Why Clinton Survived

So now, at long last, it's over.

Like the world in the T.S. Eliot poem, the protracted campaign to oust President Clinton from office through the formal process of impeachment came to an end "not with a bang but a whimper."

Yet the whimpering - on both sides of the bitter dispute - is apt to continue well into the next millennium.

In the final days of what Sen. Arlen Specter has labeled a "sham trial" (so called because the verdict of acquittal was never seriously in doubt), some of his Republican colleagues asserted that history will be the ultimate judge of President's Clinton's amorous trysts with Monica Lewinsky.

And so it will, though that hardly lets the Republicans off the hook for their decision to refrain from joining Democrats in a vote to censure the president's conduct. In less cynical times, this sort of thing was known as "passing the buck."

Still, there is no doubt that future historians will be obliged to assess the bizarre political spectacle that has been our national obsession for more than a year. And of all the questions they will ponder, none is more intriguing than the one that goes to the heart of Mr. Clinton's survival:

How did the president manage, in the face of all the sordid revelations, to sustain his strong approval ratings in the public opinion polls?

After all, this is a country with a strong Puritan tradition, and in past years the mere whiff of a sexual scandal was enough to cripple (if not quite destroy) a political career, especially on the national level.

Yet to judge from the general reaction to Mr. Clinton's philandering, the country at large seems to have embraced the easy tolerance of one of our more indulgent states - Louisiana - where a former governor, Edwin Edwards, once boasted that his core supporters would never abandon him unless he were found in bed with either "a dead girl or a live boy."

So how was Mr. Clinton able to buck the tide of history and get away with lewd behavior that, in the past, would have doomed a political leader entrusted with the nation's highest office?

We raised that question with pollsters and other seasoned observers of our political culture, and what follows - for the benefit of those future historians - is a consensus of the various answers they offered.

THE ECONOMY

To elaborate on the slogan that fueled Mr. Clinton's first campaign for president in 1992, it's not just the economy, stupid, but an economic bounty of such epic proportions that "prosperity" is almost too pallid a word to describe it.

More than a few economists have hailed the run of good fortune that America has enjoyed during Mr. Clinton's years in the White House as nothing less than the greatest boom in the nation's history.

To back up that assertion, they point out that never before have so many of the major economic indicators - employment, inflation, interest rates and, of course, the stock market - been as favorble as they have been through most of the 1990s. Which helps to explain why the dreaded term "deficit" has been replaced by the happy word "surplus" in the budget reports of the federal and many state governments.

And that bullish view is not confined to economists. Recent polls reveal that more than 60 per cent of Americans believe the past few years have produced the best economy in their lifetime.

It has long been a traditional pattern in American politics that when push came to shove, pocketbook issues have prevailed over social and/or moral issues. Thus it should come as no surprise that the unprecedented economic boom he's presided over has given Mr. Clinton a sturdy shield with which to ward off concerns about his personal behavior.

A POPULAR AGENDA

But the economy has not been the only weapon in Mr. Clinton's arsenal of defense. Throughout the long ordeal of the Lewinsky scandal, the president has somehow managed to stay focused on his agenda, which is built around other key issues that resonate with the majority of Americans, such as social security, medicare and education.

In contrast, his Republican opponents have been perceived, fairly or not, as being so preoccupied with the scandal and impeachment that they have given little attention to the issues that voters care about most deeply. That is one reason why, contrary to all predictions, they lost seats in last November's midterm election.

Mr. Clinton's commitment to his agenda also explains why so many women remained loyal to him. Yes, they were offended by his sexual romps with a young White House intern, but what mattered far more to them was his unwavering support of their position on such core issues as abortion, civil rights and child care.

WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?

The scandal would have been far more damaging if it had engulfed a president with a squeaky-clean reputation. But that was hardly the case. Long before we ever heard of Monica Lewinsky, Mr. Clinton's sexual proclivities had become the subject of locker-room jokes and eye-winking, cocktail-party banter.

Back in 1992 when, as governor of Arkansas, he was waging his uphill campaign to unseat the incumbent president, George Bush, the Clinton camp lived in constant fear of what they called "bimbo eruptions." And one such eruption - the spicy, bed-talk stories related by Gennifer Flowers - would have destroyed most national candidacies. Just ask Gary Hart.

But already by then, Mr. Clinton was donning his Teflon armor of Engaging Rogue that would serve to insulate him so well in the years to come. And in November of that year, he became (among other things) the first confessed adulterer to be elected president.

Then, during his first term, came the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, based on ugly allegations that, years earlier, Clinton had used the power of his position as governor to elicit sexual favors from a state employee. But that legal embarrassmendid not prevent him from being re-elected in 1996.

Therefore, when the Lewinsky scandal broke, it was as if the American people were being told the shocking, utterly astounding news that a leopard cannot change his spots.

HILLARY BAILED HIM OUT

The Hillary Factor. If, at the time the scandal broke, the first lady had reacted like a grievously wounded woman who had been betrayed and humiliated, millions of Americans sympathetic to her mistreatment might well have deserted the president - robust economy or no.

But instead of playing the martyr, she came out fighting and blamed the whole squalid business on longtime enemies who formed what she called a "right-wing conspiracy" to destroy her husband's presidency.

Then, over the next few months, Hillary continued to display devotion and loyalty to her husband. More than anything else, it may have been her steadfast demeanor that persuaded many Americans that Mr. Clinton's sexual misconduct was nobody's business but his - and his family's.

One of the more dramatic, telltale signs of public reaction to the scandal occurred during one of Mr. Clinton's visits to the heartland. Among those greeting him at the airport was a smiling woman who brandished a sign that read, "If Hillary doesn't care, neither should we."

WITH ENEMIES LIKE THIS . . .

From beginning to end, Mr. Clinton was greatly helped by the attitude and behavior of his pursuers.

Hardly anyone likes or approves of a "sting" operation, especially one that smacks of entrapment, and when they learned about the various maneuvers employed to place the president in jeopardy, many Americans had the uneasy feeling that Mr. Clinton was the victim of a setup.

Their sense of fair play was offended by Linda Tripp's clandestine taping of her private conversations with Lewinsky, and by the zealous methods used by Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr to lure Mr. Clinton into the lie-under-oath testimony that put him on the road to impeachment.

In poll after poll - throughout the winter, spring and summer of 1998 - Tripp and Starr were the two principals in the case with the lowest approval ratings, consistently under 20 percent. To reverse the sardonic old axiom, as long as Mr. Clinton had enemies like them, he didn't need friends.

Then in September, when Starr turned his findings over to the House Judiciary Committee, there emerged a fresh platoon of enemies who inadvertently helped the president's cause.

By overplaying their hand and turning the impeachment proceedings into a raucous, partisan brawl, the House Republicans gave the White House the ammunition it needed to claim that Mr. Clinton was being hounded by his political adversaries.

Even Democrats and moderates who deeply deplored the president's sexual misconduct and had strong reservations about his programs and policies were so turned off by the House Republicans that they felt they had no choice but to support Mr. Clinton, owever reluctantly.

Whatever chance there might have been to drum up support for Mr. Clinton's removal from office vanished for good when the House vote on the articles of impeachment split strictly along party lines.

After that, all that remained to complete the unseemly spectacle, was the "sham trial" in the Senate.

And so, once again, Bill Clinton has confounded his political enemies. What's even worse, from their point of view, they must somehow come to terms with the supreme irony that during the many months he was mired in scandal, Mr. Clinton's approval ratings were higher than at any other time in his presidency.

In defiance of all the conventional yardsticks that govern politics, he seems to have emerged from his impeachment ordeal stronger than ever.

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