Voters defy the pundits and give Clinton a boost

Just when President Clinton was savouring the disarray of his political enemies, Monica Lewinsky had to come back and half-spoil it. She hasn't gone away, you know, as Gerry Adams might have said.

As angry Republicans went looking for their leaders' heads over a botched midterm election campaign, and President Clinton and his White House aides tried not to gloat too much, the President received a letter asking for his sworn responses to 81 questions about everything he would rather forget.

The letter was from Mr Henry Hyde, chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, which is conducting the impeachment inquiry into whether the President committed "high crimes and misdemeanours".

Great boost that the election was for the Democrats, who were supposed to take a hammering, the results have still left the Republicans in control of both houses of Congress and the impeachment process.

The impeachment train has already left the station and has to keep going until it decides the President's fate. A number of things can happen. Firstly, Mr Hyde's committee, after hearing the testimony of the independent counsel, Mr Ken Starr, and studying the replies of President Clinton - if he gives any - votes for an impeachment Bill.

The Bill is then approved by the full House, and the Senate takes over. The Senate then puts the President on trial on the impeachment charges but would need a two-thirds majority of its 100 members to find him guilty.

Even before this week's election no one believed this was possible. With the Republican majority stuck at 55 per cent, it is still not possible unless at least 11 Democrats vote to convict.

Secondly, either before or after the House votes an impeachment Bill, both parties in Congress agree on a compromise, such as a resolution censuring the President for his behaviour. This would be the end of the Lewinsky affair and it is the most likely scenario. Then the politicians can turn to what is already beginning to preoccupy them, the election of the next president in 2000 and the new Congress that will take office next January.

The post-mortem on this week's historic election will keep going for a while, of course. One has to go back to 1822 to find a midterm election in which the party of a president who is serving his second term has won seats in the House of Representatives.

How did the Republicans and virtually every pundit get it so wrong? Monica Lewinsky again.

The way the Republican majority in Congress mishandled the release of the Starr report and the President's video testimony to the grand jury was widely perceived as partisan and unfair towards the President. Even Democrats who deplored the President's personal behaviour became more angry over what looked like a Republican lynching party.

But Republicans also angered their own supporters by playing into the hands of the Democrats in the budget process just two weeks before the election.

The Republicans were afraid of being blamed for a government shutdown if the President vetoed expenditure cuts they wanted to pay for a tax reduction. They instead went along with extra spending on education and agriculture for which the Democrats gladly claimed credit.

As the Speaker, Newt Gingrich, admitted before his dramatic resignation announcement yesterday, the Republicans had no electoral strategy outside of Monica Lewinsky and historical precedent, which was supposed to result in up to 40 extra seats falling into their lap in the House and up to 10 in the Senate.

Now Gingrich, who brought about a Republican landslide four years ago, has decided to end his political life. The next election is only two years away, and Republicans want a different face on the posters.

Close attention is being given to the victories of the Bush brothers in Texas and Florida, where voters turned in big numbers to a more moderate, pragmatic Republicanism than that on offer by the Gingrich conservatives. The party is not likely to turn back to Rockefeller liberalism, but it is paying a price for letting itself be driven by a conservative ideology whose moral crusades on abortion and homosexuality, for example, do not appeal greatly outside the southern states.

In many ways it was a very strange election. It is estimated that only 36 per cent of the electorate voted, probably the lowest turnout ever. But a low turnout was supposed to help Republicans, and this time it did not.

While the big news story was the upset for the Republicans, some 98 per cent of incumbents in Congress were re-elected. It was really a status-quo election, not a rout. And the Republicans set their own record by keeping control of both Houses for three elections in a row for the first time in 70 years.

In the Clinton years Democrats have fared badly in elections other than for the White House. Republicans have made substantial gains since 1992 in Congress, governorships of states and in state legislatures. This week's election has checked the Republican encroachment on formerly Democratic strongholds but not reversed it. It shows the dangers of generalisations in such a huge country where individual states such as California and New York have more than 50 million people.

Who would have thought that Jesse "The Body" Ventura would defeat a son of the former vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, for the governorship of Minnesota? Now he is the chief executive in a state with an annual budget of $12 billion. President Clinton quipped that we will now see more politicians using the gym.

He also laughed at a ceremony in the White House this week when he presented the National Humanities Medal to a distinguished author, Garry Wills, who had called for his resignation.

Handing over the award, the President said of Wills: "Whatever his subject, politics or popular culture, the classics or even boxing, his insight is unsurpassed." After a pause for laughter, he went on: "I find that difficult to acknowledge from time to time." Wills said later he had chatted easily with the President beforehand. They had talked about St Augustine's Confessions, he said. What a week.