Clinton Approval Rating Drops

Growing public doubts about his handling of the Kosovo crisis have erased President Clinton’s lofty job-approval ratings, which soared during the impeachment crisis, according to public opinion surveys and analysts.

Since the air war against Yugoslavia began March 24, the rate of approval for Clinton’s performance has fallen by 5 to 10 percentage points in most polls.

The drop is striking because a majority of Americans continue to support the war itself, and because Americans almost always rally behind the commander in chief in times of military action--including Clinton in earlier conflicts.

“If you look at where the shift came in his overall approval, it was all from people who disapproved of his foreign policy,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

“While the public hasn’t turned against the president, they certainly are asking more questions about how he’s conducting this,” said Charles Cook, an independent pollster and political analyst.

The slipping numbers pose potential problems for Clinton--and even worse ones for Vice President Al Gore--if the war against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic continues to escalate while making little discernible progress amid increasing civilian damage and deaths.

Analysts also detect signs that the Kosovo conflict has wiped out the edge that congressional Democrats enjoyed over Republicans during the impeachment of Clinton.

In a late April poll by the Wall Street Journal/NBC, for instance, only 21% of respondents expressed confidence in Gore as commander in chief during military action.

That prompted one senior strategist for a GOP presidential candidate to remark, somewhat gleefully: “The sins of the father will be visited on the son.”

But Chris Lahane, Gore’s press secretary, decried such talk.

“The farthest thing from our minds right now are polls. What is on our minds are the refugees,” he said Friday. “We’re just not going to allow domestic policy concerns [to] whipsaw our foreign policy decisions.”

To be sure, the president’s job-approval ratings remain strong, with about 6 in 10 respondents in polls backing his overall performance--a modern record for a two-term president during his last two years in office, as Cook noted.

Yet Clinton did not get the “rally-’round-the-flag” uptick in polls this time that he received earlier, such as in 1993 when he ordered the airstrikes against Iraq--his first military action.

Then, his approval rating jumped by 7 percentage points. Similarly, it rose by 9 percentage points after Clinton ordered the occupation of Haiti in 1994.

So why no poll surge this time?

One possibility, analysts believe, is that Clinton’s ratings during impeachment were artificially high. They were boosted, they believe, by respondents who told pollsters that they approved of his job performance solely as a way to send the GOP-controlled Congress a message: Do not oust Clinton from office.

“The American people use polls to send signals--they didn’t want him removed. But by no means is he now, or was he then, wildly popular,” said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato.

Cook agreed: “A lot of people were against impeachment but were not necessarily for Bill Clinton or his policies. Now they’re making decisions based not on impeachment but on other things.”

Namely, fear that the continued escalation of the Kosovo conflict will result in U.S. casualties.

“People are conflicted,” Kohut said. “They feel we should be doing this. But they don’t think it’s working and that we may have to go further.”

But the declining poll numbers do not signal “any wholesale loss of faith in his stewardship. It just reflects public frustration,” Kohut said.

“When the president’s ratings can drop 7 to 10 points and still be in the mid- to high 50s and he’s three-quarters of the way through his second term, that’s not bad,” Cook added. “It’s certainly not a crisis situation.”

But Clinton and Gore are not the only Democrats who may want to keep an eye on their job-approval ratings.

More than five weeks into the messy, post-impeachment war in Yugoslavia, Democrats as a group have lost the edge they enjoyed as recently as two months ago over Republicans in generic polls that gauge support in congressional elections.

“Coming out of impeachment, Democrats had a 6- to 10-[percentage] point lead. The Republicans were in a real deep hole,” Cook said. “Now they’re out of that hole. We’re down to a fairly even playing field now.” He explained the GOP resurgence this way: “Three or four months ago, people viewed Republicans as mean-spirited, narrow-minded and partisan. Now Kosovo has shifted the spotlight away from what cast them in a bad light.”

A senior White House official Friday dismissed the poll findings. “We’re not going let polls guide us. You can’t run a war on polls.”

Clinton’s authorization for the United States to join in the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia without first building popular and congressional support was a rare departure from his well-established allegiance to public opinion polls.

Now he seems to be paying a price on Capitol Hill as well. On Wednesday, the House approved a measure, 249 to 180, to prohibit the president from using Pentagon funds to send ground troops into Yugoslavia without prior congressional authorization. At the same time, the House deadlocked on, and thus rejected, a resolution endorsing Clinton’s decision to join in the NATO-led bombing campaign.

But White House aides portrayed Clinton’s decision to join the air war as a prime example of a president exercising leadership at a time of crisis.

On the Web

Extended coverage of the crisis in Yugoslavia is available at The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/yugo. Coverage includes hourly updates, all Times stories since NATO launched its attack, video clips, information on how to help the refugees, a primer on the conflict and access to our discussion group.