To Many in California GOP Ranks, It’s a Horror Show

For many California Republicans, watching the impeachment extravaganza from afar is a bit like watching the remake of “Psycho.” The minute Marion steps into the shower, you know what’s going to happen. Still, you watch, horrified and helpless.

“The Republican Party is doing damage to itself every day this continues,” said Don Sipple, a GOP ad man.

“I don’t see anything positive coming out of it for Republicans,” added Mike Madrid, the state party’s just-departed political chief.

“Those Republicans driving the impeachment bus don’t know where it’s going or how it ends, and they don’t care,” lamented Allan Hoffenblum, a veteran GOP strategist in Los Angeles.

Mix and match your metaphors: A horror movie. A motor coach careening off a cliff. A kamikaze mission. Political self-immolation.

It’s been a dreadful year for California Republicans. A November landslide ended the party’s 16-year grip on the governorship and smothered tantalizing hopes of picking off Barbara Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat. Many state Republicans blame the election debacle at least partly on the GOP Congress’ zealous pursuit of a president whose enormous popularity in California remains undimmed by his admitted deception.

More Party Damage Expected

Now these same strategists and political wise men see the impeachment steamroller, unchecked by public opinion, flattening the party’s prospects even further--in California as well as other states with similarly large populations of free-floating, nonideological voters, such as Illinois and Pennsylvania.

“After the election, I thought this would be over by the time the turkey [got] out of the oven,” said Sipple, a Beltway escapee living in Santa Barbara. “Now we’re two weeks past turkey day and it’s still going on. Like a lot of people, I’m scratching my head, thinking I must be missing something.”

Washington has long been a world apart from the rest of America, the more so here in California, where the psychic distance is far greater than a mere 2,500 miles. But rare is the issue that so starkly divides a political party within the Beltway and without.

Earlier this week, no less a student of provincial opinion than California Gov. Pete Wilson offered this advice, unbidden and unheeded, to his fellow Republicans in Washington: “Do it right, get it done, move on.”

Translated, a spokesman said Wilson thought some expeditious form of censure, rather than impeachment, was the way to go. (The governor was the rare state or local GOP officeholder willing to wade into the cross-fire over the impeachment issue.)

Certainly, there are some state Republican activists who ardently believe that Clinton’s ouster is not only a moral imperative but good politics.

“The responsibility of any elected official is to uphold the Constitution,” said Steve Frank, a longtime conservative strategist and state Republican Party officer. “There are no negative consequences to upholding the Constitution. There are negative consequences not doing so.”

But among those who earn their keep winning elections, those who measure victory not in virtue but in votes, there’s an overwhelming sentiment that all this righteousness is terribly wrong.

“Impeachment for California Republicans is the morally correct thing to do and a politically dumb thing to do,” said Kevin Spillane, a Sacramento-based GOP consultant. “We’re one of the most pro-Clinton states in the nation, and, frankly, it’s going to really complicate things for a number of our vulnerable Republican incumbents.”

Chief among them may be Reps. Brian P. Bilbray of San Diego and James E. Rogan of Glendale, both narrowly elected from districts chock full of the sort of centrist voters least enthralled with partisan high jinks. Reps.-elect Doug Ose of Sacramento and Steve Kuykendall of Rancho Palos Verdes will enter the House in January representing similarly touch-and-go districts.

Beyond the state’s 52-member congressional delegation, Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein will be up for reelection in 2000, along with 80 members of the state Assembly and 20 members of the state Senate.

And, of course, California looms as the grand prize in the 2000 presidential sweepstakes. Having won the state twice, Clinton has gone a good measure toward fostering a realignment that gives future Democratic presidential candidates a leg up; impeachment backlash would make it that much harder for Republicans to buck the trend.

The great unknown--and one of the rare bits of suspense--in a congressional production with all the spontaneity of Kabuki theater is whether any of this will matter two years hence.

“They’re insane and they’re going to lose the House over this,” chortled Democratic consultant Garry South, who had a front-row seat on the futility of the Republican anti-Clinton crusade as manager of Gov.-elect Gray Davis’ romp to victory.

“These are like rich kleptomaniacs who don’t have to steal, but every time they go in a store, they can’t help themselves,” South said, warming to the image of House Republicans on an ideological bender.

“Every time the subject of William Jefferson Clinton comes up, it just makes them see red, and they’d rather get their pound of flesh than do what’s in their self-interest.”

Issue Not Seen as Being Key in 2000

But Stu Spencer, the gray eminence of California Republicans, who has seen scandals and scandalmongers wax and wane over 40-odd years, takes a more sanguine view.

“I don’t think it will be a material issue in 2000,” Spencer said, arguing that President Ford’s pardon of the resigned President Nixon was the only thing keeping Watergate alive in 1976, two years after Nixon stepped down. “I don’t recall any major fallout from Iran-Contra.”

“It’s important now. It’s a news story and all that,” he said of the impeachment spectacle, before citing the ultimate gauge to prove the fleeting half-life of today’s headlines: “Who talks about O.J. anymore?”