GOP Dilemma: to Pronounce or to Persuade

There are two ways to do politics: persuasion or pronouncement. The House Republicans, having failed to persuade the country that President Clinton should be impeached, now seems content simply to pronounce Clinton guilty; an impeachment vote in the Judiciary Committee began on Friday. The entire Republican Party is at risk of being defined by a noisy few who can only pronounce, not persuade.

To be sure, the hearings have damaged Clinton’s image; solid majorities of Americans tell pollsters that they believe Clinton perjured himself. The president did not look happy Friday afternoon--just minutes before the committee voted its first article of impeachment--as he said he was “profoundly sorry” and added that he would accept “rebuke and censure” for his misdeeds. Yet the same polls show that Americans agree with Clinton; they want censure, not impeachment.

Hold on. Aren’t politicians supposed to rise above mere polls and do the right thing? What if Abraham Lincoln, for example, had thought only of public opinion after he was inaugurated in 1861? Wouldn’t it have been easier to simply let the South secede? Judiciary Committee Republican counsel David Schippers was no less historically sweeping in his presentation on Thursday. “If you don’t impeach as a consequence of the conduct that I’ve just portrayed, then no House of Representatives will ever be able to impeach again,” he thundered. But even Lincoln, determined as he was to preserve the Union, paid great heed to public opinion on matters ranging from pork-barrelish policies on the home front to the choice of generals on the war front. And so he was smashingly reelected in 1864; both his policies and his party received a mandate for leadership that survived even his death.

But the more apt parallel for the events on Capitol Hill today is not what happened in the last century, but what happened just a quarter-century ago. The similarities between Bill Clinton now and Richard Nixon then have been much noted. Both were nimble-tongued lawyers--one dubbed Slick Willy, the other Tricky Dick--who built careers out of intellectual and ideological flexibility; many called it duplicity.

Precisely because the two were so effective at saying one thing and doing something else, their respective opposition parties--Democrats against Nixon, Republicans against Clinton--were driven to exasperation and, ultimately, extremism. Nixon was arguably the most liberal Republican president in history and yet the left demonized him in Dante-like terms. Similarly, Clinton is the most conservative Democrat since Grover Cleveland, but the right can’t look at him without seeing horns and smelling sulfur.

In 1972, the Democratic Party was taken over by its left wing, which nominated Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.) for president. McGovern was so far out of the mainstream that he lost 49 states to Nixon. Yet despite that, the leftish insurgents actually tightened their grip on the party; for them, the purity of pronouncement was more important than power through persuasion. And so the “McGovernized” Democrats lost three of the next four presidential elections.

Today, in their damn-the-polls desperation to impeach Clinton even if they know that the Senate will never convict, the House Republicans are showing all the signs of McGovernization. But call it Barr-ization instead, in recognition of Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), who called for Clinton’s impeachment even before the Lewinsky case.

Just as the McGovernites were derided for their supposed platform of “acid, amnesty and abortion,” so today the Barrized Republicans are at risk of marginalizing themselves as the party of God, guns and gouging Clinton.

Yet even as the committee votes to impeach, Speaker-to-be Bob Livingston (R-La.) has been quietly working to make sure that a censure resolution, too, is voted on the House floor next week. If so, the lesser sanction is likely to prevail, and House Republicans will be pulled back from the abyss of Barrism. This is the first test of Livingston’s leadership: Can he lead the GOP away from chest-thumping pronouncement and toward election-winning persuasion? If he can, Livingston will have done a service not only to his country, but also to his party.