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The lack of clarity could be traced back to Clinton himself. Even as he embarked on his grovelthon--aides took to referring to CNN as the Contrition News Network--he signaled in private that his anger still trumps his sorrow. When he sat down with his Cabinet Thursday afternoon, for the first time since enlisting their support to defend him last January, he bared his soul and watered his eyes and shared some Scripture and defended his record in office. But when Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala suggested that "surely your personal behavior is as important as your policies," his face went red, and he slapped her down hard. "If you were judging on personal behavior and not policies," he snapped, "then Richard Nixon should have been elected in 1960, not John Kennedy." The room went silent. "It was clear that this guy did not want to hear any criticism," said an official familiar with the meeting.
If Clinton was having mixed success with his Cabinet, his stock was sinking even faster with his party on Capitol Hill. Clinton's official supporters, Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Dick Gephardt of Missouri, urged members to stay cool, but congressional aides were quick to acknowledge that their bosses were appalled by the President's behavior. Members were worried that they would be guilty by association--a chain the G.O.P. was beginning to forge in some ad campaigns in key districts. The widely cited Battleground poll released last week showed that Clinton's personal problems have elevated "moral and religious issues" to the top of the voters' agenda. They tie with crime and drugs as the No. 1 problem facing the nation. The poll also showed that scandal is discouraging traditional Democratic voters from voting. That fueled a growing fear that the Republicans could pick up enough seats in the House and as many as six Senate slots to make their power exponentially greater, impervious to filibuster. White House aides fanned out among lobbyists and labor unions and financiers last week to shore up support, having backers call lawmakers and urge them to stand by the President. Most of them just kept quiet.
That dynamic explained why, for all the professions of decorum, Republicans were playing for keeps and Democrats were trying to make it all a fairness issue. It was hard to square Gingrich's talk about sober bipartisanship with the impeachment war room set up by Republican whip Tom Delay, who has already called for Clinton to resign. Staff members from his office had compiled binders full of material on impeachment procedures. By waging a phony war over whether to give Clinton an advance look at Starr's report, Democrats laid the groundwork for a claim that the whole process ahead will be a show trial. "I feel that the Republicans were so wrongheaded not to let the President have a couple of days to review this document," said Democrat Henry Waxman, who nevertheless voted for the resolution to release the report. However deplorable Clinton's conduct, the hurry to send the report out over the Internet, he said, looked to him like "a clear partisan effort at railroading."