Battle Over Impeachment Will Cost Country a Moment of Opportunity

Washington has spent the last week at war. Not just with Iraq. But with itself.

In Washington every day now is Apocalypse Now. As if impeachment wasn’t enough, the hostilities between President Clinton and the Republican Congress escalated last week when a succession of GOP leaders accused the president of attacking Iraq to try to derail the House vote. Enraged Democrats immediately fired back that Republicans were effectively accusing Clinton of treason.

That firefight had barely subsided when House Speaker-designate Bob Livingston (R-La.) announced that he was resigning after disclosures about his own marital infidelities. And even that was just an overture to the bitterly fought, party-line House votes to impeach the president. The fighting in Iraq could not have been much more fierce--or frightening.

Although he quickly retreated, it was especially revealing that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi was among the Republicans who appeared to question Clinton’s motives in Iraq. Combined with his announcement that he will demand a Senate trial, Lott’s initial refusal to support the bombing suggests that leading Republicans may be increasingly committed to actually forcing the president from office. And that means that the country now appears doomed to a prolonged conflict that is bound to poison our political life for years. “Maybe it’s an overstatement on my part, but I have the scent of the Civil War in my nostrils,” says Boston University historian Robert Dallek. “It reminds me of the tensions of Vietnam during the 1960s. Now we are moving into a similar kind of moment.”

No one will walk away unharmed from such a confrontation. Even if Clinton survives, his presidency could be maimed. Even if Republicans oust Clinton over public resistance, they could be punished at the polls in 2000. No matter which party suffers more, one thing is clear: This struggle will exact an enormous cost in lost opportunity on the country.

This could be a moment of great possibility in American life. An abundant economy is raising middle-class incomes for the first time in a generation, lifting thousands of families out of poverty and providing government at all levels with the resources to tackle entrenched problems. In step with the economic renaissance has come something that looks very much like a cultural reformation. In this decade, crime, welfare dependency and teen pregnancy all have sharply declined. (Conservatives who worry about Clinton’s moral example might pause to consider that each of those problems either worsened or got no better during the presidencies of two family-values Republicans, Ronald Reagan and George Bush.)

Even the political arena could be a source of optimism. Clinton’s success at winning two presidential elections with a centrist reform agenda has encouraged the spread of a pragmatic problem-solving progressivism in both parties, especially (although not exclusively) at the state and local levels. There are still sharp disagreements between the parties on the role of the federal government in encouraging these reforms. But on the substance of how to improve the schools or streamline government bureaucracies or reconfigure welfare, the distance between the two sides is vanishing.

“You’ll find differences at the margins,” says Bruce Reed, Clinton’s top domestic policy advisor. “But I suspect in 1999, as in 1998, we’ll see dozens of State of the State addresses from Republican and Democratic governors that sound an awful lot like Clinton’s State of the Union.”

On education, politicians as diverse as Clinton, Texas Gov. George W. Bush and lame-duck California Gov. Pete Wilson all want to expand charter schools, end social promotion and increase the emphasis on ensuring literacy in the early grades. In social policy, likely presidential contenders as divergent as conservative Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.), moderate conservative Bush, moderate Democrat Al Gore and liberal Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) all want to shift more authority for social programs from government to nonprofit, often faith-based, grass-roots groups.

Yet in the face of this intellectual convergence, many in Washington seem to devote their greatest efforts to preventing a new domestic consensus from emerging. Like Japanese soldiers who would not come out of the caves in the South Pacific after World War II, both congressional parties have refused to lay down their arms long after the reason for conflict has ended. Now, congressional Republicans--provoked by Clinton’s recklessness--have taken this fervor for bloodshed to a nihilistic new level, inviting the sort of cynical counterstrike that felled Livingston.

This ferociously polar politics is not America’s only option. Early last Wednesday--just a few hours before the physical bombs began dropping on Baghdad and the rhetorical ones began falling on Capitol Hill--an alternative path presented itself in the White House’s Roosevelt Room. Sitting around a table with Gore and Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin were 10 business executives and entrepreneurs. Some were white, some black, some Latino. Some were Democrats, some Republicans. Some ran billion-dollar international companies like McDonald’s and Bell Atlantic. Others operated small, minority-owned firms in distressed neighborhoods.

They were all there to discuss a Clinton program called Business-Linc, which is patiently encouraging mentoring and subcontracting relationships between large companies and small ones and dozens more like them. Although it has never generated chatter on a Sunday talk show or inspired its own MSNBC logo, this effort is fortifying inner-city neighborhoods with jobs and hope--a more tangible form of the moral uplift Clinton’s critics say the impeachment drama is intended to provide the country.

Raise the wall or raze the wall: that’s always the choice in politics. Today, Washington is in the grip of those who believe politics is war (even in time of war). But the Roosevelt Room gathering last week was a reminder that there is another choice--a politics that builds consensus around innovative, bipartisan solutions and tries to narrow, not widen, divisions. No one at the meeting mentioned the gulf between their quiet, practical conversations and the fevered partisan warfare raging outside. No one needed to. Even unspoken, the contrast was its own reproach.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.