Last week's ABC News/ Washington Post poll had some interesting things in it that didn't make it into the summaries. While only 38 percent of likely voters say the president should be impeached, the 60 percent who say he should not be are not a monolithic group. They fall into two camps of roughly equal size (with some overlap). One camp opposes impeachment because what the president did is "not serious"; the other because impeachment is "too disruptive." Thus, public opinion at the end of September seems to have been sorted out into roughly equal thirds, where the president's future is concerned: Those who want to be rid of him, those who will go to the barricades for him, and those who think impeachment will disturb their sleep. This middle group is obviously a swing group, and could presumably be persuaded to favor impeachment if Congress moves ahead and if the prospect no longer looks so radical.
Meanwhile, though the public is quite cynical about the motives of congressional Republicans in their handling of the Starr referral, it's even more cynical about Democrats. Some 61 percent of likely voters think Republicans in Congress are mainly interested in hurting Clinton politically; only 35 percent think the GOP's main interest is in finding out the truth. The comparable numbers are worse for Democrats: 68 percent of likely voters think they are mainly interested in protecting Clinton, and only 27 percent believe John Conyers et al. are truth-seekers.