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In a slow-motion year that has seemed to go on forever, it is fair to wonder how we got here so fast. The public has been right about many things much of the year, but was wrong about one thing: going into last week, almost the same vast majority--68%--that opposed impeaching the President did not imagine that it would ever take place. After the November election, when the voters spoke, the G.O.P. crumpled and Newt Gingrich succumbed, many assumed that the impeachment hay wagon had been run off the road, overturned, its wheels spinning in the air.
The public went off contentedly shopping, thinking the matter was all but settled, and with that, the wild rumpus began. The White House decided to go for broke: the President's allies toasted the death of neo-Puritanism, stopped talking about censure and raised the possibility that there should be no penalty at all. Clinton's lawyers finally answered those 81 questions that Judiciary chairman Henry Hyde had sent him three weeks before, but the answers were forgetful, slippery and showed no trace of repentance. Impeach me if you dare, Clinton whistled, dancing on their graves.
He was, of course, waltzing into a trap. With Gingrich and Ken Starr gone, the role of tormentor fell to majority whip Tom DeLay, the diminutive former fire-ant exterminator from Texas who knew enough to lie low and deny Clinton a repellent foil. Alone onstage with his weaselly answers, Clinton isn't all that appealing either. He made things worse by golfing a lot. As Georgia's Bob Barr, the Judiciary Committee's hangman, said with precise accuracy this week: "One of the faults of the White House, I think, is that they have a tendency--maybe this President personally, perhaps--to break out the champagne or light up the victory cigar a little bit early sometimes."
A White House governed by polls has trouble reading politicians who are bent on ignoring them. Clinton had waited all year for the Lewinsky affair to be out of the hands of the courts and dumped in the laps of the lawmakers. The framers, after all, had designed impeachment as a political rather than a legal process, handled not by unelected judges but by the most transparently accountable branch, the legislators who have to face voters every two years. With Clinton's approval ratings still in orbit and the opposition to impeachment screaming from every last poll, it was easy for the President's men to imagine that they were over the rainbow.
Except that this House doesn't work that way. The people that count this time are not the 269 million Americans or even the 435 House members, but only the 30 or so moderate Republicans, all on the political version of the endangered-species list, who come from places where most people cling religiously to the radical middle and fear the intensity of right and left. For those members the question was simple: Party or country?