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Many want to see Clinton pay, but not at the price of shredding the presidency. Some were just holding out for something they have never before seen from this President: a flat, clear admission of wrongdoing, stripped of self-pity or sophistry, that would allow them to spank him and move on. And others were weighing how hard it would be to fight off a conservative challenger in their next primary. "You've got the facts and law about impeachment," says Delaware's Michael Castle, "but the bottom line is that for every member, there is a lot of politics involved in this decision."
Meanwhile, DeLay was spreading the word: most voters are against impeachment because they think it means removing Clinton from office. When they see that impeachment is really just "supercensure" or the "ultimate censure," as the Judiciary Committee's Bill McCollum of Florida has described it, they will not revolt; in two years they will not even remember. Your conservative base will be placated and your moderates won't care, because Clinton won't have gone anywhere except down in history. Which is also a happy thing for Republicans, according to DeLay. "The good politics, by the way, is to leave the President in office," DeLay told TIME. "He's the best thing that's happened to this party."
By early this month, the tide had turned, and Clinton was back in his own personal Hitchcock movie. At meetings on Social Security, where he would normally cartwheel through one proposal after another, he sat fatefully quiet, sullen and completely distracted. "They tell me," Clinton remarked to a longtime aide on Dec. 4, "the votes are probably there for this thing." Another adviser told Time later that it was "probably the worst I'd ever seen him. It's not fuzzy anymore. He really, really, really gets the idea that this is going to be a big, permanent stain on his record."
And so two weeks ago the White House that for a moment had considered not mounting any defense at all was suddenly demanding four days to make its case last week--a sign that it was worried and playing for time. "Mr. Chairman," said the President's lawyer Greg Craig, "I am willing to concede that in the Jones deposition, the President's testimony was evasive, incomplete, misleading, even maddening--but it was not perjury." The message to the moderates was direct: This President is a hound dog, but that's not an impeachable offense.
But for some reason, the White House forgot to tell its panel of legal scholars to stow the Ivy League condescension and assume a humbler pose. If you vote for impeachment, said Princeton's Sean Wilentz in a high-pitched, insinuating voice, you will be cast forever as "zealots and the fanatics [who] have done far more to subvert respect for the framers, for representative government and for the rule of law than any crime that has been alleged against President Clinton, and your reputations will be darkened for as long as there are Americans who can tell the difference between the rule of law and the rule of politics."