Impeachment Doesn’t Matter? Just Wait Until We Need the President

You remember the John Lennon-style posters in the late 1960s that asked, “What if they gave a war and no one came?” Times have changed: We of the late 1990s are about to discover what happens when they give an impeachment and no one shows up.

Even among political people in Washington, reactions to last week’s impeachment of President Bill Clinton by the House of Representatives are detached and ironic. A political appointee in the Justice Department muses about how far we’ve slid from the Washington of the late correspondent-turned-novelist Allen Drury, in which impeachment would have been an occasion of the highest solemnity. At one of the season’s many Christmas soirees, party-goers placed bets on which will happen first: Larry Flynt outing another Republican or anti-Clinton partisans outing another alleged presidential paramour.

You would think, based on an ordinary understanding of American politics, that a) impeachment means the president is in serious danger of being removed from office; and b) removal, if it happens, will have grave consequences for the nation. But the Clinton impeachment is dismissed as an empty exercise, and the idea of ousting him arouses no trepidation. This dispassion is not so mysterious when you realize that both Clinton’s enemies and his allies have, for their own reasons, worked hard to produce it.

Some anti-Clinton Republicans in the House decided, as a strategy, to argue in the impeachment debates that impeaching the president was different from actually kicking him out of office. To lower the impeachment bar and make it easier for colleagues to vote “yes,” these Republicans adopted the prosecutor’s traditional line: “Guilty? I’m not saying the guy’s guilty. I’m just saying there’s probable cause. Whether he’s guilty is for the jury to decide.” Thus, if representatives voted to impeach Clinton, it meant only that they thought his removal should be considered by the Senate. Over to you, Chet.

Democrats, of course, denounced this tactic as flight from responsibility. But, for their own reasons, they also denied the political reality of impeachment. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), of the House Judiciary Committee, compared this impeachment to a professional wrestling match: a lot of sweating and groaning, but everyone knew how it would come out in the end. The House could declaim about the solemnity of the process, but in the Senate, removal simply did not have the votes.

Clinton’s allies also staged some political theater to demystify the process. As soon as the House vote was over and the president impeached, they hustled over to the White House and held a press event with Clinton, in which they called on him not to resign--and he graciously acceded. The aim of the playlet, Clinton spinsters helpfully explained, was to show that this was not Watergate, in which President Richard M. Nixon was so overpowered by the weight of the Judiciary Committee’s action in approving articles of impeachment that he up and resigned. By contrast, the Clinton-era Republican Congress was not the conscience of a nation but a partisan rabble; its actions deserved not deference but defiance.

These clever people on the left and right are wrong about impeachment: It is extremely important. Indeed, the anti-Clinton campaign has, from its inception, depended crucially on procedural formalities. The fact that a president lies does not provide much leverage against him; but the fact that a president lies under oath can still produce politically significant opprobrium. Clinton’s lies under oath took place, then emerged into daylight because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a sitting president could be sued; because sexual-harassment law deems some kinds of past sexual behavior by a defendant legally relevant; and because the independent-counsel statute makes investigations metastasize. The fact that the president’s lies became the basis for impeachment charges throws them into the Senate for a trial, otherwise known as an open, rolling invitation to the unexpected.

So procedures, and impeachment in particular, are a big deal. But you can forgive people for thinking otherwise, since Clinton’s friends and enemies have worked so assiduously to that end.

People also seem to think that removal of this president will not matter much to the country. In promoting this idea, Clinton is not guilty. At every opportunity, his allies point to public-opinion polls expressing approval of his performance, and Clinton himself states his determination to keep doing the work of the people, raising the suggestion that the work of the people will go to hell in a handbasket if he is tossed out.

But, approval ratings notwithstanding, Clinton’s identification of himself with the nation’s well-being will not protect him because it does not resonate. No one seriously argues that these poll numbers signify any feeling of connection with Clinton personally or any widely held notion that he, in particular, is indispensable to the country’s good fortune. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, maybe. Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, maybe. Not, however, Clinton.

This detachment is not all Clinton’s fault. His high poll numbers are generated, in part, by the frenzied behavior of his enemies and, in part, by peaceful, prosperous times. Neither one produces any sense of real, positive dependence on a president.

But Clinton’s behavior has contributed to the public’s distance. His trademark is political cleverness: his ability to slip the ideological nooses set for him by his enemies, his suppleness at squaring policy circles, his ingenuity at stealing his opponents’ rhetoric.

The same cleverness means that, to a large extent, he does not, and has not been forced to, stand for much or bear political costs for having chosen one course of action over another. Yet, making such choices, and bearing the costs, is one way a politician shows seriousness, and showing seriousness is a way in which a political figure demonstrates that he or she matters. Thus, Clinton is a victim of his own skill.

Nonetheless, those who think removal of this president will not matter are wrong, just as they are wrong in thinking this impeachment is not significant. We still live with the consequences of having removed Nixon from office, even without an impeachment. There is no reason to think that ousting a president will be free of similarly large consequences this time. In particular, history gives us no reason to think that the current peace and prosperity will continue for long. When they fail, the country will need a strong presidency, which, in the wake of this impeachment, may well not exist.

But, once again, people can be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The politics of post-Cold War America have done everything possible to erode the idea of politics as an organizing force in the country’s life, and it will probably take a disaster to correct the misimpression. In the meantime, the Clinton impeachment seems just as unreal as most of the rest of what appears on the shrinking political pages of U.S. newspapers.*