A Pilgrim’s Digression

Russ Feingold’s proposal for a formal Congressional censure of President Bush over his wiretapping of American citizens may have caused some hardcore Bush-haters to fall into a love swoon with the Wisconsin Senator. However, I find this move to be dangerous in the extreme to genuine intellectual opposition to the President and his policies. Additionally, I do not think it increases Democratic chances of winning back the House and Senate in November if Democrats are seen as running entirely on a platform of “Impeach Bush.”

Essentially, this is what the censure motion boils down to: it paves the way for impeachment hearings next year, if Democrats win control of Congress.

My advice to Democrats is to remember the example of Bill Clinton. If Democrats really want to see their approval ratings fall to record lows, and the President’s approval ratings skyrocket, they should get behind those in the not-so-intelligentsia who are rabid with excitement over the prospect of impeaching Bush and removing him from office.

First of all, it will never happen. Impeachment is an exercise in futility, unless some dramatic new evidence turns up that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the President’s complicity either in fraudulently leading America to war, or in disregarding the Civil Rights of large numbers of innocent Americans. Absent the equivalent of White House tape recordings, à la Nixon, there will be no bi-partisan impeachment of President Bush.

Instead, whether Congress passes articles of impeachment or settles on trying to censure the President, what will happen is that the American people will rally around a man who doesn’t deserve it. Republicans witnessed this effect when Bill Clinton was in their cross hairs.

I remember the impeachment of Bill Clinton as a sad, despicable chapter in American history. The President’s actions were immature and unworthy of a good man; the Republicans were no better, resorting to investigating a sex scandal as a way of disgracing not only the President, but our country as well. In previous decades, a President’s sexual improprieties would have been covered up as embarrassing to the nation and unworthy of close scrutiny. Republicans had no such shame, when it came to Bill Clinton. The important thing was to bring him down.

Democrats face the same choice today. They can tilt at the windmill of impeachment, thus inadvertently providing the President with the “enemies” he needs to drive his approval ratings through the roof. Or they can concentrate on devising a platform that a majority of Americans can support. It ought to include a credible exit strategy for Iraq, as well as a platform for defending the nation from terrorism while maintaining our free and open society here at home.

Now that we are just a few months away from the mid-term elections, I do not believe that Democrats are going to craft such a platform. I don’t believe they can. I don’t know if Democrats are even able to reconcile the differences amongst themselves, which is the first step in designing a platform that a majority of people can stand behind.

What it looks like is that Democrats are going to stick with what has proved not to work: Bush hatred.

Back on March 1, Garrison Keillor published a well-written indictment of the President at Salon.com, titled bluntly, Impeach Bush. At about the same time, Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s, made a similar argument in an essay titled The Case For Impeachment. While Keillor and Lapham make a compelling argument for the President’s incompetence, as a practical matter, incompetence is not punishable by the extreme measure of impeachment. For that matter, nor is sacrificing nearly 2500 American lives in a foreign land for goals that have proved ephemeral: the discovery of Saddam’s WMD, and improved security from terrorism (”We’re fighting them over there, so we don’t have to fight them here at home.”).

If engaging America in a misbegotten war for dubiously achievable goals were impeachable, James Polk, William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson all could have faced impeachment in their time. If shedding American blood to no good purpose is a mortal sin, then there are several Presidents burning in the fires of hell right now.

The unfortunate truth is, the American people have always paid a kind of deference to Presidential authority that people living under a monarchy would understand perfectly. Called the Royal Prerogative in England, the King is immune from prosecution, and has a number of other rights and privileges not allotted to the common masses. Whether by intention or inadvertently, we have granted our Presidents much of the same exalted, Kingly status that our Revolution claimed to do away with. We invest a tremendous amount of power and authority in our President, and it takes a whole lot of evidence to convince us that he has abused that power. Even when such evidence is abundant, the American people are still loathe to prosecute, let alone convict. The President is literally, if not legally, untouchable.

Thus those calling for impeachment are nothing more than voices crying in the wilderness, no matter how well-grounded those voices are in common sense, logic, and ethics. Further, giving those voices a platform in the United States Congress provides a comfortable diversion for Republicans, who are under the gun right now due to their demonstrated incompetence and inability to bring to fruition a single successful domestic or foreign policy initiative.

Most people who read the Garrison Keillor article probably skip the last paragraph, or else do not fully register its importance. Keillor says, as I have been saying for months, that Democrats need to pick up the National Security ball that Republicans have fumbled:

…many Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to defend this country. We might rather be comedians or daddies or tattoo artists or flamenco dancers, but we must attend to first things.

First things are developing a popular platform, not impeaching the President. Impeachment is a chimera tempting politicians to forgo devising substantive recommendations that will advance the American polity.

President Bush has little time left in office. He has already squandered his second term. Republicans have done nothing since the invasion of Afghanistan to truly effect progress on the core issues that engage the American people: national security, tax reform, reducing Federal spending, and making government more effective and responsive to the needs of all Americans.

To attempt to remove the President from office would pull Republicans together at a time when they are disunited and fragile. Impeachment would embroil America in an exhausting drama that would consume at least six months to a year and further erode the American people’s belief in good government. This is not the road Democrats need to travel. Remember what happened to Bill Clinton during impeachment: he grew exponentially in popularity and escaped relatively unscathed.

The question is, will those in power in the Democratic party see this for themselves? I doubt it. Modern Democrats have a death wish that insists they sacrifice themselves for lost causes. At a time when myself and many other Americans are ready to vote a liberal ticket, so long as it posits a credible alternate vision to Careless Conservatism, Democrats seem intent on nursing their grudges a little longer.