Who got impeached? Assessing the political damage.

Washington's longest-running show has finally come to a close, and almost no one will miss it. There never was any drama in the Impeachment Follies - the votes to remove the president simply weren't there, especially given his strength in the polls - and it was pretty boring even as a soap opera, since the characters, Monica and Bill, Ken and Linda, were more tawdry than engaging. Toward the end, the House managers were reduced to reruns, seemingly puzzled by their failure the first time around; even the jokes have stopped being funny. As political theater, it was a disaster for Republicans, and Americans - already resentful about Judge Starr's $40 million flop - are wondering about the price they paid for admission.

Certainly, it has damaged our institutions. Bill Clinton has helped to take the remaining shine off the presidency, but the majority of Americans appear to recognize that his "impropriety" was less hurtful to the office than the insistence on exposing it in all its less-than-titillating details. As a result, Congress, which had even less of a moral aura to start with, is falling even lower in public esteem: the Republicans, as the congressional majority, seemed to have turned self-destructive, rejecting the pragmatism that is the hallmark of American politics.

Republicans, however, have their reasons, even if, in the last analysis, their calculations prove to be in error. The great majority of members of Congress can afford to ignore national opinion polls: They are elected by districts in which their party is dominant and - in the case of Republicans - where most voters probably want the president disemboweled. At a generous estimate, only about fifty seats in the House and fifteen in the Senate can really be said to be at risk. Still, that minority could, at any number of points, have brought the charade to a close; the mystery, consequently, is the Republicans' lemming-like solidarity.

Even the safest Republican members of Congress find it wise to worry about primaries, and hence about the party's right wing: conservatives are disproportionately strong among primary electorates, since the less zealous are apt to forget or stay home. Aside from the risk of losing a primary - realistically, a small one for most incumbents - any challenge drains campaign funds and leaves some scars. In competitive districts or states, moreover, primary contests pull candidates to the right, away from the center that is likely to be the decisive ground in a general election, so that moderates walk on eggs wherever the right might take mortal offense.

Also, in the internal life of the House and Senate, careers - and especially, projects that benefit a member's state or district - turn very heavily on the favor of party leaders. Paradoxically, Newt Gingrich, whose high ambitions make him sensitive to broad currents of opinion, might have been disposed to make a deal short of impeachment. As it was, the dominant presences in the House were right-wingers like Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Dick Armey (R-Tex.), so militant they make even Trent Lott (R-Miss.) look moderate, neo-Confederate nostalgia and all. DeLay and his friends are not people who hesitate to punish deviants, as Peter King (RN.Y.) has found since voting against impeachment, and any Republican with a legislative agenda had ample grounds for observing party orthodoxy.

It is important, too, that wavering Republicans knew that the president wasn't going to be removed from office, once the final vote was taken. At every point in the process - in the House, but also in the early stages of the Senate trial - it was tempting to pass the buck, relying on the fact that in the end, the imbroglio would come to nothing and someday would drop out of sight and out of mind: Conservatives will remember how you voted, but moderates - who probably don't care that much or are distracted by other issues - are more likely to forget.

Former Senator Alan Simpson, a shrewd head, recommended that strategy, encouraging Republicans to discount the polls, trusting to the electorate's fabulously short memory and capacity for inattention. It's a gamble: back in 1990, New Jersey Democrats were assuring one another that anger over Governor Jim Florio's tax increase would dissipate before the next election; in fact, Democrats lost both houses of the legislature and eventually the governorship, and are still trying to claw their way back. Some Republicans, in fact, ought to know that any such hope is forlorn. Tom Campbell (R-Calif.), for example, comes from a highly educated, liberal-to-moderate district - its political epicenter is Palo Alto and Stanford University - and his vote for impeachment makes him a good bet to lose in next year's election.

Nevertheless, Simpson is right, up to a point. Most voters will forget political specifics, and in no very long term. Further, while despising Congress as a whole, they give their own representatives a broad measure of tolerance. But political events, half-remembered, do form voters' images of a party. A few years after 1972, relatively few Americans could have said much about George McGovern's actual proposals and platform, but they were left with an enduring impression of Democrats as dovish and permissive liberals, identified with the counterculture, a notion that still influences American politics. The Lewinsky affair, similarly, is solidifying the view that Republicans are fanatics, in the grip of the religious right or partisan ideologues willing to shut down the government or wreck the country. That perception is going to cost the Republicans, in 2000 and after.

The interesting story in the Republicans' obsession isn't the moderates' willingness to kowtow, but the peculiar intensity of the right's hatred for Clinton (a man transparently too weak to be grandly evil), a loathing evident since the earliest days of Clinton's presidency.

In the first place, for social conservatives Clinton symbolizes the culture of the '60s, and with it, the forces of moral decay - a draft-dodging McGovern supporter, sexually promiscuous, tolerant of homosexuality, and, above all, a challenge to traditional gender roles. Mr. Clinton is soft, pliant, and conciliatory. Mrs. Clinton (until recently, much less popular than the president) is a person with convictions and commitments who does not shrink from the battle; worst of all, before his presidency, Mrs. Clinton made more money than her husband. (For the evangelical right, of course, it accentuates the president's faults that he is, at least nominally, a born-again Christian, so that the anti-Clinton crusade takes on the color of a trial for heresy.) Conservatives are only beginning to recognize how pervasive - and how profound - social liberalism is in the country's mood. As Alan Wolfe observes, most people who hold traditional moral beliefs are not disposed to "judge" others. As Bill Bennett and his allies are beginning to learn, things in River City are even worse than they thought.

In one sense, the conservative pursuit of Clinton has been successful: it has turned the president away from any inclination to revive liberalism's economic agenda or fondness for the state, a possibility he flirted with early on, most evidently in relation to health care. Internationally, the '80s were dominated by the right, with Mrs. Thatcher its commanding spirit; the '90s have tilted, hesitantly but clearly, toward the left, invoking government to protect families and social order against the unsettlings of the market and technology. Clinton's sympathies run in that direction, but his administration has little to show in the way of accomplishments; bumbling in the first years, Clinton's presidency has been engrossed, at least since 1994, with his personal survival, so that his having avoided impeachment looks to be the great achievement of the Clinton years.

This relative victory, however, has only underlined the need for American conservatives to demonize the president in the interest of protecting what's left of their characteristic illusion. Clinton has embraced and taken credit for balancing the budget, welfare reform, and a reduction in the size of government. A president whose fortunes turn on America's very uneven prosperity, Mr. Clinton has become even more enthusiastic about free trade and market economics, with barely a gesture toward trade unions or human rights. And in Clinton's economic turn rightward, conservatives are forced toward the terrifying truth that the market, left to itself, panders to desire and undermines social institutions, teaching relativism more effectively than legions of the most seductive intellectuals. In its devotion to individualism and unregulated change, the right has been savaging the values and virtues it professes to love, so perhaps it is appropriate that congressional Republicans have chosen to fall on their swords.

For Democrats, by contrast, the president's travail has been magical: Opposing Ken Starr's Grand Guignol has made the party's crazy quilt look like a tapestry. For a long time, most Democrats have been variously unhappy with the president, finding fault with him as a person, as a political leader, or both. There isn't a lot of enthusiasm for Bill Clinton these days - and Democrats in Congress have wisely declined to embrace the notion that the president is entitled to an inviolable private life - but the differences within the party have become largely invisible. The contest for the presidential nomination in 2000, which might have been a fracturing combat between Old Democrats and New, now looks like a walk for Al Gore. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), a splendid leader during the impeachment battle, has decided to pursue the speakership rather than the presidency, leaving Bill Bradley - as a candidate, a cure for insomnia - the vice-president's only major rival.

Once the trial is over, however, party unity will get dicier, with the odds against the Democrats coming through on their professed eagerness to deal with other looming issues. They will need to remember the argument they offered against the president's accusers, that the effort to overturn the result of a democratic election is a graver matter, constitutionally, than all of Bill Clinton's slitherings. Despite the encroachments of a politics pursued through litigation and administration - symbolized by the Paula Jones case and its aftermath - self-government by equal citizens, and hence majority rule, is the republic's bedrock. It needs defending against the multiplying inequalities of the time. The Democrats, for a wonder, have managed this time to escape from the cave of Cyclops; it remains to be seen whether they can find their way home.

Wilson Carey McWilliams teaches political science at Rutgers University.