Clearly the Clinton problems are a gift to President Bush and congressional Republicans. A new Gallup Poll shows that Bush's favorable ratings, which were about tied with President Clinton's late last year, have risen sharply while Bill Clinton's numbers have fallen. Following the prescribed tradition for freshmen, Sen. Clinton has been doing far more listening than public speaking. She waited for more than a month to make her first floor speech, on health care, a subject on which she is an acknowledged expert. On ethical matters, Clinton so far has largely avoided catching any public flak from her colleagues.
Senators naturally are loath to criticize their own.
Plenty of others have been in ethical scrapes before. Eventually, though, Clinton will risk exhausting her goodwill with other senators unless she can steer clear of controversy for a while. As political analyst Ross K. Baker of Rutgers University noted, the Clintons have caused a problem for all Democratic senators.