DATELINE–WASHINGTON, D.C.

Consumer polling touted as solution to impeachment quagmire

These days there is only one question left to be answered in the nation’s capital: What impact will the Lewinsky Affair have on the upcoming congressional elections.

While Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives contend with the tainted image of the once popular President, Republicans find themselves in a similar bind. An already wary public could easily turn on members of the GOP who make the Lewinsky Affair a backhanded campaign issue, leaving both sides unsure of what direction to take in the coming campaign season.

But one group of political insiders is certain it has the map for the road ahead. Comprised of a few former congressmen, media executives and anonymous investors, the group which calls itself the Coalition for Constitutional Consumer Polling, believes the aftermath of the Lewinsky Affair has created an ideological vacuum they are ready to fill.

The group, which champions an overhaul of the electoral process, points to the recent crisis over a possible presidential impeachment as evidence that the current system, with its ambiguous distinctions between legal and political proceedings, is in dire need of repair.

“Was the Starr Report an objective, investigative report executed to the letter of the law or a politically motivated slander campaign,” asks James Blaine, one of the coalition’s chief officers. According to Blaine, “the answer is not either/or but both/and – which makes the question moot to begin with.”

Instead, Blaine and his supporters offer up what they consider to be “the real question before the American people": should the public be forced to pay for investigations into alleged presidential misconduct or can it simply determine for itself what is the proper response in times of constitutional crisis.

The Coalition favors the latter course of action and has been working for the last two years on a constitutional amendment that would allow the public to weigh in more heavily on matters pertaining to presidential misconduct. At face value, the Coalition’s amendment does not differ greatly from past legislative propositions that have also called for national referendums on a variety of issues. But what sets this plan apart from earlier proposals to expedite the electoral process is the appearance of an agent hitherto excluded from constitutional debates: the consumer.

“Talk to any analyst this week and they’ll make the same contradictory remarks,” argues H.R. Millhouse, one of the Coalition’s top legal experts and a former Solicitor General, “on the one hand, they say voter turnout is going to be low this year and then they say that the public is tired of the Clinton-Lewinsky story. How do they know what the public feels given its reticence at the polls?” Millhouse’s eyes open up wide as he pronounces the Coalition’s answer: “Consumer polling.”

In a recent letter to the editor of the Washington Times, the Coalition declared that the era of constitutional consumer polling had already arrived and that “few of the logistical details still needed to be ironed out.” The Coalition’s plan would draw heavily on both broadcast media and the Internet to help create “a political stage upon which the public could finally voice its opinion.” Not surprisingly, Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire Australian with a media outlet in most English-speaking countries, is rumored to be one of the Coalition’s leading financial supporters.

But the Coalition’s critics, and there many of them on both sides of the political spectrum, claim that using the media to try anyone, let alone a top government official like the President, is a violation of due process if not a step towards anarchy.

James Bowdoin, an expert on constitutional law at Harvard University, says “[the plan] is mob rule by remote control with the remote in the hands of an elite few.” Bowdoin discredits the Coalition’s efforts to win legislative support for their constitutional amendment as opportunistic grandstanding and doubts the group will have any success. But like other critics of the Consumer Polling Amendment, Bowdoin does not underestimate the political reach of its proponents.

Earlier this week, the Fox television network, one of Murdoch’s U.S. companies, shelved a made-for-TV movie based on a journalistic account of the Clarence Thomas sexual harassment scandal. Although Ted Turner’s TNT network had also begun and then axed a movie about Thomas’ nomination hearings before the Senate in 1996, Bowdoin believes Murdoch’s decision to scrap his own network’s version betrays an underlying bias in the Coalition’s objectives.

“It’s too bad the project was dropped,” muses Bowdoin, “because the Thomas-Hill movie would have been a great test for the so-called constitutional consumer poll.”