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Presumably the White House is banking on the belief that the public has lost its taste for Watergate and that the threat of impeachment is past. But this is not the whole issue. "I don't think he's in danger of not surviving," reflected Republican Congressman John Anderson of Illinois last week. "But he has to survive with a kind of moral authority and capacity for governance that rest upon the trust and confidence of the people—and this wasn't helped by his performance last night."
That indeed is the question. The President may well have "survived" in office, but his ability to govern effectively, to control a runaway inflation and to restore a shaken dollar, to prevail upon a suspicious Congress and a semiparalyzed bureaucracy—all this remains in doubt.