COLUMN: Refusing to cross the bridge

From Stephanie Cooperman's, "The Velvet Hammer," Fall '98 From Stephanie Cooperman's, "The Velvet Hammer," Fall '98Many Americans will greet the impending Presidential impeachment hearings with disdain. Some, with relief. And still others, with a notable amount of shame. Yet, whatever feelings transpire over the next few months, most Americans will agree that the political system has let them down and that, in essence, they deserve more from their President and their democracy. The responsibility for the type of President we elect and, subsequently, the rules we enable him to ignore falls directly into the hands of those who stood in line at the ballet box in November 1996. We did not want the 43rd President of the United States to be the war hero, the straightforward speaker who had no room in his vocabulary for rhetoric, the conservative old-schooler. Rather we chose the smooth talker, the suave Southerner, the charm and grin of William Jefferson Clinton. Don't deny it. Of course, I'm not proposing that we ought to have elected Bob Dole. I will probably never earn enough money to understand the ideals of Republicans, let alone those that Dole represented. Yet at the same time, I understand that public opinion molds the Presidency. Or, in this case, the lack of public opinion molded the Presidency. The first four years of Clinton's administration were marked by his determination to satisfy and his ability to transform himself almost instantly under the pressure of public opinion. Remember Whitewater and the proposed national health care plan? In the blink of an eye, we witnessed these issues leap from the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post to the corners of our memory. But if Clinton was fickle, it was partly because he was mirroring the views of the American majority. Perhaps Clinton really is the best political tap dancer in history. Or maybe, in the words of Politically Incorrect host and comedian Bill Mahr, "he sold us that bridge" -- a reference to Clinton's 1996 campaign slogan asking Americans to help him "build a bridge to the 21st century." It seems that Americans want to have their cake and eat it too. We desire a President that can walk the proverbial tight rope between what we think we want at any given moment and what we think we should want at the same time. But what happens when the tightrope breaks? Ask Ken Starr. He was the first person there to pick up the pieces. Even now, Americans remain inconsistent in the face of the impeachment process. We say we want the melodrama to end, but at the same time we tune into the very first airing of Clinton's grand jury testimony. We say the government needs to focus on bigger issues, including what may be the world's first global recession, but at the company water cooler we are still discussing the Starr report. And congressmen, who right now are gearing for the next election, understand Americans better than we do ourselves. They know that discussing the moral implications of a sex scandal will be of more interest to their constituents than debating the U.S. policy on trade to Japan. And, most likely, we will follow blindly and vote according to the ethical dotted line. Despite my condemnation of the American public, I believe that this is the time to finish what we started in the ballot box two years ago. Although we now choose to despise Clinton for the very characteristics for which we elected him, it is possible to salvage what has become a sour presidency. If Americans have the ability to appear less fickle and to rally behind the causes we so nobly entertain as "the real issues," then we may have the influence to provide the impetus for a marked improvement in what gets done over the next two years. That isn't to say that Clinton and his administration will necessarily act well. The President, the master of speech rather than action, might be held solely responsible for empowering Saddam Hussein and botching foreign aid to Bosnia. Yet, once again, he was dealing with a public that didn't quite care whole-heartedly about nuclear weapons as long as we didn't see them and U.S. troops as long as there weren't too many and no one's son got killed. That is why we must not sit on the fence any longer and force the President and Congress to deal with the American public as a unified front with those "real issues" on our minds. Enough of the inconstancy. We hear there's about to be a recession, and we're staying on our side of the bridge until you do something about it.