1. From Impeachment to Kosovo: Clinton's wars

   In a remarkable display of collective amnesia, "Monicagate" and its messy legacy has been erased from the public mind in a matter of months¹ by images of the Kosovar exodus and the NATO air campaign that forced the capitulation of Slovodan Milosevic. Nevertheless the Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment and trial of President Clinton still remain the central stories in American politics last year. In the Fall and Winter of 1998-99, America's political and media elites threw themselves into a frenzy over revelations concerning the sex life of the President as Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr finally presented his report detailing charges of Presidential lawlessness and sexual impropriety. While the recklessness of Mr. Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky shocked the President's staff, family and close associates and prompted calls for Clinton's resignation among Congressional Democrats², Starr's case for indictment ultimately rested on the single charge of perjury in the Paula Jones civil lawsuit - a meager result for a four year investigation and a thin foundation for a Presidential impeachment.

   But inspired by the electoral calculations of House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the deep hostility felt toward the Clintons by conservative activists, the Republican leadership took a daring gamble and, convinced that detailed account of Mr. Clinton's extra-marital affairs would lead the public to abandon him out of sheer revulsion, committed themselves to an all out effort to bring him down. This constitutional gambit failed and ended up sweeping away both Gingrich and his successor, Bob Livingston instead of Clinton, revealing for all to see the limits of the conservative realignment of American politics and opinion. Besides alienating mainstream voters, all the congressional "coup de force" accomplished was to block domestic policy making for a year and bring the ideological conflicts between the two branches of government to a crisis point.

   The impeachment firestorm also overshadowed the successes of Alan Greenspan and the Clinton economic team of Rubin and Sommers in containing the threatened meltdown of world financial markets and sustaining the American economic expansion. The eight years of the "Clinton Boom" have delivered both full employment and low inflation- bringing about an accumulation of wealth at the top of American society unseen since the 1890's³, and importantly for Mr. Clinton's legacy, allowing for a recovery of lost ground by the America's disadvantaged bottom third - especially among the working poor and the Black residents of America's inner cities⁴. The full employment economy has triggered an orgy of consumption, but curiously the good news about minorities is ignored, and facts about the breadth of American recovery are disbelieved by much of the American public⁵.

   Confronted by a stalemate at home and harried by domestic opponents, Mr. Clinton found an opportunity for presidential action overseas, ordering air strikes of varying intensity against four different countries (Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Serbia) in a single year. Critics were quick to observe that with the notable exception of the war over Kosovo, all of these military operations were carried out without authorization by Congress or the UN Security Council, or the support of US allies other than the British. Thus a moment of extreme domestic weakness coincided with the broad deployment of US military force to implement a "Clinton Doctrine," where the United States, the world's "indispensable power," undertook policing "rogue states" in defense of "human rights" and of "shaping the security environment" of the global economy⁶. After having showcased Osmana Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein as "poster boy" enemies of the United States in the Summer and Winter⁷, the Clinton Administration stumbled this Spring into an undeclared war with Slovodan Milosevic in order to back up European diplomacy with American military force and halt the Kosovo conflict before it could ignite the entire Balkans.

   Even a shooting war over Kosovo failed to rally American public opinion "around the flag⁸" with polls showing a softening of support for the President during the Kosovo operation despite his pledge never to introduce ground troops, and the fact that the war was won without a single American combat death. While the Clinton administration insisted that Kosovo really wasn't "war," the bombing of Serbian cities and civilian infrastructure and the expulsion of a million Kosovars were warlike enough to divide opinion elites at home, transforming liberal doves into "humanitarian hawks" and cold war hawks into "neo-realist" doves⁹. The Republican leadership in Congress added to the confusion by indulging in an extraordinary display of "Wag the dog" cynicism over both the Baghdad bombing¹⁰ and the NATO air campaign against Serbia- asserting that the timing of air strikes were dictated primarily by Mr. Clinton's political and legal problems at home. Certainly the Republicans were not prepared to go anywhere Mr. Clinton wished to lead them, and this refusal was duly noted in the House votes in May against a formal declaration of war against Serbia and support of the air campaign - votes which threatened to place the Clinton Administration in violation of the War Powers Act at the height of the Kosovo air campaign. Despite Republican support for supplementary defense spending in the order of 11 billion dollars, their refusal to support US Forces in "wartime" revealed a turn toward a neo-isolationist foreign policy by the Republican Congress which may well come back to haunt Republican Presidents in the future.

2. "The Bill and Monica Show" as a Show Trial

   Lucky in his choice of adversaries at home and abroad, Clinton survived the campaign to force his resignation because the American public decided that his private life was none of their business, and that the crime of which he was accused did not merit the punishment of removal from office¹¹. Given the haste with which the House Judiciary committee published The Starr Report and broadcast the videotapes of his "secret" Grand Jury testimony - stripping the President bare before a worldwide audience - one could also argue that the public simply decided that the man and his family had been humiliated enough. But this was not a sentiment shared by either the radical Republican backbenchers in the House or by the American media.

   Disregarding both public opinion polls which showed steady support for the President and rising disapproval of the Republican Party¹², the House leadership forced a vote on December 18th of two articles of impeachment charging Clinton with perjury before a federal grand jury and obstruction of justice, which were passed in a straight party-line vote by the Republican majority. Curiously this vote, like the vote in the House Judiciary committee in November, was split as much along sectional as ideological lines with Southern and Western Congressmen generally supporting impeachment while Northerners did not. In the end, most Republican moderates from the Northeast caved in to pressure from grassroots activists and voted the articles of impeachment- often against their better judgement¹³. In January, the Senate began trial proceedings with the clear aim of quickly disposing of the charges against the President, which was achieved with a series of votes where centrist Republicans joined the Democratic minority in defeating the House radicals.

   Despite the President's escape, the fact remains that the partisan vote in favor of articles of impeachment by the Republican House of Representatives represents the first time in US history that the majority party has tried to nullify a popular election by overturning a President of the opposing party on charges of "high crimes and misdemeanors¹⁴. " Monicagate moved us across an historic threshold in the spread of the "politics of delegitimation" which have come to characterize American political life in the past twenty years. In this new form of partisan warfare politicians seek not only to defeat their political opponents at election time, but also to drive them from public life by destroying their reputations; ruining their finances with legal fees¹⁵, and removing them from office through criminal prosecutions resulting in fines and jail time ¹⁶. In this instance, the House Judiciary committee and the Special Prosecutor were even able to subpena the President's staff, White House Lawyers and his Secret Service security detail to give evidence against him - much of which was promptly leaked to the press. Future Presidents and their families will have to learn to live in a situation of total "transparency" where their closest advisors, friends and personal staff are all potential witnesses against them¹⁷.

   Public sympathy for the Clintons grew in the face of the media' aggressive approach to reporting the Lewinsky affair and House impeachment proceedings - reporting which rivaled the media overkill of the OJ Simpson murder trial in 1995. "The Bill and Monica show" dominated the news for a year and represented the marriage of the "New News," where "celebrity" trials are kept alive for their entertainment value and potential to increase audience shares, to the "porno-puritianism" of neo-conservative editorialists, who both condemned Clinton's sexual conduct even as they titillated their audience with the details of all "the naughty bits¹⁸." Network television "analysts," and "talk radio" hosts joined conservative critics in transforming Monicagate into a "show trial"of the "Baby Boomers" and their "loose" sexual ethics and secular, "relativistic" morality. Press commentary echoed to a surprising degree¹⁹ the themes of the conservative cultural campaign to overturn the "post-sixties cultural settlement" that had opened the doors to everything from premarital sex and single mother motherhood to Gay rights²⁰, and the need to restore the authority of local religious authorities to regulate community morals²¹.

3. The Fallout from Monicagate

   The Starr Report; the articles of impeachment and the Senate trial blackened Mr. Clinton's reputation but did little to weaken his high standing in the public opinion polls²², or to hurt the electoral chances of the Democratic party last Fall. Contrasting public emotions about Clinton and the impeachment proceedings were translated into sharply polarized votes this past November, when 77% of core republican voters favored the impeachment and removal of the President, while most Democrats were opposed²³. The prospect of impeachment proceedings was sufficient to mobilize core Democratic constituencies such as Blacks (17% of actual voters), union households ( 22% of actual voters) and Hispanics who increased their vote totals in key states such as California and added five Democratic seats in the House of Representatives²⁴. They were not enough, however, to give the Democrats a House majority or to mobilize the general electorate, and voter turnout fell to 36% of all eligible voters - the highest level of abstention since 1942.

   We shouldn't underestimate the importance of Clinton's victory in this the third and last, campaign of his presidency. The Republican effort to destroy him was a "bloodless" coup attempt which, had it succeeded, would have institutionalized the crusade for orthodoxy of the Christian Right and banalized the threat of impeachment proceedings against future presidents. It would have also rewritten the constitutional rules of the game in more "parliamentary direction" which would have moved us toward the "Congressional Government" of the 19th century. Although the Republican House Spokeswoman, Jennifer Dunn of California , dismissed the "coup" metaphor with the observation that she saw "no tanks in the streets²⁵," a successful campaign to remove Clinton would have limited the independence of the executive for decades to come, and increased the influence of the legislative branch and judiciary at its expense. But then this coup failed.

4. "The Hillary Cluster" and the reemergence of regional divisions.

   Its failure left many Christian conservatives stunned by their discovery that the rest of the country did not identify with their cultural politics and that they were at best a "moral minority" with no claim to speak for the rest of America. Paul Weyrich, a key radical activist, reacted by proclaiming that conservatives had "lost the culture war" and should withdraw into enclaves where they could shelter themselves and their families from the general corruption of American life²⁶. Others declared that conservatives had lost the impeachment battle because the American people had failed them and were unworthy of their leadership.This reaction and the inability of the Republican moderates to deflect the Party from its suicidial path, demonstrates that the Republican Party is hostage to a single bloc of voters - the evangelical Christian Right. - who make up at most third of the U.S. population.

   Republicans in Congress now run the risk of becoming an "integralist" faction which will alienate the other voter blocs necessary to any future effort to build a Republican presidential majority ²⁷- as the current favorite for the Republican Presidential nomination, Governor George W. Bush of Texas has long appreciated²⁸. Indeed one of the principal outcomes of this year's crisis is that the Republican Party has shown itself to be primarily a powerful, sectional party. It is an open question whether it is capable of overridding the secional and sectarian impulses of its activist base and acting like a responsible party of national government.

   The American electorate now seems split along sectional lines as well as ethnicity and class distinctions - with the Republicans generally losing out in the most culturally sophisticated areas of the country because of their resistance to the new social issues ( " the Hillary Cluster") which attract many young and female voters - issues such as gun control, tobacco regulation, or the reform of Health Maintenance Organizations to name only a few. This is due to the confusion between the defense of conservative family values and the celebration of Southern folkways ( "God, Guns and Gays"), made by the Republican leadship in Congress - which is almost exclusively Southern in background. Today Republican support is mainly found in the South and the Rocky Mountain States, while the Democrats increasingly dominate the two coasts and the former Republican heartland in the Middle West and North East²⁹. In short the culture wars of the past two decades has brought about a regional "swap" between the parties of their respective northern and southern bases. The trend toward the regional polarization of the parties and their electorates has been strengthened by current demographic trends where foreign immigration to the two coasts has triggered internal migrations of ethnic Whites (and some Blacks) toward interior sections of the South and Rocky mountain States. In particular, white migrants are abandoning the Northeast, West Coast and Middle West making their remaining electorates more Democratic, and moving to the Rocky Mountain States and the South making them more conservative³⁰. The regional division of party voter tends to make both parties more ideologically cohesive, not less, which in the American system can only have destabilizing effects that will become more apparent over time.

Notes

1. See David Plotz, "Impeachment Redux,: Flytrap is forgotten but not gone" Slate Magazine, June 24, 1999, .

2. See Bob Woodward's " A President's Isolation," Washington Post, June 13,1999; Page A1

3.See Lester Thurow, "Building Wealth; the new rules for individuals, companies and nations," The Atlantic Monthly, June 1999, pages 57-58.

4. See E.J. Dionne, " A ladder for the Poor," The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, June 14, 1999, page 27.

5. See Richard Morin's, "Not a clue: The economy's booming and crime's down, but many Americans believe it ain't so," The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, June 14,1999, page 34. See also, Gregg Easterbrook, "America the OK", The New Republic, January 4, 1999, page 19.

6. See Andrew Bacevich critical review of this policy, "Policing Utopia: The Military Imperatives of Globalization,"The National Interest, No 56, Summer 1999, p.p.s 8-12.

7. See for instance, Steve Emerson's "Unholy War," The New Republic, September 14, 1998, pp.s. 22-23.

8. See the CNN polls of May 28th, 1999 and of June 14,1999 which reported that only 40% thought that the successful conclusion of the air campaign was a "US victory."

9. See David Plotz, " Hawkish Doves, Dovish Hawks: the confusing taxonomy of Kosovo," Slate Magazine, Friday , April 16th, 1999,

10. See William Saletan, "Wag the Doubt: the debate over Clinton's Iraq attack blazes new frontiers in cynicism," Slate Magazine, December 19, 1998

11. See the CNN Poll of February 11th, where 64% of respondents approved of the Senate decision to acquit Clinton and only 39% were either displeased or angry about his acquittal.

12. See the CNN poll of February 14th 1999 where 71 % of respondents agreed that the Republicans in Congress were losers in the impeachment process.

13. See Joshua Mich Marshall,"Where have you gone Nelson Rockefeller?" The American Prospect, March/April, 199, No 44, page 43.

14. Richard Nixon resigned rather than face a House vote on articles of impeachment and Andrew Johnson who came with one vote of removal in his Senate trial in 1867 was the unelected successor of Abraham Lincoln.

15. The Clintons are facing somewhere over ten million dollars in legal fees for their defense, while other minor characters in the Monicagate saga have had to mortgage their houses to settle deal with legal bills that ran in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

16. Theodore Lowi and Benjamin Ginzberg, Embattled Democracy: Politics and Policy in the Clinton Era, W.W. Norton, New York, 1995, p.p.s. 45-47.

17. Mr. Clinton described the White House as a "prison," Woodward, op cit.

18. Sullivan, op cit.

19. See Todd Gitlin's analysis of the NYT editorial page, "The Clinton-Lewinsky Obsession: How the Press made a scandal of itself," The Washington Monthly, Dec. 1998, page 16.

20. See Andrew Sullivan, "Going Down Screaming", The New York Times Magazine, October 11, 1998, p.p.s.48-49.

21. See John J. Judis, "Washington Possessed,"The New Republic, January 25, 1999, page 16.

22. See the recent Time/CNN Poll from January 21, 1999 where the President's approval rating remains a healthy 66%, Time, February 1. 199. Page, 24.

23. See Peter Connolly, "Bill Clinton and the Two Nations," Dissent, Winter 1999, page 9.

24. These figures were given to me by Guy Molyneaux, an AFL-CIO National staffer.

25. See Richard Berke, "An Identity Crisis in the US," Week in Review Section, The New York Times, January 31, 1999, page 4.

26. See Larry P. Arnn's response to Weyrich, "Despair is no Virtue," in Precepts, The Claremont Institute, March 16, 1990, page 1.

27. See Christopher Caldwell, "The Southern Captivity of the GOP," The Atlantic Montly, June 1998, p.p.s.56-62.

28. See Peter Beinart, "Size Matters: Big Business, Big Governement, and George W. Bush's Battle for the Future of the Republican Party," The New Republic, March 16th, 1998, p.p.s. 21-23.

29. Caldwell op cit.

30. Jonathan Trove, "The New Map of American Politics," The American Prospect, March/April, 1999, No.44. p.p.s. 34-42.

Go to John Mason Home Page

Go to Political Science faculty menu

Go to Political Science Home Page

Go to William Paterson Top Page