Impeachment leaves doubts about U.S. political maturity

By Martin Winter

WASHINGTON (DPA): Over. At last. For a whole year the U.S. has forced upon itself and the world a monstrously disproportionate and exhaustingly ridiculous trial. When even comedians ran out of jokes, the impeachment proceedings against President William Jefferson Clinton came to the end they justly deserved.

They failed because they were bound to fail. Undertaken in the face of the unswerving will of the American people and against all judicial sense, they may have found a scant majority last December in a House of Representatives where party-political feelings were running high.

But in the Senate, where majority requirements are different and where other standards and, occasionally, also insight prevail, they were defeated.

That could have been foreseen, and yet the conservative Republicans pursued the trial of the President with a self- destructive zeal that is normally associated only with lemmings.

Without heed to the high political price their party will have to pay as a result, certain of victory in their witch hunt against Clinton, they deliberately steered clear of several honorable exits.

The Republicans wanted so desperately to win against this man in the White House that they succumbed to blind rage. And yet this along does not explain the incredible energy with which they pursued the case against Clinton, regardless of the fact that they were losing some of their own supporters in the process.

And the Lewinsky case, even in the grotesquely overblown form in which it was served up by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, was not enough to unleash so much zeal.

No, its tracks lead back to the 1960s, to the era when young people burst the chains of cultural and politically ossified post-war America, when hippies and students and intellectuals experimented with new ways of life and thinking, when free sex and drugs mingled with the anti-Vietnam War protests and when the civil rights movement turned militant.

A culture of new departures, which challenged traditional America as hardly anything had done before. Therein lie the roots of the battle against Clinton.

The cultural, social and political Right always regarded this radical change of culture as a sinful aberration from the path of true, eternal U.S. values such as patriotism, family, God and the Church.

The political and ideological struggle against the 1960s generation crystallized in fundamentalist movements of Christian moral provenance, from where it found its way into the Republican Party.

When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1981, it seemed to them like the victory of true over false America. All the greater was the Republicans' shock when a man who embodies everything they detest moved into the White House. That man was Bill Clinton.

He funked military service and demonstrated against the Vietnam War. He speaks up for homosexuals, feminists and the right to abortion. Under his presidency, minorities are in good hands and black Americans, still despised and feared simultaneously, revere him.

In the eyes of the Republicans, Clinton's election victories reflect the triumph of moral decline. In these circumstances it is only logical for them to attempt to finish off the president on a question of character.

Long before Monica Lewinsky first entered the White House as an intern, armies of investigators were snooping on Clinton, either in the pay of wealthy right-wing fanatics or under the wing of the state special prosecutor's office.

He was accused of fraud, drug-dealing, murder and conspiracy as well as of being a sexual offender. None of it was ever proved. Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, all vanished into thin air.

The Lewinsky affair was private stupidity on Clinton's part, and he has been punished more than enough for it, if only in the type and scope of the proceedings against him.

The Republicans laid the groundwork for their own defeat by arrogantly equating their party-political and ideological interests with those of the American people.

Even though most people in the U.S. disapproved of Clinton's behavior, they decisively rejected impeachment proceedings because they sensed that lurking behind the moral outrage over an adulterer was an attack on freedom, tolerance and the style of life which the new culture had brought with it.

In this sense, there was good aspect to Clinton's trial. The conservatives' claim to ideological sovereignty over the United States of America has proved to be an illusion.

Sixties culture has put down roots in the middle of society. The majority of U.S. citizens are immune to the siren calls of moral and political fundamentalism. That gives grounds for hope.

On the other hand, for a whole year the country has looked on helplessly as political zealots dragged it through an absurd, destructive and constitutionally dubious process. That gives rise to nagging doubts about the U.S.'s maturity and thus about its ability to lead the world.