Capital Rushes to Judgment as Public Holds Fire

Most Americans haven’t decided yet what to think about President Clinton’s latest controversy. But Washington’s political professionals have--and their snap judgment is that Clinton is in the biggest mess of an already-messy career.

With brutal speed, members of Congress and their aides have begun to speculate about the prospect of Clinton’s resignation or impeachment if the charges against him prove true.

A few, like Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) and former Clinton senior advisor George Stephanopoulos, have raised the issue publicly. Nearly everyone else in Washington, including ranking Democrats, is talking about it in nervous anonymity.

“He’s gone by Easter,” a senior Senate aide predicted glumly. “Some of us are in denial, and others are in mourning.”

Democratic political operatives offered wan jokes about the coming presidency of Al Gore. “He’ll be tougher to beat [in the 2000 presidential primaries] as an incumbent,” one said.

“Is this what Watergate felt like?” a Clinton aide asked plaintively.

In the nation as a whole, opinion polls suggest that the public is holding its fire. A Gallup Poll taken Wednesday evening for CNN and USA Today found Clinton’s popularity steady at 62%, even though 54% believed he “probably” had an affair with a young White House intern.

“People are willing to hold judgment in abeyance until there is real evidence,” Democratic pollster Geoff Garin said. “In the interim, they give far greater weight to his public performance as president than to his personal conduct.”

But Washington is different. The capital’s political class seems to have sensed that the Clinton investigations have suddenly tumbled through a hitherto-invisible barrier and entered a more treacherous zone.

Clinton and his aides have battled serious allegations of misconduct on several fronts ever since his 1992 campaign. But those charges rested on the ambiguous tangles of Arkansas land deals, dubious accounts of long-ago womanizing and the maddening technicalities of campaign finance law. This one, involving a purported affair with a then-21-year-old intern and an alleged attempt to obstruct justice, appears more fatally cut and dried.

“The culture of Washington is very legalistic,” said Suzanne Garment of the American Enterprise Institute, a scholar of political scandal. “Suborning perjury . . . is something for which a prosecutor can send you to the slammer. It isn’t something that public opinion polls can fix.”

In that sense, the politicos are holding Clinton to what might be called the “Nixon standard”: A deft statesman can withstand many charges, but obstruction of justice isn’t one of them.

Asked if leading Democrats believe that Clinton would have to resign if that allegation were proved, a strategist with broad contacts in the party said: “Oh, yeah. I haven’t talked to anybody who doesn’t think that.” (The Gallup Poll found the public evenly divided on that issue.)

“When stuff like this comes up, the mentality is always, ‘Oh, he’ll figure out some way to work around it,’ ” the strategist said. “But . . . who is brilliant enough to figure out a way around this thing? There is more shock and bewilderment than anger.”

Perhaps tellingly, one thing is clearly not happening among leading Democrats: There has been no wave of staunch public support for their embattled leader.

Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), the party’s leader in the Senate, issued a written statement that was a masterpiece of noncommittal caution.

“Like everyone else, I am learning about the allegations and following the story through news reports,” it said. “These are serious allegations which the president has denied, and which deserve an investigation that should be conducted quickly and fairly.”

House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) was a little more supportive: “My view is that no one should draw any conclusions in this matter until the investigation is allowed to determine the facts. The president deserves that.”

The strongest statement on Clinton’s behalf on Capitol Hill came from a conservative Republican, Sen. John McCain of Arizona. “I pray that the allegations are false, and will believe in the president’s innocence unless there is persuasive evidence to the contrary,” McCain said. “In the meantime, we should all of us resist participating in a frenzy of public speculation.”

Congressional Democrats said the White House has made no attempt so far to organize its allies on Capitol Hill into a coherent defense strategy as it did to contain the political damage of last year’s campaign fund-raising controversy.

And no one has taken the initiative to defend the president.

“You don’t see a chorus of the normal defense lines you hear from members of his party,” said one Democratic strategist. “People are more cautious about this one. They will continue to be more cautious until a lot more is known. It has the look and feel of things that are more serious than the previous allegations.”

Another Democrat put it succinctly: “We’re dodging.”

Administration officials and congressional aides said the situation’s eruption this week was especially frustrating because it interrupted a real upswing for the president and his party.

“Things were going well for Democrats,” said a senior House aide. “The polls had us up. We were ramping up to what appeared likely to be a highly successful State of the Union [speech]. A lot of that is waylaid now.”

Democrats have a huge stake in Clinton’s political health. The party’s strength in the polls is closely tied to the president’s sky-high ratings. And Clinton has been a potent fund-raiser for the party, despite the last year’s travails. If he were forced out of office, Democrats fear they could face the kind of massive loss of congressional seats that Republicans suffered in 1974, in the wake of Nixon’s resignation amid the Watergate scandal. So when party operatives handicap Clinton’s longevity, or guess who a President Gore might choose as vice president, they aren’t merely dealing in idle speculation; they are groping for handholds for their own perilous future.

“The country hasn’t gotten that far yet. . . There’s a delay before the public will make up its mind,” said Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. “Washington has already convicted the guy.”