I notice that a new diary about impeachment from my friend buhdy el tigre is in the top slot tonight. As a longstanding member of the impeachment-averse team who has nevertheless come out for the impeachment of Gonzales and Cheney, I'm not going to argue with it on substance, although I disagree at points. (Well, I will note that the biggest reason to hesitate about impeachment are omitted: that if it turns into a bellyflop it may leave us less able to do the things we are doing well now, like engage in investigations.)
But I come in peace. Here's something that everyone, regardless of our feelings on impeachment, ought to be able to support -- and it's an action item, too:
We should be polling on impeachment. We should, in fact, be collecting money to do a national poll on impeachment.
Why poll to find out whether the broad public favors impeachment?
Not because we're only going to do it if the public already agrees. We can lead as well as follow. Rather, we'd do so for these reasons:
(1) If the public really supports it, it will make a splash.
These days, I am involved in some political activities (to be described later) that bring me into contact with elected officials and regular party types. Good people, not jerks, and the sorts we'd want in our corner before starting an impeachment effort. And the intuition among them, outside of the echo chamber (not that there's anything inherently wrong with that) of DKos is that impeachment is a highly bad move, largely because the people won't support it when push comes to shove, and largely because they don't want to give the GOP an easy way to get out from under Bush and Cheney. (I don't think there's as much resistence to impeaching Gonzales; maybe I'm projecting.) We're dealing with some well-entrenched prejudices here, perhaps, and the best way to dig those out is with facts: facts like "here is what the public actually thinks about impeachment." Not only will party officials take notice, but the media -- and average voters -- will as well.
(2) If the public doesn't support it, it's a useful reality check for us.
For one thing, it may spur us to try to figure out why; at a minimum, it will prevent us from suffering from the same echo-chamber myopia (to mix sensory mataphors) that party officials do. One can support "impeachment without a conviction," sure -- one can do it so that one goes down in the history books as at least having tried to defend the Constitution, separation of powers, the independence of the Justice Department, etc. -- but one ought to know if we're going to just fail to get 2/3 of the votes to convict or if we're going to get only 30% of the votes to send a bill out of the committee. There's a tendency to believe one's press clippings -- if all these people around here favor impeachment, then how could it do anything but succeed? A poll might pour cold water on that, and lead us to ask what exactly we are trying to accomplish.
(3) The exercise of putting together a poll would be good for us.
Say we wanted to ask questions about Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales. Well, we'd want more than one "yes or no" question on each, if we want to understand the dynamics. This might involve trying to understand what the public understands each of them to be doing. This might involve prioritization of which "sins" we focus on -- which is just what we'd have to do if we went ahead with impeachment, given the public's lack of interest and attention. We'd want to look at expected counterarguments and see how they'd play. At any rate, discussing what a real good impeachment poll would look like would be a helpful exercise beyond simply beating the drum. It would force us to look at impeachment the way that an inattentive public does, to see it through fresh eyes. (For one example, you can't get much from the question "should he be impeached if Blush lied about Iraq?" without understanding what the public believes to constitute a "lie," "by Bush," as opposed to wishful thinking or being duped by overenthusiastic subordinates.
(4) We can do this, (since the media won't).
The unwillingness of the media to poll on impeachment (even for money!) is a true scandal. If we could collect $5000 (that's a wild-ass guess), I'll bet we could hire some second-tier agency to do a national poll. So, if someone wants to put up an Act Blue page and collect money for it -- ideally refundable or divertable to some good cause if we don't make the nut -- then I'm all for it. That may actually help to light the fire and change the way people see what's possible. But I don't think that simply agreeing that we'd all like to see Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales gone does the trick. We already know that.
Frankly, I'd love to find out that the public supports impeachment. I already have a list of people in whose face I'd triumphantly wave the results. Unfortunately, that's a long list, and it's growing.