THE DEMOCRATS' FATE
KRISTOL, WILLIAM
THE DEMOCRATS' FATE by William Kristol THE DEMOCRATS ARE DOOMED. They're doomed because Bill Clinton is their leader, and because they are Bill Clinton's party. On Thursday, October 8, only 31...
...In the first six years of his presidency, that price has been the loss of longstanding majorities in the Senate and House, and in governorships and state legislatures...
...On Thursday, October 8, only 31 House Democrats broke with Clinton to support an inquiry that would explore "fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its constitutional power to impeach William Jefferson Clinton...
...Republicans won't ever have to suggest that the Democratic party is tolerant of adultery, indifferent to perjury...
...Zeifman wrote recently that Clinton "has personally brought his office to scandal and disrepute...
...In the debates, Republicans will cite old-fashioned Democrats like Jerome Zeifman, who was chief counsel to the Judiciary Committee at the time of the Watergate hearings...
...They will decide that Clinton does need to go, after all...
...But Monday, October 5, was the day the Democratic party died...
...Nixon, the incumbent president, trying to hand the succession to his favorite, John Connally...
...Lacking any Republican support—as the GOP will have rendered a formal judgment against the president's fitness for office—everything Clinton does over the next two years will reinforce the identification of the man with his party...
...That's what permitted Reagan and Reaganism to come forward...
...His ghost did not hover over the party...
...But that was possible only because Nixon had resigned (owing in part to Republican insistence...
...Not one of them was moved when an old-style Democrat, chief counsel David Schippers, explained that acts of perjury and obstruction of justice by the president—a man who has taken an oath to "preserve, protect, and defend" the law—cannot be allowed...
...They will try to pull back from the abyss, in an effort to save themselves rather than their president...
...Clinton's policies will move left as he seeks to ensure Democratic support (which will tend to undermine his approval rating...
...Democrats may even do some short-term damage to Republican approval ratings...
...From there, the case goes to the Senate...
...But they also will have made the decimation of the Democratic party more certain...
...And the devastation will continue at the state and local levels...
...Assume public opinion has not moved dramatically as a result of the impeachment hearings and debates...
...They prevailed...
...At some point—perhaps as early as November 4, perhaps after Clinton's impeachment at the end of the year, perhaps in early or mid-1999—Democratic leaders will see this horrible future stretching before them...
...almost no calls from Democratic officeholders for Clinton to resign...
...But Democrats have already paid a high price for Bill Clinton...
...Meanwhile, Democratic leaders Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle trooped down to the White House to stand behind Clinton in a display of solidarity—united in a manufactured fight over a possible government shutdown...
...Democrats will have to concede, if only en passant (as they did last week), that Clinton's behavior was disgraceful and that he lied about it...
...Still, for the next couple of months, the face of the Republican party will be Henry Hyde...
...This will suggest itself—and this is the burden the Democrats will have to bear once they have kept Clinton in office...
...Nixon the honored guest at the '76 GOP convention, that year's nominee having to pledge a degree of continuity with and fealty to him...
...Assume that Senate Democrats indicate they will stick with Clinton...
...William Kristol is editor and publisher of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...That should be the true Democratic nightmare...
...After the voting this November 3, the Democrats are likely to be down to about 40 senators and fewer than 200 House members, their lowest totals in 70 years...
...On that day, every Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee voted against the full and complete inquiry...
...Toni Morrison can worry all she wants about "feral Republicans" and their "sustained, bloody, arrogant coup d'état...
...The Democrats will presumably stick with him, reassured by opinion surveys that may continue to show most Americans opposed to his removal...
...And it's surely no accident that 1980's most disastrous candidate was Nixon's designee: Connally...
...So as we move through 1999 and 2000, the Democratic party will be held ever more responsible for keeping before us an ever more disgraced president...
...But Bill Clinton will still be there...
...There will be a price to pay for all this on Election Day...
...But the damage in '75 and '76 would have been far greater: no fresh start for the party under President Ford...
...Nixon went and stayed gone...
...For then Clinton will remain president—an impeached president, still in office, still the leader and spokesman and representative of the Democratic party, saved only by the exertions of that party...
...Also on that Monday, the Democrats' counsel, Abbe Lowell, dismissed the idea that lying under oath and obstruction of justice should be thought impeach-able offenses...
...Indeed, when Schippers concluded by speaking briefly as "a citizen" and invoked Sir Thomas More on respect for the law, the committee's Democrats complained that such talk was out of order and should be stricken from the record...
...The key question, he explained, is not whether Clinton's statements "were or were not truthful," but rather "what were their context, what were their impact, and what were their subject matter...
...no stands like those of Howard Baker and James Buckley during Watergate that would serve to separate the party from its law-breaking standard-bearer...
...In some sense, Democrats will have won...
...Arguments for impeachment will be made by a traditional Democrat, Schippers, who will remind Americans why the Democrats were once the majority party...
...He has lied repeatedly to the American people, has lied under oath in the Paula Jones case, has committed perjury several times before a criminal grand jury...
...In fact, Republicans almost won in 1976, and they came back strong in '78 and '80...
...But the truth is Republicans will never be able to inflict as much damage on the causes that she and other liberals allegedly believe in as Bill Clinton has done...
...The scandal won't go away, what with the Paula Jones case possibly coming back to life or indictments flowing from the Kathleen Willey matter...
...And what will happen after November 3 if Clinton is given two more years...
...It will be as if Nixon had remained president through 1976...
...He has managed to undo the political accomplishment of Franklin Roosevelt...
...But it will be too late...
...The president who had sex with an intern in the Oval Office and then lied about it repeatedly, both under oath and to the public, will never have been repudiated by his own party...
...After Republicans do well at the ballot box, the House will move to impeach Clinton...
...Thanks to Bill Clinton, Democrats are no longer the majority party in America...
...They will realize that they are locked in an embrace with the agent of their doom...
...Assume that Senate Republicans fail to persuade enough Democrats to convict the president—or that they decide to negotiate some sort of censure or rebuke...
...Richard Nixon was not at the 1976 and 1980 Republican conventions...
...His pieces "Clinton's Fate" and "Clinton Is the Issue" appeared on May 4 and May 25...
...And there will have been no resignations on principle by Clinton's cabinet officers and staff...
...But Democrats defending Clinton will then have to explain why such behavior should not result in impeachment—why, as Bill Buckley has put it, "who says A need not say B." Nonetheless, by the end of the year, the House will impeach Bill Clinton...
...And their arguments will be the sophistic legalisms of Abbe Lowell and the White House...
...There will be charges of partisanship on both sides...
...The laces of today's Democratic party will be the partisan John Conyers and the glib Barney Frank...
...If he had—if he had not been driven from office in 1974—Republican losses in the '74 congressional elections might have been diminished...
...Then, perhaps, they will try to free themselves from that embrace...
Vol. 4 • October 1998 • No. 6
