinton. A political reporter has also pointed out that a number of other Democrats in the House -- feeling betrayed in the past by the president -- were outraged at his recent accusatory speech. After all, it has been noted, a presidential aide had promised confession, contrition and closure.

It's not just disassociation from a tarnished leader but fear for the future of beloved causes that may partly have led some liberal columnists and a couple of liberal newspapers to join several conservative publications and a handful of Republicans in calling for the president's resignation. Still another alternative -- favored by the public and possibly even encouraged as a lesser calamity by some in the White House -- is censure of the president by the Congress.

Can't pretend to govern?

But would censure truly get the nation past all of this? Might there come a point when the president's stature has eroded so much that he cannot even pretend to govern?

A decisive factor may be the report to be issued within a month or so by independent counsel Kenneth Starr. The printed speculation of some is that it will demonstrate not just perjury in a civil deposition, but more lies before a grand jury and also obstruction of justice, that its evidence will be overwhelming and that it will include fresh and surprisingly sordid details about the president's behavior.

If that's true -- and it quite conceivably won't be -- it's difficult to see how his presidency could or should survive.