California Democrats rallied to the support of President Bill Clinton on Saturday, when a private Beverly Hills event in aid of the party's Unity '98 campaign raised about $1.5 million.
The president chose the event to attack the House of Representatives' plan for an election-year tax cut of $80 billion. "It is the wrong thing to do," he said. "Now with so much of the rest of the world in trouble, we need to show people we have got our head on straight and are not going to knee-jerk in the management of our economy, we are going to be a force of strength and stability for the whole world."
Mr Clinton was trying to build up enthusiasm among Democrats, who could face the loss of seats in the November 3rd mid-term elections after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
But a poll commissioned by Time magazine and CNN found that Congress's decision to release the videotape of Mr Clinton's grand jury testimony may have backfired.
The survey, released yesterday, found that rather than further damage the president, as Republicans had hoped, the airing may have hurt Congress instead.
The poll found that the Republican-led Congress's approval rating dropped to 54 per cent from 63 per cent since the tape ran on national television last Monday, while the Democratic president's approval rating remained strong, at more than 60 per cent.
The survey of 1,019 adults was conducted in the three days after the four-hour tape was shown.
In Atlanta, Georgia, meanwhile Mr Ross Perot, who ran for president in 1992, said that President Clinton was mentally unstable and should resign.
"This guy's brain's not working correctly," Mr Perot told a convention of the Reform Party, which he founded in 1992, when he ran for president against Mr Clinton and Mr George Bush.
"Any man who would conduct himself in such an emotional, unstable manner, and bring worldwide shame, first to his family and then to a vulnerable young woman and finally to the United States of America, is unfit to be the president of this great country," Mr Perot said. "The president is mentally and emotionally unstable."
"I said in 1992 he's a bright young guy in business, I might put him somewhere and train him to be a middle manager. Right now I wouldn't have him third shift in a hamburger stand responsible for cleaning out the sink after everybody had gone home," he said.
President Clinton on Saturday consulted his former chief fundraiser, Mr Terence McAuliffe, about the money necessary to resolve the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit against him, according to the Washington Post.
The Jones case was thrown out by a federal judge in April, but Ms Jones promised to appeal the case, with her lawyers citing Mr Clinton's admission of an affair with Ms Lewinsky as evidence that he perjured himself in the Jones case deposition.