Daniel Schorr, the senior news analyst for NPR commenting on the speeches by the House managers of the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, suggested all the GOP speeches were aimed over the heads of the Senators sitting in judgment and at the people watching on television or listening on radio.
Why else, Schorr asked, would Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) invoke the honored war dead of D-Day. "I'm sorry to play the role of cynic," Schorr said, "but what has Normandy to do with these proceedings?"
In a similar vein, ABC-TV's Sam Donaldson, on the Senate floor when President Clinton delivered his State of the Union address, noted that the president's speech was not for the members of Congress but aimed at the estimated 80 million television viewers.
Sure enough, Clinton's speech ran the gamut of human development, with proposals for every life stage from the aged on social security to infants kept at home by their non-employed parents. In between, he offered programs to benefit pupils, teen-smokers, Baby-Boomers and those enlisted to defend the nation.
Why are these elected officials courting us in the midst of what they often tout as an historic moment and a potential Constitutional crisis? Why does the president find it so necessary to remind us unceasingly how well off our national economy is performing and how much he would like to see the nation - but for Congress - spend on our welfare?
We vote, that's why.
At the risk of sounding more cynical than Schorr, a majority of the speeches of the House managers prosecuting the impeachment of the president dripped with patriotic references and self-righteous memoirs. These were speeches for the stump.
Rep. Hyde even invoked the words of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a noted war hero who lost his position of military leadership because of a controversy with then-President Harry S. Truman. At the time, as I recall, MacArthur's popularity served him well in the eyes of many, and the Republicans courted him as a potential presidential candidate. Ensuing historical analysis has been less adoring of the general's often megalomaniac manners.
On the other hand, I'm equally surprised at the campaign passion the president brought to his report to Congress and the American people. Some might suggest he was fighting for his political life, but just what life is that? Little more than two years as a personally disgraced lame duck.
Let's face it, even with our union as positive and productive as the president suggests, were new elections held tomorrow for the top office, Clinton would have a slim chance of being re-elected. Even those who defend his political leadership find his personal activities reprehensible.
Beneath all the rhetoric of sex, the rule of law and the state of the union is a sure truth. Both the Republicans prosecuting the impeachment of a president they cannot stand personally and cannot work with and the Democrats arguing that Clinton's personal morality is irrelevant to the leadership he brings to the office are operating with eyes on the 2000 elections.
The GOP wants to assure that Vice-President Gore, should he win the Democratic nomination, runs under a burden of tainted associations with Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones and the Starr Report. The House managers are prosecuting, as much as anything else, a case against whatever candidate the Democrats select to bear their standard in 2000.
Clinton, on the other hand, is running as the party's standard-bearer, trying to assure us it is the Democrats who have all the good ideas. We'd be on easy street, he suggests, if it weren't for the GOP-dominated Congress that has so often "missed the opportunity" to do good for the people of America.
The Democrats are posturing to show that the GOP is rife with self-serving hypocrites who put their notions of self-righteous morality in front of the health and wealth of the nation and who ignore the sentiments of the people having said "enough" with the impeachment show.
With the president's speech done and the applause meter an indicator, I think it safe to say conviction by the Senate on the articles of impeachment is unlikely. The votes simply aren't there in a debate that has been notoriously partisan.
The best idea to emerge from this legislative pageant is one suggested by the schoolboy cited in Hyde's speech last Saturday. The boy suggested the president be forced to write a 100-page essay on why telling a lie is wrong. Hyde seemed to praise and support such a notion.
Why doesn't someone dare Hyde to drop the impeachment prosecution and press for the compulsory essay -- a juvenile punishment for the president's juvenile actions? Such a solution at least would close an embarrassing display of politics posing behind concerns for morality and and public welfare.
Copyright 1999 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.
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