And the story is simply this, that the American public hasn t rushed to any judgment about Bill Clinton, on the one hand, but on the other hand, they re taking this very seriously. There we go. If you look at the opinions they re expressing about Bill Clinton and what should happen if he, indeed, did some of these things, they are, indeed, taking it seriously, but four out of five of these surveys show no difference in his approval rating, so people are not changing their bottom line judgments all that quickly. He was 60 percent in our poll last weekend, a weekend in which he was being deposed in the Paula Jones case. The Presidential popularity game.
People can read that.
He s up there with Lyndon Johnson in 1966 and with Reagan in 1986, up in the 60's, not quite to the Dwight Eisenhower level, but we ll never see those levels again, and certainly was doing better than Richard Nixon did when he was so much under fire. He was doing very well, the whole political establishment is doing well, people feel good about things, and then comes this sort of body blow to public opinion. Now, the cliche here, the conventional wisdom is that the American people have immunized Bill Clinton on the sex issue because of the 92 election and then the 96 re-election. Paula Jones has been an ongoing scandal for three years, or an ongoing issue for three years. And the public is accustomed to this.