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The speech didn't linger much longer than it took to give it. But its vapors still wafted through the week as the Clintons and the Gores hit the road again to sweet, screaming, Election Day-size crowds. By the day after the speech, the Senate floor might as well have been on the ocean floor. The minister delivering the invocation at the rally in Buffalo on Wednesday extolled Clinton as "the greatest President for our people of all time." Hours later in Pennsylvania, Clinton was so jazzed by the rope line that he went back to the beginning and worked it again--four times. "We've had a good day," he told an aide late that night. "We've had several good days."
The broader Democratic Party machinery lost no time climbing aboard. People for the American Way sponsored anti-impeachment rallies in 23 cities and announced a $25,000 radio campaign in five states and in Washington to try to persuade moderate Republican Senators to join with the Democrats to shut the trial down. The Democratic National Committee organized 200 "State of the Union Watch" parties at people's homes to rally activist support. The scandal has been very good to the party: small-dollar direct-mail response in 1998 was up 53% over 1994, the last midterm year, and opinion polls have seldom shown a greater differential between the two parties in favor of the Democrats.
Those numbers were not lost on the Senators stapled to their seats as Clinton's lawyers launched their defense. The lawyers' presentation was more factual, more respectful and more effective than anything they managed in the House. The idea was to alternate sober, numbing presentations of exculpatory evidence with passionate appeals to common sense and American ideals. Ruff opened the defense with a grave dissection of the House managers' conspiracy theory. He argued that the chronology broke down--Vernon Jordan was already on a plane to Europe when Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled that the Paula Jones team could question other women--so the ruling could not have triggered his meeting earlier that day to help Monica find a job. And Ruff offered the first of the week's rhetorical body blows. The former Watergate prosecutor, hunched in his wheelchair, took his case to the same battleground on which Henry Hyde had planted his flag the week before.
The House Judiciary chairman had summoned the ghosts of Normandy as witnesses to the sanctity of the "rule of law." Ruff's voice trembled as he turned that appeal back on its author. "I have no personal experience with war," he said quietly. "I have only visited Normandy as a tourist. But I do know this: my father was on Omaha Beach 55 years ago, and I know how he would feel if he were here today. He didn't fight, no one fought for one side of this case or the other. He fought, as all those did, for our country and our Constitution. As long as each of us--a manager, the President's counsel, a Senator--does his or her constitutional duty, those who fought for their country will be proud."