Clinton's Impeachment Puts The Republican Party On Trial

Eric Ellis, San Francisco.

01/09/1999

ON THURSDAY Washington began the turgid and ultimately pointless process of putting America's most consistently popular president on trial for what amounts to getting fellated in the White House.

As the nation snored on after a full year of l'affaire Lewinsky, news of the Senate impeachment trial was perfunctorily put on the front page, it led the evening bulletins and, of course, Larry King was full of it. But Middle America has about as much enthusiasm for the matter as it has for The Gap's blue-dress and beret line this winter. Indeed, as the opinion polls suggest, the public's interest would be truly served by learning of developments in the trial of President William Jefferson Clinton via a page 13 filler or a brief midway through the 6pm bulletin.

As the Senate got down to business on Thursday, a Gallup poll showed American resolve steeling further, with 85 per cent saying their view that the trial is a waste of time will not change, regardless of its outcome.

Even Clinton's own Democratic Party hierarchy have got the message and moved on. At the annual New Year "renaissance weekend" on the chilly South Carolina coast, the brightest political future up for discussion seemed to be that of First Lady Hillary - arguably the biggest winner, politically if not personally, from Fornigate.

Hillary's star turn and her ominous talk of a "rendezvous with responsibility" came the same week that Vice-President Al Gore formally declared his hand for the 2000 presidential race by convening an election committee. Might it again be a Gore-(Rodham)-Clinton ticket in 2000?

Barring Gore falling under the proverbial bus, or Attorney-General Janet Reno losing her job, Gore is certain to be fronting the Democrats in 2000, while hoping that the good times can last at least until November 5 next year.

Gore has barely put a foot wrong in the phantom campaign. He discreetly kept his distance from Clinton when Monica mattered, but was there by his side on the White House lawn after the pre-Christmas impeachment vote in the House of Representatives in a potent show of party unity with Hillary, House leader Richard Gephardt and party grandees.

Gore worked hard in key States, especially California and New York, during the mid-term election campaign when Clinton's presence wasn't always appreciated, adding to the reservoirs of political capital the VP has around the country.

He was in California again a few days ago, making jokes about charisma with the State's new governor, the aptly named Gray Davis, who was voted in largely because he was dull and thus perceived as a polisher of the comfortable status quo rather than a changer.

Gore's supposed lack of charisma has dogged his vice-presidency just as "potatoe" haunted his predecessor, Dan Quayle, but after the colourful Clinton that may be no bad thing. It certainly doesn't hurt that wife Tipper has campaigned to clean up pop music lyrics, or that their daughters are far more photogenic than, and just as likeable as, Chelsea.

It's the Republicans who have the work to do this year if they are to come anywhere near taking the White House. When the Lewinsky scandal broke, it would have been a bold pundit who predicted that a year later the Republicans would be smarting the most. But suffer they have, mostly by self-inflicted mistakes, the gravest of which has been not listening to what America has been saying for at least six months - drop Monica!

The Republicans have lost two House Speakers - Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston - at the heart of their ideology and have been forced to fall back on a national nobody, Dennis Hastert, for a coveted job no-one seems to want in this climate. Because the Republicans wouldn't let Monica go off to Chat Show Heaven, they were comprehensively hosed in the mid-term election. The party's opinion poll rating is lower than (sweet irony, this, for the Democrats) when Nixon resigned.

Their efforts to get in step with the mainstream - moves like installing J.C. Watts as party chairman - have seemed insincere. The capable Watts is an African-American, and it's hard for the electorate not to see him as a modern-day Uncle Tom, thrust forward by a party whose senior white leadership is dogged by near-weekly revelations of links with white supremacist groups.

The fact is that 80 per cent of US blacks - some 10 per cent of the population - vote Democrat, feel a bit richer during this presidency and are not about to look at a Republican Party with a Mississipian, Senator Trent Lott, as its senior national leader; all the more so when celebrated black writer Toni Morrison describes Clinton as the best black president the US has ever had.

Americans are probably not ready to vote in a female president, despite Hillary's resuscitation and the virtual candidacy announcement a few days ago of Elizabeth Dole, wife of the Republicans' failed 1996 contender, Bob Dole. Liddy Dole has joined the usual Republican suspects - Steve Forbes, Lamar Alexander, Pat Buchanan and Dan Quayle - all considering a run and seemingly determined to ignore the internecine debacle that lost the presidency in the first place back in 1992.

As the recently retired president of the US Red Cross and a Cabinet member during both the Bush and Reagan terms, Liddy Dole strikes a prominent figure nationally, but it's hard to see how Republicans all messed about race, abortion and morals, among other things, will rally to support her candidacy.

Most of the party's attention has been thrust upon someone who hasn't yet declared his hand - George Bush jnr, the recently re-elected Texas Governor and son of the last Republican President.

But the man the smart money is on is Arizona senator John McCain, who this week formed an exploratory committee with wise hands such as Reagan's master-strategist, Michael Deaver, on it. Americans may be ready for McCain, a rare bird among politicians, particularly Republicans, in that he can say a good word about the opposition if they do something right. That goes down well with the anti-politician sentiment in the electorate, evidenced by the near-record-low voter turnout last election and the triumph of former wrestler and general eccentric Jesse "The Body" Ventura as governor of Minnesota on an anti-Washington Reform Party ticket.

In many ways, the telegenic McCain neatly embraces many of the themes running through the US today. At 62 and the heir to Republican grandee Barry Goldwater's Senate perch, McCain's personal life is perhaps as complex as Clinton's. A father of six, he openly acknowledges, and apologises for, a womanising past, which (as with Clinton) has not dimmed his popularity. He represents Arizona, a State that has been transformed this decade from a redneck collection of desert cow-towns to the showpiece of the New West, a prosperous and familified white-Latino suburban belt of internet users, golf courses and sports utility vehicles with a Starbucks coffee shop on every second corner.

Again rare among Republicans (except, notably, Bush jnr), McCain is popular with women (a recent tasteless remark about Chelsea Clinton's appearance notwithstanding) and Latinos, which as political groupings have emerged as real power brokers in the electorate in the '90s.

Although he likes to portray himself as a staunch conservative to the party's more extreme leadership, McCain, again like Bush, sits in the moderate wing of the party and has not been afraid to take on Republican sacred cows such as Big Tobacco and campaign finance reform. While that may not be popular with the party, it is with voters.

McCain's trump card is his military record, mindful that an America that likes its war heroes has yet to elect one from the Vietnam era. A Navy brat born in the Panama Canal zone, where his admiral father was posted, McCain was educated at the prestigious Annapolis Naval Academy before being dispatched to Vietnam.

In 1967 he was shot down in a bombing mission over Hanoi and gained national celebrity by refusing an offer of freedom from the North Vietnamese, who were then seeking an overture to Washington by letting go the son of an influential military official. Then followed nearly six years of prison and torture at the notorious Hanoi Hilton. He was freed in 1973 and moved to Arizona in 1980 to marry a wealthy local heiress.

Like Clinton, McCain has a potential Whitewater in his closet, his close relationship with an Arizona businessman, Charles Keating, who was at the heart of the nationwide savings and loans collapses during the 1980s, and for whom McCain has lobbied on Capitol Hill.

In the poisonous air that afflicts Washington these days, McCain has made a point of promoting bipartisanship to counter voter alienation.

The length of McCain's tenure in the lead-up race will be a reliable guide as to whether the Republicans can wrest back the White House in 2000. With George Bush jnr leading polls for the nomination without yet declaring his hand, strategists at the moderate end of the party see a Bush-McCain campaign - in either order - as a dream ticket when, or if, the Republicans stop tearing themselves apart by dragging out the Lewinsky affair.