The Clinton Gallows Poll for Democrats

Anyone who claims to have read a newspaper or weekly newsmagazine from cover to cover in the past few weeks is about as credible as the Evader-in-Chief asserting never having been alone with you-know-who in you-know-where. Who could possibly keep up with the onslaught of reports, transcripts, e-mails, claims, counterclaims and analyses--much less make any sense of it?

Sorting through the mind-numbing mess, however, one gleans emerging political implications and a number of bizarre observations by Clinton’s claque.

Wishful Thinking Department: Last week, MSNBC’s Laura Ingraham asked Rep. Charles Rangel (D-New York) to comment on the Democrats’ diminishing hopes of winning a majority in November. Ever the trooper, Rangel replied: “If you look at the polls, where is the political damage?”

It depends on where one is looking. Here in California, the Clinton scandal is a high-speed Mack truck looking to make road kill of gubernatorial candidate Gray Davis and incumbent U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.

A month ago, Davis was strutting along with a 12-point lead in one major statewide poll but is now--according to the most recent Times survey--dead even with his opponent, Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren. Republicans are rapidly returning to their partisan home. Democrats are dispirited by the corruption of their party leadership. And Democratic issue clusters are lost in the din of impending impeachment proceedings.

As for Boxer, the same poll shows that her opponent, state Treasurer Matt Fong, has jumped to a five-point lead among likely voters. “Clinton has hurt Boxer--and . . . she has exacerbated the damage with her reaction to his admission of an illicit sexual relationship,” observed the Times’ analyst.

Can Democratic House candidates be far behind? Fox News/Opinion Dynamics asked voters: “If a Democratic candidate asks President Clinton to campaign for him, her, will you be more or less likely to vote for that candidate?” Less likely, said 41% of the respondents, to 22% more likely.

Clinton has claimed that this election “is not about me.” Tell that to the Democratic candidates who express public bravado but live in private despair.

A Tower of Babel: The pressure must be getting to the Clintonistas. What else could explain the goofball statements uttered in the clutch by Mr. P’s pals?

* Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove), the Potomac darling devoted to Clinton for helping her achieve a narrow victory in 1996, said this of Ken Starr’s devastating report to the Congress: “It’s like when you have two little kids running around the house and one goes running to mommy and says, ‘Mommy, Mommy, he hit me.’ ”

Sanchez’s search for profundity looks to have fallen a bit short.

* When the award goes out for this year’s most kissy-face statement about the president, the lead nominee will be for comments addressed to Clinton by Democratic National Chairman Steve Grossman: “You have demonstrated . . . a higher commitment to the kind of moral leadership that I value in public service and public policy than any person that I have ever met.”

He’s safe; He wasn’t under oath.

* The buffoonery of a courtier like Grossman can be explained, but the atrocious example set by Congressional Black Caucus chair, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), cannot. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Waters stated her determination not to let Clinton be “railroaded” because “African Americans . . . have a history of having to fight to make sure there is justice and equality in the criminal justice system.”

No one who remembers the hideous past can dispute this “history.” But the failure of justice and equality that battered African Americans in the ‘50s and ‘60s grew precisely out of the same brazen disrespect for the law and the Constitution that Bill Clinton has displayed in his contempt for the oath of office he took as president.

The racists who defied the law, who blocked equal rights, who sanctioned the murder of civil rights workers, all lived in the security that they were beyond the reach of the laws that govern a civil society. There is no moral distinction between those attitudes and the effrontery that Clinton has displayed toward his duties as America’s chief law enforcer and as an officer of the court.

When the next corrupter of human values defies law and justice and cites the Clinton precedent that laws may be selectively embraced, we will have the likes of Waters to thank.

Kenneth L. Khachigian is a veteran political strategist and former White House speech writer who practices law in Orange County. His column appears here every other week.