Room for Debate:

The Policymaking Consequences of Presidential Scandal

DANIEL V. KROOP
Harvard University

In late 1997, large-scale entitlement reform was a priority for Congress and the
President. In the aftermath of the Lewinsky scandal, however, reform died. Using
regression analysis, interviews, and archival research, this article draws three
major conclusions about modern policymaking. First, politicians are indeed
attentive to public concerns when setting their governing agenda. Second,
presidential scandal reconfigures Congressional priorities and shrinks the media
space required to heighten public attentiveness to an issue and in turn propel
reform. Finally, the Lewinsky scandal underscores the importance of presidential
reputation for both electoral and policymaking purposes. The case of failed
entitlement reform demonstrates the limits of our democratic institutions as
currently configured to confront long-term challenges.

This paper is not about health care reform. Yet any student of public policy
would naturally yearn to compare President Obama’s major policy victory and
President Clinton’s failed attempt at entitlement reform in the late 1990s. Though
both presidents were Democrats and both proposed changes striking at the heart of
American social welfare policy, the similarities end there. Democrats dominated
the 111th Congress while Republicans controlled the 105th and 106th. Obama
broached the issue in his first year—when Presidents are considered strongest
(Neustadt 1990)—while Clinton prioritized entitlements as a second-term swan
song. And while Obama has thus far remained free of any direct and abiding
personal scandal, Clinton became embroiled in a massive sexual imbroglio in
January 1998. A few days after the scandal broke, Clinton used his State of the
Union address to boast he would “Save Social Security First.” But with a booming
economy, a nation at peace, and Social Security only in long-term trouble, the real
story was unearthing the latest details on the President’s newest woman. The
public’s attention and Congress’ calendar were rapidly changing.
Historian Steve Gillon blames the Monica Lewinsky scandal for late 1990s
policy paralysis. No complex issues, he contends, could be addressed so long as
impeachment poisoned the waters—even with flush federal coffers. But to many,
entitlement reform merely met a common legislative death. To say nothing of the
media or interest groups, constitutionally-engineered friction between branches of
government makes large legislative packages enormous loads to lift.
 Nevertheless, the failure of entitlement reform seems set apart from
traditional Washington policymaking. While the mid-‘90s were a relatively
productive policymaking period, in just a few years Washington had became a
minefield for partisan fighting and legislative paralysis. Binder (2003) labels the
106th Congress (1999–2000) the most gridlocked of the past thirty years. In an
interview, Peter Baker of the New York Times agreed. “You can’t underestimate
the scandal in affecting those two years in Washington.” The irony for a student of
politics is that those years brought the elusive gift of budget surpluses: a legislative
rope of possibilities that became a political noose.
Policymaking is the battlefield of politics. The success of elected officials
in interpreting the public will and enacting policy changes accordingly is central to
the democratic trust. A clearer understanding of policymaking allows us to
improve self-governance and critically examine the functioning of our political
system. This paper develops a new model to explore the link between the politics
of presidential scandal and domestic policymaking. Extensive previous scholarship
explains the challenges of lawmaking during periods of divided government, and
the particular frequency of gridlock during lame-duck presidential terms (Mayhew
2005, Conley 2003, Silber 2007). Other works examine presidential strategies for
surviving scandal and the impact of the media on successfully pressing an agenda
(Stewart 2004). Yet there is a surprising lack of political science asking if scandal
yields domestic policymaking consequences, and if so, in what dimensions such
effects occur.
Quantitative methodology guides this paper. I generate three models to test
the effect of particular variables through multivariable regression. The first two
models explain whether or not American political institutions like the presidency
and Congress are genuinely responsive to public opinion. Using data from the
Policy Agendas Project and the Congressional Bills Project, I find that political
institutions in Washington are generally quite attentive to public opinion in aligning
with public priorities and drawing attention to them through State of the Union
rhetoric and Congressional hearings. This conclusion validates an essential
function of democracy, representativeness.
On the other hand, American government’s capacity to make policy changes
that reflect the will of the people seems much more limited. My third model arrives
at this conclusion through an unraveling of what Kingdon (1984) calls the “garbage
can” model of policy formation. Kingdon argues that to pass a policy, three strands
must be tied together: problem, policy, and politics. Political entrepreneurs who
successfully couple these strands and push them into a window of opportunity set
the national agenda.
I find that the effects of impeachment proceedings do seem to inhibit
policymaking productivity, above and beyond the influence of mere lame duck
status. Evidence is more inconclusive about the role of the media in this process,
but a host of theory and qualitative evidence, such as interviews and archival
research from the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, lend credence to the
conclusion that scandal limits presidential policymaking authority in the public
sphere.
Though it was unclear then, it seems obvious now that the national
obsession over the Lewinsky scandal had serious long-term policy effects. As the
dot-com bubble burst and the nation reeled in response to the attacks of September
11, 2001, the federal government rapidly returned to its old habit of exploding
deficits. By 2003, President George W. Bush’s $2 trillion in tax cuts had met the
cost of a multi-front international war. The June 2001 prediction of then-Senate
Majority Leader Thomas Daschle (D–S.D.) now seemed prescient: “I just know that
at some point reality is going to come crashing down on all of us and we’re going to
have to deal with it” (Wallace 2001).
The close of the twentieth century brought economic surplus and global
peace—a narrow window in which there was rare bipartisan potential for long-term
restoration of fiscal rectitude. Today, an aging population relies ever-increasingly
on Social Security, Medicare, and other social welfare provisions. While it is
simplistic to think that, without the Lewinsky scandal, successful entitlement
reform would have fixed long-term financial imbalances, it is clear that the ability
of elected officials to confront policy challenges in the face of scandal merits
renewed scholarly examination.

PERSPECTIVES ON CONGRESSIONAL-PRESIDENTIAL POLICYMAKING

Unpacking the way Washington interprets public opinion and creates public
policy is a tall order. In order to be specific, this paper examines those processes
through the lens of Congressional-presidential relations. Since I aim to determine if
scandal has a specific result, I focus on the way in which the formal and informal
powers of Congress and the presidency are altered by competing forces.
Kingdon (1984) is the germ of my model. He asserts, “As an administration
emphasizes its priorities… it limits people’s ability to attend to other subjects”
(197). Administrations most frequently take their cues from conditions in society.
Such nebulous conditions are actualized into problems when indicators, focusing
events, and feedback draw attention to the way in which they violate some values,
are comparatively bad, or are framed in a way that makes them seem so. In the
policy alternative generation and selection strand, Kingdon likens the process to
natural selection for ideas. Finally in the political capitalization strand, Kingdon
notes that swings in national mood, impending election, new administration, new
ideological distributions, and interest group pressures all effect the success of
agenda items (ibid.).
Kingdon lauds the way in which visible participants (the president, members
of Congress, etc.) affect the agenda, while invisible participants (journalists,
academics, analysts) affect the alternatives. This, says Kingdon, is “democracy at
work.” However, the complexities of agenda setting in the scandalized modern
presidential era put this finding in doubt. Whether democracy is still at work in the
1990s is addressed later in this paper.
 Kingdon writes that a complete linkage brings all three strands together:
problem, policy, and politics. When bundled, items rise dramatically on the
decision agenda of a government. If political entrepreneurs take advantage of open
windows of opportunity to push these proposals, there is a good likelihood of
success. Nevertheless, Kingdon notes even a bundled plan with an active policy
entrepreneur may die before it is made into law, due to the multiple veto points in
the American policy system. These include committees, interest group lobbying,
bicameralism, the filibuster, and presidential vetoes. In short, the entire process
appears more like a cloud than a clock—imprecise, scattered, and impossible to
neatly discern (223).

Divided Government and Gridlock

After 1995, the very character of the Clinton administration changed. For
the first time since the Truman years, a Democratic President met a Congress
controlled in both chambers by Republicans. Accordingly, literature on divided
government is central to understanding hypothesized corrosive effects of the
Lewinsky scandal on the machinery of government.
In his seminal study, Mayhew (1991, 2005) argues that the existence of
divided government actually has no statistically significant outcome on the passage
of policy. His hypothesis and methods have been re-evaluated since then, and a
debate rages in political science over whether Mayhew’s numbers lead to unsound
conclusions because he evaluates without a denominator of laws passed (Binder
2005; Edwards, Barrett, and Peake 1997; Royed and Borrelli 1997). Binder argues
that legislative output is better understood as a ratio also consisting of the size of
the policy agenda (Binder 2005, 38). She claims that disregarding the size of the
legislative agenda may undercount the potentially greater degree of policy change
proposed and enhanced under united government.
Mayhew counters that there is an endogeneity problem with adding a
denominator; namely, the size of the agenda will expand when there is divided
government, therefore decreasing legislative success as a percentage. However,
Binder uses unsigned editorials appearing in the New York Times to recreate the
political agenda for each Congress (37). By doing this, she reasonably claims not to
double-count the agendas of the two parties. Instead of mirroring the Democratic
and Republican platforms, the editorials supposedly reflect the central public debate
and agenda issues. This rebuttal to Mayhew’s greatest concern shows the
complexity of policymaking measurement. But it does lend confidence to Binder’s
conclusion that divided government has a statistically significant effect on
legislative performance (45).
Binder tests a variety of variables to gauge their effect on gridlock. Divided
government increases the average probability of gridlock by eleven percentage
points, bicameral differences increase it by twelve, and partisan moderation
decreases it by nine. Time out of Majority, Budgetary Situation, and Public Mood
(Lagged), were not significant. Binder has several interesting conclusions from her
data. In the 104th and 106th Congresses, the Senate was more frequently the cause
of stalemate than the House, and stalemate reached its peak of 70 percent in the
106th Congress (48, 67). Binder agrees that distributions of policy views within and
across the two major political parties have predictable and important effects on the
legislative performance of Congress and the president (Krehbiel 1998). She adds,
“Issue salience does seem to matter, with more visible issues more likely to secure
passage than ones of marginal media and elite salience” (Binder 96).

Partisanship and Institutional Conflict

Brady and Volden (2005) posit that new policies can only be adopted when
there is a significant alteration in pivotal members or their preferences (9). If this
mechanism is true, then the ideological chasm between the two parties matters
greatly: if parties are further apart, then the ability to find compromise when no
single party has control over all the pivotal players will decrease.
McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal (2006) show that the increasing levels of
elite polarization in the United States over the past half-century mean that Congress
will likely continue to get more starkly polarized. Conley (2003) adds “there may
be incentives at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue for what John Gilmour calls
‘strategic disagreement,’ or the conscious choice by the president and Congress to
delay policy decisions until more favorable conditions for partisan credit-claiming
arise” (7).
The 106th Congress, which began with the Senate trial of the president, was
marked by extreme partisanship. Representative Jim McDermott (D–Wash.)
lamented, “Everything was crafted on their side to win the election. And
everything we tried to do was derail them from winning the election…. It was the
most unproductive public policy year I’ve spent in my life” (Pfiffner 2006, 46).
It seems clear that not all politics is governing. Ginsberg and Shefter (1990)
take the pattern of investigations and prosecutions directed against Clinton, Reagan,
Nixon, Gingrich, and many others to reflect on the declining place of democratic
elections and the growing importance of “politics by other means.” Ginsberg and
Shefter assert that the process of “revelation, investigation, and prosecution”
became firmly institutionalized in the Clinton administration (39). From
Whitewater in 1993 to Travelgate in 1996 to Lewinsky in 1998, Clinton faced a
multitude of probes, inquiries, and charges.
The pressure is linked to non-electoral changes, importantly the changing
role of the far right. Between 1989 and 1994, the far right was activated over
environmental regulation, property rights, the Family Medical Leave Act, the
Clinton crime/gun bill, abortion, school prayer, and the contentious confirmation of
Clarence Thomas (Ginsberg and Shefter, 67). Conservative media outlets flourished
at this time. Rush Limbaugh, James Dobson, and Pat Robertson entrenched
themselves as national conservative commentators (ibid., 68). And in 1996, The
O’Reilly Factor premiered on the Fox News Channel. Its popularity grew steadily
until—as it has remained for the past nine years—it became the number one
nighttime cable news show (Ariens 2010).
“Nationally syndicated radio and television programs helped the Gingrich
Republicans to circumvent the antagonism of the established national news media
and to promote their ideas on the national level,” Ginsberg and Shefter assert (67).
The House Republican Conference used daily fax updates to update local radio
hosts, who in turn told listeners to lobby politicians on those issues near to them
(68). The circle was completed when Republican members of Congress voted to
satisfy such constituents. Members saw at least two advantages by doing this.
First, they could stave off threatened primary challenges from further-right
candidates; second, they could harness the right’s mobilized troops for their own
electoral advantage. Congressmen became extended foot soldiers in the
conservative movement’s war. The election outcome in 1996 did not stop
congressional Republicans from their full-court press against the president.
Time spent by White House staffers preparing for depositions and dealing
with subpoenas and legal fees inhibited the ability of the administration to operate
at full capacity. Republicans who regained Congress in 1994 promised to use their
investigative powers to harass Clinton for the remainder of his presidency. Former
Bush White House counsel C. Boyden Gray presciently prognosticated, “Clinton
will be debilitated” (165). Paul Begala, who had almost quit in the fall of 1998,
resigned less than a week after Clinton’s acquittal in February 1999. Begala had
“told friends he would never look at Bill Clinton the same way again” (Baker 2000,
415). This aggressive use of the techniques of investigation, publicity, and
exposure allowed the national media to enhance their autonomy and carve out a
prominent place for themselves in American government and politics (Ginsberg and
Shefter, 33).

The President and the Media

The President has long been seen as the foremost figure in American
politics, his office imbued with immediate news-making gravitas. In order to
achieve policy successes, Kernell (1997) remarks on the importance of “going
public,” the process by which presidents “promote themselves and their policies
before the American public” (ix). The president can go public in a variety of ways,
such as delivering a speech, having a press conference, or holding an event.
Kernell argues that politics in Washington has transformed from
institutionalized pluralism (conducive to bargaining) to individualized pluralism
(conducive to going public). By going public, the president bypasses political
players and other interests to speak directly to the public, oftentimes directly
precluding and undermining opportunities to negotiate a deal with Congress (5).
Examples from Ronald Reagan’s presidency nicely illustrate the point, particularly
on tax reform and budget cuts in 1984 and 1985. “We’re going to have
confrontation on spending and consultation on tax reform,” Washington Post
columnist Lou Cannon recounted a White House official predicting on November
29, 1984 (ibid.). By confrontation, the official meant going public; by consultation,
bargaining with Congress.
Yiotas and Segvic (2003) argue that the media’s choice to emphasize the
“sex scandal/adultery” attribute of the Lewinsky scandal most often, especially
when the story broke in January 1998, negatively affected the public’s assessment
of the story’s salience (567). Their explanation hinges on the media’s framing of
issues and the public’s perceptions of news coverage. Drawing on Entman, they
argue that news items are framed to be salient—that is “noticeable, meaningful, or
memorable to the audience”—and to frame a news item is to choose a particular
“problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment
recommendation of the item described” (569). To frame is to imbue a news item
with perspective and relevance.
Yiotas and Segvic then highlight the concept of “compelling arguments,”
which is when the media’s imposition of attributes on a news item affects the
salience of the news item itself. For example, Schoenbach and Semetko examined
news articles in advance of the first national German election following unification.
Though many articles dealt with the situation in the former East Germany, salience
for that issue decreased since the tone of the coverage focused on “successful and
rapid change,” thus weakening the importance of the issue and leading fewer voters
to perceive the situation in the East as a “problem.” The effect is termed “agenda
deflating” (572).
As Gitlin and Tankard write, “media themes are persistent [and] the initial
frame tends to determine how the issue will be presented in the future” (574).
Clinton’s scandal, at first revealed in sexual terms, never fully became about
criminal offenses.

Reputation, Trust, and Power

Finally, I turn to the interaction of reputation, trust, and power. Journalist

Steven Roberts provides two reasons for Reagan’s success in dealing with his first
Congress. “Lawmakers believed their constituents supported [the Reagan program]
and they were afraid that Mr. Reagan could galvanize that support through an adroit
use of television and punish any dissidents at the polls” (Kernell 151).
Today, the president attracts substantially more news stories than
Congress—a reversal of the mid-nineteenth century arrangement when presidents
received less press attention than congressional committees (220). Accordingly,
presidential popularity is more critical than ever. Such limelight allows the
president to go public, what Kernell labels a “means for achieving other ends”
(225). But popularity won is popularity that can be lost, and presidents who push a
program that is unpopular diminish their ability to draw on such popularity for later
programs.
Yet popularity must work in concert with public opinion, particularly in
public assessments of the most important issues facing the country. “When a
president goes to the country, he is counting on his prestige to persuade sufficient
numbers of citizens to communicate their support of his position to their
representatives…. All the president needs do is convince a sufficient number of
politicians that the political cost of resisting his policy is greater than any potential
gain” (250). That said, the late 1990s stand out as particularly politically
inattentive. For something like Social Security and Medicare reform, essential yet
long-term issues not easily lending themselves to simple solutions, the amount of
attentiveness that would need to be driven to the issue would be high.
John Thompson introduces his social theory of scandal by emphasizing the
seriousness of transgression in our modern mediated world. “Scandal matters
because… it touches on real sources of power” (Thompson 2000, xi). Thompson
positions modern postwar politics as actually non-ideological, with traditional class-
based parties replaced with the “politics of trust” (8). Because credibility,
character, and trustworthiness are used as substitutes for long-standing social
affiliations, scandal becomes a barrier to success for officeholders.
Thompson writes that scandal is significant because of its “potential for
damaging reputation and corroding relations of trust” (245). He distinguishes
between skill-specific reputation and character reputation, a distinction particularly
wide in respect to Bill Clinton’s approval as a president and as a person in the late
‘90s. Critically, the scandal did not incentivize the kind of bipartisanship that stoked
welfare reform in 1996, or the budget agreement in 1997. Instead, it encouraged
Republicans to continue with the “Slick Willy” characterization they pioneered
against then-Governor Clinton in the 1992 presidential campaign.
The amorphous yet significant issue of trust is a recurring theme both in the
media and among political professionals. On January 10, 1999, Senator Judd Gregg
(R–NH) said, “[The Senate trial of Clinton] could end up having a positive impact
because after we come out of the trial there’s going to be a desire on both ends of
Pennsylvania Avenue to show constructive action. The issue that’s sitting there
ready to go is Social Security” (Stevenson and Broder 1999). Yet, remarked the
New York Times journalists covering Congress, “Such an outcome presumes that
there is enough trust between two parties who have been savaging each other for
months that they will be willing to wade hand-in-hand into issues that are easy
targets for demagoguery. Trust may prove to be an especially scarce commodity
since Republicans and Democrats are thinking as much in terms of positioning
themselves for the 2000 elections as in terms of what they might accomplish
legislatively this year” (ibid.).

EXAMINING POLITICIANS, THE PUBLIC, AND POLICYMAKING

As V.O. Key famously wrote, “Voters are not fools” (Key 1966, 6).
Citizens’ policy preferences, expressed in different political configurations through
elections, may also change as a result of scandal. This paper considers such a
potential long-term effect.
To determine in which dimensions political scandal has domestic
policymaking consequences, in this chapter I develop three testable quantitative
hypotheses relating developments in the political sphere to results in the governing
sphere. I specifically investigate two complementary regions of high importance to
democratic governance: first, political responsiveness to the public’s problems, and
second, policymaking effectiveness in response to those problems. Taken together,
these issues will explain a great deal of the interaction between public opinion,
elected officials, and the policymaking purpose for which such officials serve.
Results are presented in the form of ordinary least square regressions. Some
regressions also use the statistical program Clarify (King, Tomz, Wittenberg, 2001)
to generate quantities of interest. These include predicted expected values when
variables change. In the absence of more than a single presidential impeachment in
the realigned post-1980 political era, these additional measures are imperfect; still,
they provide helpful contextualization when brought to light with all measures.
My key finding underscores a fundamental paradox in American
government: although political leaders are responsive to public opinion,
policymaking outcomes frequently are not. Competition for agenda space, already
limited by the public’s relative inattentiveness to political affairs on a day-to-day
basis, is further limited by large-scale scandal and impeachment. In the next
section, I place the relationship of the Lewinsky scandal and entitlement reform in a
comparative political context to further refine my argument.

Hypothesis 1: The President will attend to the public’s perception of the most
important problems by more fully discussing those problems in the State of the
Union. Congress will respond to priorities outlined in the President’s annual State
of the Union address by increasing the number of bills introduced, hearings held,
and laws both passed within the chamber and signed by the President.

My first hypothesis tests the Downsian democratic assumption that elected

officials are responsive to public opinion.1 Since the entire American people elect
the President, it is therefore sensible to posit that he will respond to their most
pressing concerns by speaking to those issues more extensively in the State of the
Union speech. I have selected the State of the Union speech because scholars have
documented that “public appeals have become a normal component of presidents’
attempts to influence policymaking,” and the State of the Union is the best choice
for longitudinal comparison since it is delivered annually in accordance with Article
II, Section 3 of the Constitution (Canes-Wrone 2006, 16). The address frames new
and existing proposals, and the speech’s content is important to establishing
presidential leadership in the following session of Congress.

                                                        
1
The literature here is extensive and some of the most central to studies of American government.
Downs (1957), Key (1961), Monroe (1979), and Page and Shapiro (1983) maintain that elected
officials respond to public opinion. Though Cohen (1997) and Jacobs and Shapiro (2000) argue that
presidents are not tethered to public opinion, the majority of scholars confirm the Downsian
viewpoint. For instance, Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson (2002a, 2002b) show that polling
encourages presidents to reflect the liberalism of the public mood.
 For its part, Congress never speaks as a unified body. Unlike the singular
presidency, there are 535 members in Congress, spanning a broad array of
ideologies. Accordingly, Congress must have its priorities measured not in
speeches, but in direct activity that precedes policymaking. And in turn, those
priorities can be aligned against the president’s State of the Union see if, in each
Congress, there is convergence or divergence in institutional policy priorities.
Arraying Congressional activity per major issue area into a matrix and then
regressing that matrix against State of the Union major-issue line references yields
such information.

Hypothesis 2: When looking at six of the most frequently cited Most Important
Problem areas, heightened concern over the economy and health will be positively
associated with concern over social welfare. Conversely, concern over crime,
international affairs, and government operations (which includes scandal,
corruption, and improper influence) will be negatively associated with concern
over social welfare.

An impressive correlation exists between quarterly unemployment and

quarterly identification of the economy as the most important problem (r2 = .887, p
< 0.001, see Figure 1). It thus seems reasonable to believe identification of Most
Important Problem is grounded in abiding respondent preferences.
This second hypothesis explores the possibility that the issue agenda facing
elected officials behaves in predictable ways. If so, it may help explain legislative
outcomes, since declining public pressure on one issue—instigated by an increase
or decrease in another issue—may reduce lawmakers’ dedication to implementing a
policy resolution on the first issue.
Looking at the FIGURE 1.
historical range of
responses
Americans give to
the question of Most
Important Problem,
six stand out. For
purposes of
examining
entitlements, social
welfare is most
pertinent. The other
five all boast an
average of around
(with the economy
frequently
exceeding) 10%
identification
annually between 1980 and 2008. This is a significantly more than the other dozen
measured issue areas.2

Hypothesis 3: Presidents in their second term, or presidents confronting major

scandal, or presidents with smaller majorities in Congress, are less effective at
getting laws passed. This effect is strongest when considering production of
Mayhew’s Major laws, less strong when considering Mayhew’s Important Laws,
and least strong when considering all laws.

These hypotheses take Mayhew’s law productivity as their response

variable. I assign a dummy variable of 1 to second-term Congresses and when the
President is embroiled in direct major scandal (Iran-Contra and Lewinsky only).3
In the Congressional majority case, they are scaled on a negative to positive scale
relative to the party controlling the White House.

Variables translated into OLS multivariate regression models:

H1. SOTU = β0 + (β1* HINTRO) + (β2 * HHEARINGS) + (β3 * HPASSED) + (β4 *

LAW) + (β5 * VETO) + (β6 * MIP) + ε

H2. MIPSOCWELF = β7 + (β8* MIPECONOMY) + (β9 * MIPHEALTH) + (β10 *

MIPCRIME) + (β11 * MIPINTLAFFAIRS) + (β12 * MIPGOVOPS) + ε

H3. LAWS IA/B/C = β13 + (β14 * LAMEDUCK) + (β15 * SCANDAL) + (β16 *

IMPEACHED) + (β17 * HMAJ) + (β18 * SMAJ) + (β19 * NATLSECURITY) + (β20 *
RECESSION) + ε

OLS Regression Results for H1

Variable Coefficients t p
β Std. Error
(Constant) 4.926 3.459 1.42 0.156
HINTRO 0.004 0.017 0.22 0.826
HHEARINGS 0.082*** 0.021 3.85 0.000
HPASSED -0.121 0.235 -0.51 0.607
LAW -0.032 0.375 -0.09 0.932
VETO 0.730 2.102 0.35 0.729
MIP 218.112*** 20.712 10.53 0.000
* p < 0.1; ** p < 0.05; *** p < 0.01
r2 0.458
Adjusted r2 0.441
Degrees of Freedom 188  
                                                        
2
Energy, the environment, and defense each average below the ten percent threshold.
3
These are the 99th, 100th, 105th, 106th, 109th, and 110th Congresses of the 97th through the 110th
consecutive congressional set.
 
OLS Regression Results for H2
Variable Coefficients t p
β Std. Error
(Constant) 0.112 0.078 1.42 0.186
MIPECONOMY 0.330* 0.159 2.08 0.064
MIPHEALTH -0.217 0.146 -1.49 0.167
MIPCRIME -0.162 0.133 -1.22 0.251
MIPINTLAFFAIRS 0.238 0.187 1.27 0.232
MIPGOVOPS -0.720** 0.287 -2.51 0.031
* p < 0.1; ** p < 0.05; *** p < 0.01
2
r 0.725
2
Adjusted r 0.587
Degrees of Freedom 15

OLS Regression Results for H3

Variable Coefficients t p
β Std. Error
(Constant) 11.068*** 1.217 9.10 0.000
LAMEDUCK 0.835 1.599 0.52 0.620
SCANDAL 2.199 3.13 0.70 0.509
IMPEACHED -8.161* 3.740 -2.18 0.072
HMAJ 0.031* 0.016 1.96 0.098
SMAJ -0.040 0.103 -0.39 0.711
NATLSECURITY 4.163 3.17 1.31 0.237
RECESSION 0.451 1.827 0.25 0.813
* p < 0.1; ** p < 0.05; *** p < 0.01
r2 0.684
Adjusted r2 0.315
Degrees of Freedom 13

Results

Hypothesis 1: The correlation between Most Important Problem and both the
number of days of House hearings held and State of the Union Line references are
statistically significant at the p < 0.01 level. This validates the hypothesis, against
some scholarship to the contrary (Cohen 1997, Jacobs and Shapiro 2000), that
politicians do “pander” to vox populi. In addition, the House hearings data suggest
there is institutional concordance. Congress, like the president, is responsive to
changes in national public opinion. Issues cited by the president in the State of the
Union receive more days of Congressional hearings: their importance is publicly
weighed, leaders and experts are brought to testify, and committees mark up and
move forward on bills. Though the number of House bills introduced, passed,
vetoed, or made into law do not show statistically significant correlation, there is
strong evidence in the hypothesized direction indicating that both the president and
Congress listen to public opinion.
Hypothesis 2: First, the economy and social welfare do move in tandem, though the
relationship is not as strong as hypothesized. It is significant at the p < 0.1 level.
This result has a very interesting application on the Clinton case I explore in depth.
If care over the economy and social welfare problems move together, then the late
1990s seem a poor time to push massive social welfare program reform. The
booming 1990s economy brought not just a huge predicted surplus but also
incredibly low unemployment. Therefore as individuals’ concern over their own
and the country’s fiscal future wane, it appears so too does the salience of Social
Security and other related programs. This lack of public concern could have
independently debilitated the drive for reform in Clinton’s final years, even absent a
presidential scandal.
Another other statistically significant variable, MIP GOVOPS, shows that
scandal takes the focus off social welfare. Significant at the p < 0.05 level, this tells
us that as concern over government operations increases, the interest in social
welfare decreases. The late 1990s saw serious consideration of this problem: in the
third quarter of 1998, as Clinton’s August grand jury testimony became essential
water-cooler fodder, government operations posted its largest percentage of
concern, with 11% of respondents calling it the most important problem facing the
country. In this model, scandal does appear to drag public opinion away from other
issues. An increase of ten points in those identifying government operations as the
greatest problem is correlated with a decrease in 7.2 points in those identifying
social welfare.

Hypothesis 3: Let us now turn to the lawmaking model. The lame duck, scandal,
and impeachment variables all move in the hypothesized negative direction. This is
helpful for at least showing that these issues do not assist policymaking, a
conclusion that would be quite surprising. The Clinton impeachment, more so than
the Iran-contra scandal which overtook the Reagan administration but remained at
arm’s length from the President, appears strongly negatively associated with
policymaking productivity. As a result, important policy passage is indeed
gridlocked by impeachment.
Control of the House is significant at the p < 0.1 level, revealing that
“having the numbers” in the House does assist lawmaking capacity. This
conclusion comports with the party government assertions of many political
scholars, who assert that partisan congruence across Pennsylvania Avenue increases
legislative productivity (Sundquist 1981, 1988; Cutler 1988; Kelly 1993).
In Figure 2, I identify Clinton’s final Congress with a label. It is clear from
the distance to the least-fit line that the 106th Congress’ performance was far below
even average expectations. Senator Joseph Lieberman (D–Conn.) said of the
106th’s first session that “[It] was post-impeachment and pre-election” (Mitchell
1999). Senator John McCain (R–Ariz.), who was seeking the 2000 Republican
Presidential nomination at the time, said “We have a poisoned atmosphere in
Washington that can only be cured by a new administration” (ibid.).
 FIGURE 2.

CLINTON IN CONTEXT

Even in 1997, the White House was looking to ‘99 for real movement on
Social Security. It seemed neither the policy answers nor the political breathing
room existed for a big bipartisan agreement in Congressional mid-term year 1998.
However, any Social Security/Medicare agreement in 1999 would surely require
extensive groundwork in ’98—trips to the Hill, calls with leaders of both caucuses,
public pressure, and undivided attention. The sheer scale of reform, affecting so
large a percentage of the American economy, would require it.
But the bombshell of January 1998—the revelation that Clinton might have
engaged in a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and
lied about that relationship in a legal deposition with Paula Jones’ attorneys—was
splashed across newspapers, cable news, and the Internet. In September 1998, upon
the release of the Starr Report, scandalous details flew across the globe. In a
section entitled “Narrative,” the Starr report covered, in explicit detail, the
interactions between Clinton and Lewinsky. Although hard evidence does not
exist, most people would agree that the news hole devoted to coverage of the
Clinton/Lewinsky scandal was pervasive. March 10, 1999, was the first day in
more than a 365-day time span that the New York Times did not mention
Lewinsky's name in any of its articles (Yioutas and Segvik 2003, 31).
Additionally problematic for the President was that he had only set the stage
for massive surpluses. As OMB Director Jacob Lew and Domestic Policy Adviser
Gene Sperling admitted in a memorandum to the President, “Large surpluses
remain only a projection, and less desirable outcomes are certainly possible”
(Clinton Archives, NEC I, OA40676 [5], 1). The limited on-budget surpluses in
2000 and 2001 did not leave an exceptional amount of room for new priorities.
Those would be left to Clinton’s successor.
In a February 7, 1999, Washington Post opinion piece, David S. Broder
penned that fixing Social Security and permanently reducing the national debt
would be “the greatest gift to our kids.” He argued that cutting interest payments
on debt payments that line “the pockets of the bondholders, foreign and domestic,”
would responsibly free up money for social programs and other national needs. Yet
what to do with the surplus remained a controversy. Senate Finance Chairman
William V. Roth (R–Del.) said, “I find it incomprehensible that the president’s plan
would not allow for a wide-gauge tax cut in the next 15 years” (ibid.). Even then, a
large tax cut was a focus for Washington Republicans, and problematized
budgeting-in structural changes to Social Security in Clinton’s last two years.
Partisan back and forth continued through late 1999, when it became clear
with the approaching 2000 election that no real movement could be made on the
issue. Daniel Cohen (2000) argues that:

Despite repeated claims by Clinton loyalists that the president had a remarkable ability to
‘compartmentalize’ and not let himself be distracted by the scandal that nearly consumed
him, it is now clear that not only the president but the entire Clinton administration was
seriously distracted during 1998….

For the remainder of his term Clinton would have to deal with a Congress where more than
half the members didn’t believe that he deserved to be in office, and tried to block many of
his programs, and where even his friends no longer trusted his word (100).

The pervasive power of reputation in establishing policymaking credibility is

remarkable, if not surprising. Clinton, now deemed a liar in the court of public
opinion if not the Senate, had been seriously stripped of credibility. Like Reagan
and Nixon before him, Clinton admitted to wrongdoing only after proof of the
misdeed was laid before him. In not coming forward with the truth, his credibility
suffered. (Blaney 2001, 105; Benoit, W.L. et al. 1991, 272-294).
In all, the Clinton saga showed the difficulty of garnering support for an
initiative in the face of scandal. Administrative memos seem to imply that there
was at least the possibility of real reform in 1999 prior to Lewinsky; it therefore
cannot just be said that lame ducks are incapable of policy change. Indeed, Reagan
completed tax reform in 1986 before the inevitable politicization of the end of his
term. However, the cost of protecting Clinton from removal from office was
presidential credibility. Though hard to quantify, it is clear that the degradation of
trust in the late 1990s, combined with public apathy, doomed a massive undertaking
like entitlement reform.
Today, as partisanship has increased and the filibuster threat has become
common, the addition of scandal as another stumbling block to passing major
legislation is devastating. Presidential scandal, in particular, can rise to the status of
a major agenda item for the public and the media, to the point of removing
Washington’s ability to govern responsibly on other issues. The government is
already handcuffed in governing responsively when a policy issue is highly salient;
to put political scandal on the front burner exacerbates the limitations of dealing
with policy issues.
For its part, the media continues to focus on scandal coverage so long as
there are new developments. Counsel Starr certainly provided such developments.
In an environment of traumatizing scandal, the president found little place from
which to leverage an effective push back with other publically salient issues.
Clinton increasingly turned to foreign policy in 1999-2000. In that realm, mostly,
the President avoided members of Congress hoping for a party-wide sweep of the
House, Senate, and White House in 2000.
However, even with the Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment
proceedings, there is not enough evidence to conclude that entitlement reform
would have taken place. Perhaps surprisingly, some evidence suggests it still would
not have. While Clinton was the first elected president to be impeached, he also
presided over the longest peacetime economic expansion in history. The data show
that social welfare policies become less politically salient as the economy improves.
Taken in tandem with the running down of Clinton’s political clock and the
competitive parity of polarized parties in Congress, entitlement reform might well
have died without Lewinsky.
The policymaking atmosphere of the late 1990s is unique. Not for forty
years had the federal government posted a surplus. Not once has it happened since
2001. To say nothing of the media or partisanship, that critical historical fact places
a heavy demand on scholars seeking definitive answers. Had Vice President Gore
become President upon Clinton’s resignation, there indeed would have been fewer
limitations to passing entitlement reform. The scandal, for one, would not have
eaten up the media agenda for an entire year. Yet if there were a Ford-like
presidential period, however, it is unrealistic to think Republicans would not have
chomped at the bit for 2000, positioning Gore in an ineffectual light. Even if not,
there would remain a litany of issues to work out on entitlements in order to pass a
bill into law. Republicans would have had plenty of incentive to sit on their hands
until 2000. George W. Bush polled well against Gore in 1998-99, and tax cuts,
private pension accounts, and Medicare reform took precedence for Congressional
Republicans above shoring up Social Security with the surplus.
But the political bubble of Washington cannot fully explain the myopia
gripping the country in the late 1990s. If Americans hadn’t flocked to read the Starr
Report on the Internet, or provided CNN with its highest ratings since O.J. Simpson
when Clinton admitted to his relationship with Lewinsky on 17 August 1998,
perhaps the media obsession would have died down (AP 1998). That said, the
media covers whatever is news, and Clinton’s lying became serious political and
legal news in 1998.
I aim to have shown that, in one sense, the power is still the people’s.
Politicians respond to public opinion. Indeed, the president in the modern media
age is consumed with popular opinion, because it is the much of his presidency’s
power. However, I have also shown that politicians will prioritize the power at
stake in the next election over a policy adjustment functioning far in the future.
Though self-serving and, in retrospect, disappointing, it is in a strict sense
democratic. Unless one party mightily dominates both sides of Pennsylvania
Avenue, the incentives of gridlock and political point scoring prove tempting. Even
in future times of surplus and peace, a policy to ensure long-term stability will face
harsh odds against the steeled spines of Washington’s political animals.
Scholars, citizens, and elected officials should all think critically about the
modern state of governmental responsiveness to our challenges. While I have
demonstrated that scandal is a toxic asset in the Oval Office, it alone is not
responsible for failures in our government to deliver reform.
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