“THIS WHOLE THING IS POLL DRIVEN,” declares a leading defender of President Clinton. Indeed, following Kathleen Willey’s gripping TV appearance on March 15, the mere possibility of a dip in the president’s poll ratings gave Clinton and his advisers a bad case of the jitters. “There was apprehension,” says press secretary Mike McCurry. “Everybody worried she’d appear to be credible.” James Carville, anxious that Willey’s accusation of sexual harassment by the president would affect the polls, called the White House on March 17 from Latin America, where he’s working on a political campaign. He was relieved to hear from Clinton aides Paul Begala and Rahm Emanuel that the president’s numbers had held, even gone up in one poll. McCurry breathed easier as he drove to work that morning after hearing a radio report of a fresh CBS survey. Clinton’s job approval had risen to 67 percent from 64 percent two weeks earlier.
Never have polls measuring the public’s judgment of a president’s job performance and personal traits been more important. Why is this? Because polls “are driving every aspect of American politics at the national level,” insists Democratic consultant (and sometime White House adviser) Bob Beckel. ” If Clinton’s poll numbers stay up, he rides right through. If they fall, it changes the equation for the congressional election in ’98, the legislative agenda in ’98, and the presidential election in 2000.” For now at least, the president’s strong poll numbers are restraining Republicans from launching a full-scale effort to discredit him, keeping Democrats from bolting, allowing Clinton to move ahead on issues like education and tobacco, and holding off challengers of Vice President Al Gore for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“If his poll numbers drop 15 points,” says Carville, “then the Republicans would see there’s a place to seize the offensive.” McCurry says both Republicans and the press would go “thermonuclear.” But since the impact of Willey’s interview on 60 Minutes was only to cause a slight tumble in Clinton’s personal popularity, nothing like this happened. In a CNN survey, the president’s favorable rating fell from 64 percent to 60 percent. In an ABC poll, it slipped from 56 percent to 50 percent. But these dips were offset by sky-high approval of the president’s job performance (67 percent in CNN’s poll, 63 percent in ABC’s).
This acted as a brake on Republicans, causing them to fear a public backlash if they moved boldly against Clinton. So only a handful of Republicans spoke up. Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri called Clinton a “sexual predator” in his encounter with Willey just outside the Oval Office in 1993. House GOP whip Tom DeLay, in a speech on the House floor, charged Clinton with breaking faith with the American people “time and time again.” He said Clinton should come forward and explain his relationship with Willey and Monica Lewinsky. Meanwhile, House speaker Newt Gingrich and chairman Henry Hyde of the House Judiciary Committee announced they wouldn’t move against Clinton unilaterally. They said any impeachment proceedings would wait until independent counsel Ken Starr sends Congress a report on his investigation of Clinton.
Post-Willey, few congressional Democrats rushed to Clinton’s defense. They are reluctant to back Clinton out of fear they’ll be embarrassed by new revelations. Even Sen. Bob Torricelli of New Jersey, normally a noisy Clinton supporter, was muted in defending Clinton again. What’s more important to Clinton at this point, however, is that no Democrats are jumping ship. Should the president plummet in the polls, the expectation at the White House is that Democrats would begin peeling away. And it might not take much. Only a few Democrats on Capitol Hill have close ties to the president. Most blame him for the loss of Congress in 1994 and for siphoning off most of the campaign money in 1996 for his reelection drive.
The White House calculation is that the public wants the president to press his issues. There’s a kind of mutual reinforcement at work: The polls not only indicate the public’s desire for Clinton to stress substantive matters, they encourage him to keep on doing it. The public, says McCurry, “will never forgive Clinton if he allows himself to be mesmerized by this [scandal] thing. I think Clinton knows that and understands that.”
There’s a problem for Clinton, though, in trying to stick to his issues. After the Monica Lewinsky story broke in January, the president had a perfect vehicle for touting his agenda to the country. It was the State of the Union address. Viewed by millions on television, it was a “godsend,” an adviser says. But there’s no “natural setting in the next six or eight weeks” that would rivet national attention to Clinton’s domestic plans. True, Clinton has trips to Africa and Latin America planned, but these probably won’t provide distraction from the sex scandal. And Republicans are unwilling to play along by engaging Clinton in policy negotiations that would emphasize his involvement in serious presidential business.
In the end, the polls could come back to haunt Clinton. It’s quite conceivable, for example, that the president’s job-approval rating could drift down to where his favorability is now — the low 50s or high 40s. That’s not especially high for a president, though normally not bad either. But Clinton’s case is different. It would represent a decline of 15 points or more. The press and the political community would take notice, and Clinton would surely suffer. The old saying that if you live by the polls, you might die by them, could turn out to be true.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
