With Impeachment Book Closed, Here’s What We’ve Learned So Far

Looking for lessons in the impeachment struggle that finally ended late last week is like looking for airline safety tips at the site of a plane crash: it’s possible but difficult amid all the wreckage. This, too, is a story that has produced more destruction than instruction.

Yet the long battle over President Clinton’s efforts to conceal his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky does offer some lessons about the nature of modern politics--even apart from the obvious conclusion that it would be nice to have a president who looks the other way when an intern flashes her underwear. What else have we learned? Here are some first cuts:

No one is listening. Like cannons laying siege to a stubbornly resistant fort, the Washington media barraged Americans for a year with the message that they ought to be outraged about this case. Despite the fusillade, public opinion never wavered from the conclusion it reached within weeks of the scandal’s disclosure: Clinton’s behavior, while inexcusable, was not a sufficient cause to remove him from office.

The public’s refusal to be instructed may be a harbinger of an Information Age politics in which the sheer proliferation of soapboxes dilutes the impact of the message from any one of them--or even from all of them.

Scandal is war. One reason the message never took is that the country never accepted a fundamental premise of the messengers. From the start, most Americans have viewed this as a political rather than legal or moral confrontation--as Clinton’s critics would have it. And in the end, Congress seemed to view the case through the same lens: Whatever other factors they considered, only a handful of legislators in either chamber broke party lines on the critical votes.

There’s a message larger than hypocrisy in that pattern. What it shows is that the use of ethical allegations has become so integral to the parties’ political strategies that the public and the participants now tend to view these charges principally as a form of partisan warfare.

That perspective puts enormous pressure on politicians to line up with “their side” in these conflicts. And that means absent much weightier charges--and far more unambiguous proof than Kenneth W. Starr and the House Republicans amassed--it will grow increasingly difficult in future scandals to reassemble the rough bipartisan consensus that coalesced against Richard Nixon in Watergate. By leveling so many ethical accusations against one another, the parties have devalued the coin of moral outrage.

The sophisticates have a less sophisticated view of human nature than the public. Among Washington’s opinion elite, the dominant view has been that the scandal reveals the essence of Clinton; in the country, the dominant view has been that it reveals only one distressing part of a more complex picture. While Americans’ faith in Clinton’s moral compass has plummeted, significant majorities in national polls continue to see in him other qualities they admire: empathy, tenacity, vision.

Throughout this long crisis, Clinton also has been boosted by an innate sense among many Americans that if you spent this much time and money investigating anyone you could find something they wouldn’t want to read on the front page of the newspaper--or might try to conceal under oath. Evidence of adultery by Republican Reps. Henry J. Hyde, Bob Livingston, Bob Barr and Dan Burton, plus new reports that House Minority Whip Tom DeLay may have perjured himself in a civil deposition, all suggest that that inclination was a pretty good hunch.

None of that justifies Clinton’s actions, but it helps explain why most Americans weighed them differently from the GOP.

Zeal kills. The most abiding lesson of American politics in the 1990s is that neither party can sustain majority support when it pursues a course aimed primarily at pleasing its most ideological supporters. That was true of Clinton’s health care plan in 1994 and the House Republican budget in 1995, and it has been proved again on impeachment.

At the moment, this resistance to ideological zeal is more of a problem for Republicans than Democrats, who have been tempered by Clinton’s push to the center and their sobering losses in 1994. In many ways, the GOP today resembles the Democratic Party of the 1970s--focused more on placating its ideological base than reaching the decisive center of the electorate. It’s a measure of that fervor that many conservative intellectuals, such as William J. Bennett, have taken to condemning the American people for not condemning Clinton. That’s a sure sign of a party looking in the wrong place for answers.

Character counts: Bennett and his fellow moralists come closer to the mark on this front. Clinton’s behavior in this case may not define his essence or justify his removal, but it does reveal a black hole of self-absorption that will stain his legacy.

By endangering his presidency with such reckless acts, Clinton took risks that were not really his to take. His irresponsibility punished not only those closest to him but anyone who believed in the policy agenda that was submerged in this year of self-inflicted wounds. Clinton may survive, but he can never recover the opportunities and respect he squandered.

The unknown looms largest: Screenwriter William Goldman once distilled the essence of Hollywood into three words: Nobody knows anything. In the same way, the most important lesson here may be that we don’t yet know the most important lesson of the Lewinsky affair.

In politics, the full meaning of events usually isn’t apparent for years, if not decades. Remember: Democrats cheered Watergate as a triumph, but it spawned an independent counsel law that came back to consume the first Democratic president reelected since World War II.

So too is this bruising struggle likely to alter the political playing field for years, in ways that no one can now entirely guess. “There are just enough negative currents out there,” says Republican pollster Bill McInturff, “that something is going to rebound and happen that we just don’t anticipate.”

Put another way: The last victim of this dispiriting and heroless story has yet to be named.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.