Clinton's high aproval rating and Monica Lewinsky - 24 July 1998

Well, from the northernmost tip of the far western state of Washington, zooming south-east across 4,000 miles to the Florida Keys and from southern California blazing north and east, the same distance to the rock-bound coast of Maine, the whole country was burning and frying in days over 90 and in more than half the nation, over 100º.

The weather bureau says it, they can't dredge up the record of a time when the whole continent looked as if it suffered from a single climate. All except one city, which is unique in this hemisphere, in having a micro-climate all its own, within the small compass of the city of San Francisco. Across the bay from the city, only three miles inland, it was 100º. Across the Golden Gate Bridge and the first valley town to the north is in the mid-90s. But start from that town and drive south two miles towards the bridge and coming into San Francisco, you see round a bend, a vast, bulging, drifting cloud of wonderful white, lazy fog. The mid-afternoon temperature in San Francisco – 63º.

Except for a tiny sliver of the Oregon coast, way up north on the Pacific, which has a chronic climate, much like England's and undulating slate-grey skies, more often than not, gentle rain, lots of umbrellas and very green fields, it's the same story across the entire country. One network, the other night, put together a collage of brush fires tearing across Arizona, of the ruined horizons of beaches in Georgia, of corn and cotton in Texas, the citrus fruits giving up the ghost in the tinder box of Florida and you'd think Dante had been resurrected and re-staged the Inferno on an apocalyptic scale.

And you'd have one plausible reason, the farmers' reason, to why the stock market dropped not far short of 200 points in two days. The "futures" of much of the nation's fruits and vegetables don't look very rosy and I'm told by my greengrocer, good heavens, a word I've never used in 60 years, it shows either that the heat is getting to me in the worst way or later than sooner, we resort to our origins. Just to be sure I looked it up in Webster. It says crisply, greengrocer, a retailer in fruits and vegetables, in brackets, "Brit.". Well then, Mr Shim, the Korean round the corner is my greengrocer, though he'd be much surprised to hear it. He says that already the supplies of fresh stuff, coming in from just about everywhere, near and far, are shrinking by the day and the prices going up in inverse proportion.

It's a factor that Mr Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board didn't, as they say, factor in in his warning the other day that just now what the United States has to fear is less the continuing deterioration of the Asian economy than the prospect of early inflation here at home. He has not, so far, mentioned the heat or the farmers.

Why should he? He leaves an air-conditioned home to drive in an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned hearing room of, this week, the Senate Banking Committee. One of these days I suspect he's going to be called to dispense his learning before the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, which is the main farming one, not to mention its various allied sub-committees, Agriculture Credit, Agricultural Research, Foreign Agricultural Policy, Soil and Water Conservation, Rural Development.

But rotting crops, bankruptcy and the prospect of inflation is all the farmers talk about. Sooner than later, I suspect, their view will begin to strike the distance vision of the city folks. As I think I mentioned last time, in the good bad old days, the infernal summer weather was mostly what Americans thought and talked about, that and baseball and what to stack up for a picnic at the beach or wherever, because, as I said, Washington was a dead city.

Before the Second World War, that is before air-conditioning, both houses of Congress and all their cronies and lobbyists and petitioners managed to get through their labouring and haggling by the end of June and take to the hills or lakes or seashore or mountain cabins and the fat trout rivers. Nowadays Congress goes on and on, demonstrating a perfect example of Parkinson's Law. You remember Parkinson? The wily Englishman, who, 40 years ago just put his finger on the moment in the life of a bureaucracy when it can grow fat. His immortal maxim – work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Tell the Congress it has to be through before all hell descends with the July heat and it slams its desks shut on the last day of June. But tell them (you don't have to tell them, Senators and Congressmen with snow-white hair have grown up under the impression that air-conditioning is a law of nature), so you say, your work in Washington will take as long as you need and they've got into the habit of saying, well we'll have to see how long we have, to which the fatal answer is, all the time you care to take.

These morbid reflections are due to the impression that, if Congress still had a deadline, we should by now know what the special prosecutor has been able to find out about the president's relations with the immortal, it seems, Miss Lewinsky. He would have already delivered his report to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and after conferring with colleagues on the committee, he would have decided to file charges of impeachment or to do nothing at all.

After all these weary months, the whole Lewinsky thing came up late last fall. We hear this week that what Mr Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor, is trying to find out from the Grand Jury that must be mighty weary by now, is what did four Secret Servicemen on duty with the President on 28 December last hear about Miss Lewinsky's visit to see the president? It was the last time she was to be in the White House and the informed rumour, shall we say, has it that Miss Lewinsky returned presents the president had given, that she talked with the president's secretary before going into see him, that the president is alleged to have maintained that she did no more than pop her head in and say hello, goodbye but that Mr Starr has witnesses who allegedly believe that that could have been the occasion when the president might have persuaded Mss Lewinsky to testify falsely before a Grand Jury looking into, wait for it, Miss Paula Jones's case against the President of the United States. Must I go on? It'll all come out in the wash, one day, that's what Mr Starr says, while the president and his lawyers seem quietly determined to say no more than he's already said, which so far as we know, is to deny any wrongdoing.

But Miss Lewinsky is alleged to have said one thing to her lawyers and another to a friend who secretly taped a long conversation with her, way back. Is that legal? It surely ought not to be. It happened in Maryland and its legality is yet another of the pack of legalities that are being gone into. There's no way that this tangled web can be simply unravelled.

All I can say now is, first, the peril to the president is not that he may have had sexual relations with this young woman. Weirdly, over 60% of the people think he did. But Mr Clinton's popularity rating, is he doing a good political job running the country, is also in the 60s, as high as ever. The question Mr Starr, the special prosecutor, is dying to have positively answered in the affirmative is, did Mr Clinton or a close friend of his or his devoted secretary, advise or persuade Miss Lewinsky to lie by declaring innocence, either to the sitting Grand Jury or in a deposition she's supposed to have made. Was she persuaded by the president to lie?

That's the nub of the whole huge ball of twine, if twines have nubs, and yet not another strand of meaningless string. You'll have heard from the few times I've gone into this, to spare you the writhing coils of justice, you'll have heard another paradoxical statistic, that a majority of Americans are sick and tired of the whole thing and the majority takes a shriekingly bored view of the persistence of Mr Starr.

Worse still for him is a recent poll which runs dramatically against the popular verdict of six months ago. Suppose the President did have sex and suppose he did persuade Miss Lewinsky to hush it up in public before the Grand Jury and, granting that that is the crime that according to the Constitution would make him eligible for impeachment, knowing all that, would you want to see him thrown out of office? And whereas it used to be, "Oh in that case...", over 60% again say, well if he did lie, then he did obstruct justice and suborn perjury, just like Mr Nixon and he ought to go. Today about 50% say, "So what, he's doing a great job, though as a man his character is not to be trusted".

It all comes down to a question that's rarely asked these days. Since the youth of Dr Gallup, as long as polls have been taken, the popular answer has always been firm to this question, "Yes the presidency must represent the moral authority of the nation". Apparently today most people don't think so or don't care and that too, is something Mr Henry Hyde, the very balanced, perceptive, experienced and fair-minded chairman of the House Judiciary Committee will bear in mind when and if he gets a report from Mr Starr suggesting grounds for impeachment.

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