Clinton's Democratic Support Slips Further
Maryland's Glendening cancels appearances with president
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Moynihan
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WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, Sept. 6) -- Evidence of President Bill Clinton's political deterioration continued to mount over the weekend, with one key Democratic senator saying he isn't sure how he would vote on impeachment and a Democratic governor canceling appearances with the president.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) said on ABC's "This Week" program that he thinks if Clinton perjured himself in the Paula Jones' sexual harassment suit about an affair with Monica Lewinsky, it would constitute an impeachable offense, even without additional evidence of obstruction of justice.
And Moynihan said he does not know at this point how he would vote if the House were to bring impeachment charges against the president to the Senate.
"We have a crisis of the regime. You cannot have this kind of conduct as normal and acceptable and easily dismissed unless there is a great effort to do so," he said. "And if in addition to what we know there are things we don't know, that will make it worse."
On Saturday, Maryland Gov. Paris Glendening, once a close Clinton ally, announced that he was canceling an October campaign fund-raiser with the president. He also will not appear with Clinton on Tuesday when the president is scheduled to visit a Maryland school.
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Glendening
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Glendening, who is facing a tough re-election battle in November, released a statement saying "this is a very serious time for everyone who loves this country." The Washington Post quoted a fund-raiser close to the governor as saying that Glendening supporters were finding it hard to sell the $1,000 tickets.
However, the man leading the re-election campaign for Senate Democrats, Sen. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, told CBS's "Face The Nation" on Sunday that Glendening's decision "is a very isolated incident" and that Democratic Senate candidates "continue to ask him to appear in their states."
But even Torricelli conceded that the political situation was "very fluid" and that "it is not at all clear what the effect will be on November elections."
In a bit of good news for Clinton, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), who helped start the Democratic drift away from the president with a dramatic, hard-hitting speech on the Senate floor last Thursday, said Sunday that he still thinks Clinton can salvage his presidency.
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Lieberman
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"I'm confident he can ... restore the full moral authority of his presidency and go on to finish (his) full term honorably," he said on NBC's "Meet The Press."
"(Clinton) has some work to do," Lieberman said. "He began it admirably with his statement of apology in Ireland. My highest hope is that President Clinton is able to repair the damage and go on and end his presidency in two-and-a-half years, honorably and effectively."
Asked what Clinton should do to repair the damage, Lieberman said, "I leave that to him."
But another longtime Clinton ally, Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) offered a much more grim assessment, telling "Fox News Sunday" that "I don't know how he can ever recover the strength of the bully pulpit that he needs."
Moran has floated a new proposal -- agree to keep the contents of Independent Counsel Ken Starr's report to Congress sealed in exchange for the president's resignation.
"Then [Clinton] would have to make a decision whether it would be worth it to spare the country the humiliation, as well as his family, that's likely to come from the report," Moran said. But he conceded that the problem with his proposal is that it is unlikely the Starr report could be kept under wraps.
Lieberman said he hopes that a public rebuke of Clinton, perhaps a congressional resolution censuring him for his behavior in the Lewinsky matter, "will be the maximum we will want to do to end this sad chapter in our history."
But Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said it was now unlikely that Clinton would get off with only a rebuke.
"I don't think the circumstances now call for something that could be interpreted by anybody as nothing," he said on "Meet The Press."
For its latest issue, Time magazine contacted the offices of nearly all of the 435 members of Congress, to survey them about what action they favored based on what they now know about Clinton's relationship with Lewinsky.
Only 91 would agree to provide specific answers to the questions, and they divided sharply along partisan lines. Among Republicans, 57 said Clinton should resign, while only four said he should not. But not a single Democrat in the survey said he should resign, while 26 said he should not.
While 21 of the Democrats who responded said Clinton should stay in office without any formal action being taken against him, none of the Republicans agreed with that idea.
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