It Is Finally Hitting Home: Impeachment Could Happen

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —  A popular pastime at the Harvard Law School’s Harkness Cafe is wadding up little pieces of paper and throwing them at the television set that drones on, endlessly, with coverage of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings. Sometimes the students talk back to the figures on the screen, using colorful language to tell them what a stupid waste of time they think the whole business has been from the get-go.

But lately, the mood has shifted. Until just a few days ago, students poring over their casebooks reported, the hearings seemed abstract and unreal. Impeachment felt like a word out of the historical lexicon, a process Congress would never go through with because--in President Clinton’s case, anyway--the American people were so opposed to it.

“I wish we weren’t in this situation at all,” Sam Casperson, 25, a third-year student from New Jersey, said hours before the panel approved the first articles of impeachment on Friday. Now, it looks like impeachment “really could happen.”

Casperson and his fellow members of what Judiciary Committee member Bob Barr (R-Ga.) derided this week as “the Ivy League culture” were by no means alone in their growing realization that for the first time this century, impeachment might actually happen. In taverns, on radio talk shows, in Internet chat rooms, many Americans expressed surprise that after a four-year investigation of the president’s involvement in the Whitewater land scandal and nearly a year of examinations into more personal aspects of his life, momentum has swiftly heated up. Their astonishment was mixed with feelings of powerlessness and, in some quarters, rising stridency.

Feeling Is One of Lack of Power

Seating diners Thursday evening at Denver’s Wynkoop Brewing Co., hostess Jane Nicknish, a graduate student in social work, said, “In the last two days, all of a sudden, it’s like it’s for real--it’s serious.”

At a table at the popular watering hole in Denver’s SoDo district, high school English teacher Michelle Mack conceded that until just recently, she, like many Americans, was suffering from impeachment overload. The partisan bickering turned her stomach, Mack said. Now, as a spectator to the denouement of this long process, she also realized that all she was doing was watching, not participating.

“I have to say that in the last few days what I’ve begun to see is how powerless we are in the entire process,” Mack said. “This is clearly out of our hands. It’s happening without us.”

Recent polling data show that the public remains consistent in its opposition to the expected House vote next week to send the case to a Senate trial. Los Angeles Times Poll Director Susan Pinkus said Friday that a sampling of public opinion surveys over the last months revealed a steady figure of around two-thirds of voters who oppose the move to impeach the president.

Surveys also demonstrate that most Americans accept as fact most of the charges against Clinton, Pinkus and other public opinion experts said. But the overwhelming sentiment, in polls and in interviews, still seems to be that the country should reject impeachment.

GOP Assailed in Internet Exchange

This general viewpoint was expressed in busy, sometimes passionate Internet exchanges. A Friday forum devoted to the impeachment question, for example, roused this response from “ringwood”: “This is most stupid thing to happen in the history of our republic. And that’s saying a lot. The Republicans are destroying America in an attempt to gain power. It makes me sick and very sad.”

The Internet also displayed a sizable contingent expressing contempt for the president. “Clinton’s arrogance has ultimately brought about his ruin. He did it all by himself,” was one of the more muted comments in an AOL chat room.

The burst in Internet conversation reflected the growing sense that impeachment might truly be imminent. Before this week, Clinton chat groups on CNN Interactive received about 1,000 postings a day. By late this week the figure had shot to 1,400.

At C-SPAN’s Web page, a spokeswoman said Friday that Web traffic “increased dramatically” this week. “Yesterday we had 2.5 million hits, and every day there are more. We anticipate it to keep going up, over the weekend and next week.”

And on radio talk shows in Southern California, many of the same listeners who said they were sick of the Washington dramatics also admitted they were increasingly drawn to them. As proof, they took the time to call in and pass along their disgust.

“We just voted, and two-thirds of the people want him to stay,” said “Sam” of San Juan Capistrano, buzzing into Bill Handel’s morning show on KFI-AM (640). “And still it does not matter.”

Handel, for his part, told his audience he was “excited” and “passionate” about the impeachment issue and its implications for the country. But, the talk show host said, he doesn’t believe lying rises to the level of impeachment.

On television, ratings for the all-news channels, which are providing extensive coverage of the hearings, remain relatively low. However, there have been some increases, particularly on CNN. The cable channel averaged about 1 million homes tuning in during the hearings this week, more than double its usual daytime audience.

“Any time you can double or triple your audience it’s a good day, but it’s not the same sort of frenzied increase in viewing we saw earlier this year” in response to coverage of the story, said a CNN spokesman.

Over eggs, toast and a pile of law school class notes, Harvard third-year student Eilish Cahalan said she is no fan of President Clinton, “and, personally, I think he should have resigned.” But she pointed out that the public sent a mandate on impeachment with the November election, in which Republicans lost ground in Congress.

As a consequence, said the student from New York, “I think people almost feel helpless, like there is nothing they can do.”

Many Believed It Would All Go Away

“It’s not ‘much ado about nothing,’ but it’s close,” said Christian Correa, a first-year student at Harvard Law. “It’s much ado about something very small. I think the whole thing is preposterous, a gargantuan waste of time.”

Cramming for final exams next week, Correa, 25, of Denver, said one great frustration is the feeling that the views of the majority in this matter are of no importance.

“I can’t believe that Congress can ignore what the American people want,” he said. But then, he added, “the system isn’t really designed to find out what people want.”

For months, said 28-year-old Gregory Barnes, a lawyer from St. Louis now pursuing a graduate degree at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, most people thought the whole impeachment crisis would die and disappear.

“We all thought he would say he was sorry, and it would go away,” Barnes said.

But the “upswing in intensity” in recent days has him worried, Barnes added. “What concerns me from a democratic perspective is the path that Congress is taking us down now in terms of defining impeachment. There will be nobody who will be able to hold to these impossible standards, and you’ll see this escalation in calls for impeachment. That scares me.”

Impeachment, after all, was written into the foundation of this country’s government “so people would have the right to throw out someone who scares them,” said Karen Dabbs, 23, a first-year law student from Jackson, Miss.

But in a democracy, she said, “the people also have an opportunity to forgive.” Dabbs said that while by rights she and her classmates should all be studying like mad right now, many are pausing to reflect on how the impeachment process has spiraled before their very eyes. The silly, sometimes ribald jokes about the president and his personal life are thinning out now, and not as many people hoot or holler at the Harkness Cafe’s TV.

“People are getting frightened now,” she said.

Times staff writers Julie Cart in Denver, Judith Michaelson in Los Angeles and researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this story.