The elections of 1998 look to be bad news for the Democrats and worse for the country.
Democratic prospects were never very good this year. Midterm elections historically are unkind to the party in power, especially a party like the Democrats whose low-income supporters are less likely to make it to the polls without the big stakes and bigger hype of a presidential contest. And this year, continuing to be lacerated by questions about their fund raising in 1996, Democrats have been painfully circumspect and much less successful. The Republican advantage in campaign funds, always substantial, has become startling. Even a major victory on the Democratic side has its irony: The unions, still the party’s best donors, defeated a California ballot proposition that would have limited their ability to make political contributions, but in doing so, they spent millions of dollars that otherwise might have found their way into Democratic campaigns. The shortage of money has added to the Democrats’ difficulty in persuading attractive potential candidates to run for office: In Colorado, for example, Representative David Skaggs not only declined to run for the Senate, but decided to retire from the House. Concentrating their resources on the competitive House races that might give them a majority-an outside chance at best-Democratic strategists effectively allowed dozens of Republican incumbents to be returned without opposition.

Here and there, Democrats can spot a glimmer. Gray Davis is doing well in the gubernatorial contest in California, and Democrats have a good shot at picking up three or four other governorships, as in Minnesota, where the party’s nominee is the state’s attorney general, Hubert Humphrey III. Recent polls give Senator Ernest Hollings a decent lead in South Carolina, Evan Bayh may pick up a Senate seat in Indiana, and Democrats cling, precariously, to their perennial hope of defeating Al D’Amato in New York. Republicans also obligingly nominated a number of more-or-less extreme right-wingers-Bob Dornan, seeking to return to Congress, may be the nuttiest-giving Democrats better chances than they would have enjoyed otherwise. In Illinois, for example, Peter Fitzgerald’s victory in the G.O.P. primary rescued Carol Moseley-Braun from the list of dead ducks, although her campaign is still in the political ICU.

However, there aren’t many grounds for Democratic optimism. In California, a Republican rightist, Darrel Issa, lost to Matt Fong, an appealing candidate who has Senator Barbara Boxer in serious trouble. Social conservatives are behaving with unwontedly good political sense, focusing on opposition to partial-birth abortions, where their position has overwhelming political support. Democrats, moreover, have their own cranks, like Geoffrey Fieger, their doomed candidate for governor in Michigan, while some Democratic centrists, like Jay Nixon, their nominee for the Senate in Missouri, have made black voters restless. Now, with the president’s troubles, Republicans have reason to think that they can pick up ten or twelve seats in the House and three or four in the Senate, a splendid showing considering their party’s lackluster congressional record.

Democrats will be entering the campaign demoralized and resentful, aware that the president’s caperings and the Starr Report will dominate public discussion, and knowing that they have no really good way of responding. Some, of course, are talking about resignation or even impeachment, but most are likely to say that the president’s conduct, while repellent, did not involve impeachable offenses, an argument that is at least defensible and is probably correct, as far as the Constitution is concerned. (The Constitution, after all, speaks of high crimes, not tacky ones.) Clinton’s recent contrition helps; so does the fact that Starr’s report is overtly partisan and fundamentally voyeuristic-the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, no friend of Clinton’s, called it "a Harold Robbins novel"- especially since Starr himself has rather less charm than the average gauleiter. Still, Democrats will be on the defensive and holding the moral low ground.

The president and his party are on terms of bare civility, united only by their enemies. A good many Democrats-leaders and citizens-feel betrayed, not because the president lied or because he did so with that quivering sincerity that is one of his trademarks, but because he lied so stupidly, telling flat untruths that always stood a good chance of being exposed. Machiavellians had better not bungle: those who admired Clinton’s slickness and excused him for many faults when he euchred their enemies are not inclined to forgive his very public pratfall.

In any case, Bill Clinton has worn out his welcome among Democrats. Newsweek asked, "Can He Still Lead?," but for Democrats he was never much of a leader. His version of leadership is conciliatory-Clinton said he wanted, in his second term, to be a "repairer of the breach"-more suited to patching the old order than to changing it, championing consensus rather than party. "A political Typhoid Mary," Robert Kuttner writes, the president is devastating to his friends and allies. And for the foreseeable future, he will find it hard to appeal to the high road of moral suasion and principle without evoking snickers. Even on his own terms, he is pretty much a spent force, and Democrats have plenty of reasons to wish him gone.

Republicans, of course, have partisan reasons for glee, but the attack on the president is dangerous for them, too-John Czwartacki, one of Trent Lott’s aides, called it "Kryptonite." Conservative zealots want the president’s scalp (to say nothing of other body parts), and most partisan Republicans sympathize. Independent voters, by contrast, so far seem to think that while the president is a sleaze, he ought to stay in office, and Republicans have to conciliate their sensibilities. Especially, the G.O.P. cannot afford to look partisan or persecutory, and Republicans are lucky to have the House hearings chaired by the admirable Henry Hyde of Illinois. Republican strategic interests suggest leaving Mr. Clinton in office-why give Gore the present of incumbency?-and, despite promises of an expeditious impeachment process, they can be expected to keep that pot boiling, rhetorically, until after the election.

Meanwhile, Democrats and their allies are starting to retaliate by unmasking the seamy and steamy irregularities on the Republican side; Dan Burton’s (R-Ind.) illegitimate child and Helen Chenoweth’s (R-Idaho) affair, not to mention that of Congressman Hyde, are probably only the beginning. Republicans, of course, are sure to have a similar list of their own. The campaign of 1998, in short, bids to be a season of exceptional nastiness, adding to the public’s already abundant disenchantment with our institutions and with democratic politics.

To most voters, there are no heroes in the story: disappointed or disgusted by the president, they despise his critics. In their view-partly distorted, but only that-our political leaders, beginning with Messrs. Clinton and Starr, are guilty of pettiness, letting themselves be governed by tawdry passions and schoolyard arrogance, all apotheosized by moralism and ideology. Meanwhile, great issues get neglected or ignored. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) complained recently that the president, distracted, has been able to offer only weak leadership in response to the global economic crisis; one imagines millions of voters responding, "And whose fault is that? A plague on both your houses." The greater number of Americans recognize that the wrangle in Washington is damaging not only the president but the presidency, and with it, the country. They want the whole shebang to go away. The voters, Boston University’s Alan Wolfe writes, "are more in tune with realpolitik than the politicians."

In the short term, however, this rather evenly balanced public distaste works in favor of the Republicans. In the first place, it will help keep turnout down on election day. And second, it reinforces distrust of government, no bad thing for most Republicans, but a blow to Democrats as the party of the state.

From a Democratic viewpoint, the focus on the president’s wrongdoings is doubly unfortunate, partly because the party is tainted by its association with him, but more importantly because it takes attention away from what is otherwise a very strong Democratic case. With few exceptions, this has been a do-nothing Congress: In the most obvious omission, Republican majorities have failed to move forward on campaign finance reform, an issue manifestly central to the future of democratic politics. The G.O.P. promise to cut taxes, moreover, seems less compelling this year. For all their ideological suspicion of government in the abstract, voters continue to express a desire for government programs and protections-for better education, for the regulation of HMOs, and for policies to afford a measure of economic security. The stock market’s recent case of the vapors has muted the chorus calling for the privatization of Social Security. And in the same sense, the global economic crisis dramatically reflects the inadequacy of unregulated markets and the need for public intervention in the interest of home, work, and social order. As Paul Lewis writes, Karl Marx, wrong about socialism, looks increasingly prescient as a student of capitalism, and even Francis Fukuyama has acknowledged doubts about "the end of history." A campaign debate concerned with matters other than phone sex and thong underwear might find time to challenge America’s increasingly harsh class structure, its towering inequality of respect, and the looming resentment that stalks both. That sort of public discussion, however, will have to wait for another time.

Bill Clinton is a survivor and he will probably remain in office. It is just possible that his humbling will give new depth and seriousness to his soul-that, "broken in spirit," as he said on September 11, he will be strong of heart. But that’s a very long shot, and not worth risking the rent money. "We force the spring," Clinton said in his 1993 inaugural; in 1998, we will probably settle for surviving the winter.