Totally agreed, but he couldn’t keep the Senate from voting on, and even passing, the resolution against President Biff’s fake Wall State O’Mergency.
He’s not omnipotent.
2 Likes
Clinton was impeached halfway through his 2nd term. He wasn’t re-elected afterwards.
The increase in Clinton’s approval rating after the impeachment was due to the late 90s boom as much as politics. And the political side rested mostly on most people not thinking that lying about a blow job was an impeachable offense.
2 Likes
So by that logic, what… trump is at like 45 percent now with the economy doing WELL… and he continues to dig us all further into debt. it ain’t like his numbers are gonna get any better…
1 Like
But yeah I’ll cop to that one. I was wrong. I seriously thought that was what this was all about. The fear of impeachment making trump stronger… I dunno. I don’t think it matters one way or the other honestly. Trump isn’t winning over anyone and although he has seriously insane diehard loyalists and that’s terrifying, there must be people in the middle who see how awful he is.
1 Like
from 538:
Trump is at 41% with -13% net. I’m for impeachment whether it hurts his approval or not.
The plot is Clinton’s net rating in black with 45 in purple. Clinton’s ratings were basically unaffected by impeachment.
2 Likes
It’s a good theory, and the timing idea makes sense — it would definitely be a Bad Look for Trump for actual impeachment proceedings to be going on during peak campaign season.
My concern is that Pelosi has so solidly framed impeachment as “the thing Trump is eagerly goading us to do” that I’m not sure how impeachment can be approached without it looking like she’s giving him what he wants.
3 Likes
Sounds like Nadler’s had enough.
Now we just need Pelosi to put away her utterly ludicrous “of course he’s doing things that are worthy of impeachment, but opening an impeachment hearing would be divisive and play right into his hands!” argument for why she insists on not doing her damn job.
4 Likes
Here’s the (similar) graph from Gallup:
Considering there was a good economy, personally I look at that and think impeachment may have hurt Clinton. At the very least the idea that it helped Clinton’s approval rating is unsupportable, and I don’t get how it is so often repeated. At absolute best it’s possible that the announcement of impeachment proceedings gave Clinton a one or two week boost, but clearly there was no lasting positive effect. The “impeachment helped Clinton” narrative seems like total nonsense.
And, probably most damning to the idea that Clinton’s impeachment teaches us impeachment helps the president: the Republicans won the presidency two years later.
On one hand Pelosi has five children, each of which would have gone through the ages 2 through 6, so I don’t doubt Pelosi’s experience dealing with people like Trump. My problem with the don’t-impeach approach is that the rhetoric around it has turned it political. I feel like they should have been pushing hard the entire time to make the impeachment case purely on law and rules.
Trump doesn’t want to be impeached, Trump wants the impeachment that is coming to be a Democratic political strategy rather than a reaction of a society based on rule of law to a lawless president.
But maybe Pelosi is better at this than I imagine. It’s possible we’re going to hear a lot of “We never wanted to do this!” during the impeachment proceedings.
9 Likes
spot on.
2 Likes
I agree with you on all points. Impeachment helping Clinton is nonsense, Pelosi is currently playing right into the narrative that this is all just partisan politics, and I’m really hoping she’s got a better plan than it looks like.
Also:
FTFY
5 Likes
That’s the thing though, it would have been lost either way, so maybe the only winning move is not to play.
Which is itself probably related to this timeline. “Hmmm, we didn’t take down Democrats with a dubious impeachment, should we try just…taking the presidency next time?”
1 Like
The problem is that not doing something isn’t some neutral default that has no impact on anything. It’s still an active choice that has consequences, and the consequence of choosing not to do anything about a lawless president is that it sets a dangerous precedent. If Trump can’t get impeached for everything he’s done, how much farther will he and his probably-even-less-scrupulous successors going to have to push things before enough is finally enough, and how do we pull back from that precipice to re-establish what we once thought of as acceptable?
6 Likes
Looks like that is what she is doing already, saying she doesn’t want to do something, pointing out how it would be beneficial for the other side for her to take this action and letting the unfolding events of everyday politics “push” her to take a stand she publicly rejects.
I agree that it certainly didn’t help him. I am not sure how badly it hurt him. I wasn’t a Bill Clinton fan, but remember thinking the whole affair seemed a bit silly. Yes, morally “bad” for various reasons. But it also seems like a lot of the political hub-bub was a a of political jockeying. I mean in a lot of ways there are a lot of parallels between now and then, with the main difference (IMO) is that now there really IS shenanigans that SHOULD be leading to a resignation. But it seems like starting with Clinton (and maybe before that, but I was less politically before that) there has a been a constant beating of a drum to condemn the sitting president by the opposition party. It gets to the point we just tune it out and are numb when - oh shit - it’s real this time.
That was an exceedingly close race that could have gone the other way. And it Clinton wasn’t running. So I am not sure that is a fair comparison.
I agree. It allows them to brand it among supporters and people still soured on Democrats to just view it as a vast left wing conspiracy.
But that’s not a lot of presidents. Bush’s administration did fabricate evidence to enter into a foreign war, which is pretty much as bad as it gets. Obama, as we know, was black.
Somehow it feels like the Republicans did win by impeaching Clinton. But they didn’t win by forcing Clinton out of office or damaging Clinton’s approval rating. They won by damaging public faith in the process of impeachment so that their own lunatic could run amok without consequences. I feel like if Clinton hadn’t been impeached there wouldn’t even be a question of whether to impeach Trump.
6 Likes
You’ve probably seen this, but this article also dwells on faith and impeachment
I don’t know if people understand the impeachment process enough for it to be damaged anymore than ignorance or party loyalty already has. The two presidents who were impeached, neither were removed from office. Nixon probably would have been the first had the process played out, but he at least had the wherewithall to resign when he realized there was no squirming out of the mess he made.
If anything, logicaly, the impeachment of Clinton sets the bar low on what should be an impeachable offense. But people defending Trump from impeachment aren’t doing so with logic, they are doing so as part of the politcal culture war. They are party loyalist that would put old school Commies to shame.
But I do appreciate your take and it is probably true for some people.
1 Like
the author’s book is reviewed here
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
