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Andrew Kohut analyzes public opinion of President Clinton, while our five regional commentators compare how public opinion fits in with their paper's editorials.

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MARGARET WARNER: Sixteen newspapers have called on President Clinton to resign since Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's report was released last Friday. They include such major papers as USA Today, the Detroit Free Press, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. According to the political report "Hotline," that brings to 45 the number of daily newspapers that have called for resignation since the President publicly admitted he'd had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Yet, these editorial opinions remain at odds with public opinion. For more on this apparent disconnect we're joined by Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Andy, you've been looking at a whole collection of polls taken over the past few days. What, in general, was the public's reaction to the Starr report?

ANDREW KOHUT, Pew Research Center: Well, the public looked at the findings of the report, and they said, this is confirmatory; it's not revealing. Basically, they said that the evidence that was presented was about what they expected - 21 percent in the ABC-Washington Post poll - said it was stronger evidence of Clinton wrongdoing. But for the most part people said this is what we thought happened. One of the important questions is what did all of these details do to public opinion -

MARGARET WARNER: All these graphics.

ANDREW KOHUT: All these graphics, sexual - what was the emotional reaction? And we have a slide showing reaction to President Clinton. And it shows that 64 percent said these details made no difference. 30 percent said they had a less favorable view of the President as a consequence. But, interestingly, 45 percent - only 45 percent - said they made no difference with regard to the public's view of prosecutor Starr and 45 percent said they had a less favorable reaction to the prosecutor as a consequence. There's some sense of backlash and negative reaction to these details. Most people say that they were put out to embarrass the President, not to make the case for perjury.

MARGARET WARNER: So does the public believe the charges that Starr outlined against the President, or do they believe the President's denials?

ANDREW KOHUT: Well, they may have a less favorable opinion of the prosecutor, but they believe him more than they believe the President with regard to these charges by a margin of five to three, the percentage of people in the ABC-Washington Post poll, saying that the President did something wrong, or committed a crime with 40 to 50 percent, the percentage in the Gallup Poll saying that the President urged Lewinsky to lie went from 50 to 60 percent. So the President's credibility problems increased further with regard to these charges.

MARGARET WARNER: And what did all this do to his job approval, that most important benchmark?

ANDREW KOHUT: Nothing. There all these national surveys, and there were 11 nationwide surveys conducted in this two-day period, lead with a question, do you approve or disapprove of the President's job performance?

MARGARET WARNER: All right. And we have a graphic of about six of them, I think.

ANDREW KOHUT: You can see, if you came down from Mars and looked in on the President and said, how's he doing in his second term, you'd say, wow, 67 percent to 59 percent, those are - those are in historic terms very high ratings, and they ain't much different than they were a week ago. In fact, they're not statistically different than they were a week ago. The public still continues to have a favorable view of the way the President is running the country, or doing his job.

MARGARET WARNER: How do you explain this?

ANDREW KOHUT: Well, the way you explain it is what people say. They say these crimes, this lying, perhaps even this perjury relates not to the President's official duties; it relates to his private life and relates to an embarrassing sexual affair that perhaps we shouldn't even know about.

MARGARET WARNER: And his personal popularity, I gather, is down?

ANDREW KOHUT: Very much down. 36 percent in the Gallup Polls say they have a positive opinion, and our survey conducted before this - 61 percent or 62 percent said they don't like him as a person - very unusual responses for a popular - policy popular President.

MARGARET WARNER: So let's look at what the public wants to have happen, first of all, what do they want the President to do? Do they want him to resign, as all these newspapers suggested Jesse should do?

ANDREW KOHUT: There has been a small increase in the ABC-Washington Post poll showing 39 percent now saying the President should resign. But the Gallup Poll has 36 percent, the LA Times Poll has 32 percent. The important issue here is this resignation sentiment, while it may have grown a little bit in some polls, it's still very much minority point of view. The American public does not want the Clinton presidency to end as a consequence of reading this report, or in reaction to reading this report. I would like to add that by last night we found that 51 percent said they had actually read the report, themselves, which is amazing, and 11 percent - or 13 percent had read it online, had gotten this off the Internet. So there's been a lot of activity with regard to this report.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, what do they want Congress to do? First of all, as you know, Congress is debating right now, or the Judiciary Committee is, whether to even have a full-blown impeachment inquiry. Does the public have a view on that?

ANDREW KOHUT: Well, the public is divided. 46 percent said we should have hearings - there should be congressional hearings. 52 percent want to see the matter end. The public isn't clear as to whether Congress should go further. It has more definite views about what the conclusions should be, but the - it's not clear about the process.

MARGARET WARNER: And what do they think the conclusions should be?

ANDREW KOHUT: Well, the public does not want to see the President impeached based upon their reading of the Starr Report. This graphic shows 30 percent say based upon their reading in the Gallup Poll only 30 percent think that he should be impeached and removed from office. When the question is pushed a little bit and the subjunctive phrases are used, if the President lied, if the President encouraged perjury, that percentage goes up to 40 or 48 percent. But the important bottom line measures now based upon what people have seen - these are still - it's still very much a minority view that the public wants impeachment. And the reaction - the rejection of impeachment isn't because they don't want the process. We asked the question, is it because you don't want the country to go through that process, or simply because how you feel about Clinton's wrongdoing. And by two to one they say it's not the process. It's that we don't feel the wrongdoing justifies impeachment.

MARGARET WARNER: Because they think it's more - as you said - personal.

ANDREW KOHUT: More personal. It's not that serious.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, the option being discussed among many in the White House and some on Capitol Hill is, is some sort of censure. Did you ask how does the public feel about censure?

ANDREW KOHUT: Three national surveys this weekend - CBS News - around 57 in favor; ABC, the same percentage - 57 percent; in the Gallup Poll 59 percent. Censure, condemnation by the Congress, some official wrist slapping or condemnation seems appropriate to the public, or is much more in keeping with the public's views about this than impeachment. That's clear.

MARGARET WARNER: So they do feel something wrong has been done here, and they do want something to happen?

ANDREW KOHUT: Clearly, they want something to happen, but they're not. They haven't gotten to the point where they want that to be - to represent the end of - or go to the end - mean the end of the presidency.

MARGARET WARNER: And quickly - I'm sorry - quickly, what is their view on whether this whole thing is affecting the President's ability to lead?

ANDREW KOHUT: Well, the public recognizes -

MARGARET WARNER: And we do have a graphic on that, yes. Thanks.

ANDREW KOHUT: That there's a preoccupation with it - 70 percent say that it's getting in the way of doing business in Washington and there has been an increase in the percentage of people who think that the President does not have the moral standing to lead. 48 percent of the public feel that in the current survey and a week or two ago it was 36 percent.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, Andy, thank you again very much.

ANDREW KOHUT: You're welcome.

JIM LEHRER: Now, how this looks to our regional commentators: Patrick McGuigan of the Daily Oklahoman; Lee Cullum of the Dallas Morning News; Robert Kittle of the San Diego Union Tribune; and Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Constitution, joined tonight by Jim Boyd of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Bob Kittle, based on any polls or reporting your paper has done, where does San Diego fit into the national polling that Andy Kohut just went through?

ROBERT KITTLE: Well, I really hesitate, Jim, to try to speak scientifically about how San Diegans feel, but I suspect that if a poll were done strictly in San Diego county, that it would reflect many of the same numbers that Andy Kohut has just outlined. I think certainly if we look at our letters to the editor that we've received over the last few days, the reporting we've done asking people what they think. We've seen two real themes here. One is a kind of revulsion that these details have made public. The other is - is a very deep sense of disappointment in our President but yet no one it seems - or a majority of people at least it seems to me are not rushing to a judgment that the President should be impeached over this. I think their views today are pretty much the way Andy Kohut's poll numbers suggest. They think this is something that needs to be condemned; they think it's atrocious behavior, but they haven't reached a point that they believe the President should be removed from office. I think their judgment, however, is a little fluid. It could change. I don't think they're ready to make the definitive judgment on this yet. So it could change. We'll just see how things play out.

JIM LEHRER: Jim Boyd, how does it look in Minneapolis?

JIM BOYD: I agree with a lot that Bob said. I tried an exercise this weekend. We haven't had a poll, but I tried an exercise this weekend in the non-stop discussions that we've been having, and I found people arguing past each other, some people seeming to defend Clinton to an excessive degree, in my opinion, and some attacking him successively. And I tried an experiment. I said, look, if we can get impeachment off the table, can we get agreement here, and it was a fairly simple process of them then saying, yes, we agree. He did something wrong. We especially don't like the lying, but we don't think it rises to the level of impeachment. But we would like - I agree very much with what Mr. Kohut was saying. We want some punishment meted out. We want it to be over fairly soon. The other thing is we published extensive excerpts of the report with the seamy bits left in, and the response to the newspaper has been from many people we don't appreciate this. But an undercurrent in that is not to blame President Clinton. They're actually angry at the newspaper on the President's behalf. We don't -

JIM LEHRER: They blamed you - you shouldn't have published it.

JIM BOYD: We were invading his privacy in the same way that they felt that the independent counsel had.

JIM LEHRER: I see. Were they offended by it, or they felt it was a privacy issue?

JIM BOYD: Some were offended by it, but some were offended by it on behalf of the President.

JIM LEHRER: Yes. Lee Cullum, what's the reading from Dallas?

LEE CULLUM: Jim, there was a poll taken by the Dallas Morning News and the Houston Chronicle that showed that in Texas the President is certainly holding his own. 63 percent approve of the job he's doing; 61 percent have a negative view of him personally. About 42 percent want to see the matter dropped. 27 percent want to see him resign. 14 percent are for censure, and 11 percent for impeachment. So you can see that here in Texas, which is a very Republican state, there is still a great deal of forbearance where this President is concerned.

JIM LEHRER: You heard what Jim Boyd said about the non-stop talk. Has it become - because there's a lot of conversation before the Starr Report came out that the American people didn't care about this anymore. Was there non-stop talk in Texas about this?

LEE CULLUM: Absolutely. Yes, they care. There's non-stop talk everywhere you go. People are riveted to the story.

JIM LEHRER: And the newspapers covered it extensively?

LEE CULLUM: Oh, yes.

JIM LEHRER: What about in Oklahoma, Pat McGuigan?

PATRICK McGUIGAN: (network audio difficulty) You have to remember that President Clinton's high water mark was here in 1996. He only got 40 percent. This was one of Bob Dole's strong mistakes, the same thing back in 1992. So I think there's a critical view of the President from the get-go, to put it with a radio expression.

JIM LEHRER: Excuse me, Pat. Excuse me, Pat. The first - your first sentence was not heard for audio reasons. You were saying - just repeat what you said at the beginning - well, I can repeat it. You said that in Oklahoma it's slightly different because the President has never done that well there at any rate, right?

PATRICK McGUIGAN: Yes. I think that people here have been a little more critical of the President all along, and that was the observation that I made. I think that's holding up. Our letters to the editor are overwhelmingly critical of the President's behavior. Now, I think there's two clusters of people - it might be worth sharing this - that one is people who have paid close attention, a certain level of exhaustion, if you will, is beginning to set in; they're beginning to get very tired of the issue and the details. But the other cluster of people that's really surprised me is it's very clear that a lot of people had not paid close attention to, if you will, the explicit details that we got in the report, some of which, of course, had been revealed in news stories previously. So that's the reaction we're seeing in the letters. I don't sense what Mr. Boyd saw in Minnesota -- maybe I just haven't picked it up yet - that there's anger in the local news media, including this newspaper.

JIM LEHRER: Did the Daily Oklahoman run the whole thing, Pat? Did you run the whole thing?

PATRICK McGUIGAN: Jim, I lost you there.

JIM LEHRER: I'm sorry. Did the Daily Oklahoman run the entire Starr Report?

PATRICK McGUIGAN: I don't know if we ran the whole thing. It was very long. It was what we call open pages. It was five open pages inside with a few ellipses. So they might have edited something out. But that would probably amount to at least a couple of hundred pages.

JIM LEHRER: Was there a conscious effort to take out the explicit sex things, or do you know?

PATRICK McGUIGAN: Well, a lot of it was there, just like in these other newspapers, and, again, I think it's more shock here - what I perceive is it's shock at the President and at this kind of behavior, more than shock at the nature of the material being presented, because a lot of this - at least verbally - you can see on the sitcoms most any night of the week.

JIM LEHRER: Now, Cynthia, your paper has called for the resignation of the President. You did that even before the Starr Report. And has anything changed, and does it pretty much match what you're picking up from the folks in your area?

CYNTHIA TUCKER: Actually, Jim, we have gotten a lot of disagreement from our readers about our editorials calling for the President to resign. We haven't done any polls at the Atlanta Constitution either which would give you a scientific view of what the readers in metro Atlanta or Georgia are thinking. But I can give you a thumbnail sketch of what I've gleaned from our letters to the editor. It seems to me that they come down about 50 percent in favor of the President and 50 percent against him, which would roughly reflect what President Clinton's standing was in Georgia before any of this came up. He narrowly won Georgia in 1992. He narrowly lost Georgia in 1996. And it seems to me most people - with some notable exceptions - it seems to me most readers have not moved away from their partisan views of the President if they liked his policies, they want him to stay in office, if they didn't like his policies in the beginning, they want him out of office. Now, there are a couple of notable exceptions. One of those is Governor Zell Miller, who broke his silence on the affair on Monday and said he was very disappointed in the President and thought the President had lost his credibility and lost his moral authority. And what's significant about that is Governor Miller and President Clinton have been very close for a very long time. They're both - they both fashion themselves as new Democrats. And so I thought that Governor Miller's criticism of the President was significant.

JIM LEHRER: Well, let's go back through here quickly and just bring us up to date on where your papers stand on the three options: resignation, impeachment to proceed or censure. Jim Boyd, where does your paper stand on those issues right now?

JIM BOYD: We said if you get the impeachment option off the table as quickly as possible - because it's not going to happen - we can have a national discussion about our dissatisfaction with the President's behavior, agreement on some form of appropriate sanction, and be done with it and get on to the serious work we have to do.

JIM LEHRER: Pat McGuigan, you've called for resignation. Is it still there?

PATRICK McGUIGAN: Yes, we've called for resignation. We have not called - we have not written an editorial, the title of which is "Impeach Clinton," we have not done that. It's not presently on my agenda.

JIM LEHRER: All right.

PATRICK McGUIGAN: That's an awfully big step. It's not something that necessarily scares me for the sake of the country, because, after all, it's a constitutional process, and I think we could weather it, but I think it is a big step. In terms of censure, I share personally David Broder's view. The problem with censure is it's not in the Constitution. We already have a process for dealing with high crimes, misdemeanors, offenses by the President, and it's called the impeachment process. So if we're going to go down that route of sending some kind of a strong signal, I think that that's more appropriate constitutionally than trying to find some magic way out of this difficult situation that the President's behavior has presented to us.

JIM LEHRER: Bob Kittle, where does your paper stand now?

ROBERT KITTLE: Jim, we've urged the House to move forward as expeditiously and in as fair a manner as possible to take a closer look at Starr's evidence. We have not urged the President to resign. We haven't called for his impeachment. We've certainly raised the possibility that censure will be needed, and we've said some sort of punishment is needed to resolve this issue short of the President's resignation, which appears highly unlikely. But, frankly, we want to see Starr's report held up to scrutiny, itself, through the process that the House Judiciary Committee is about to embark upon, and we want to see a cross-examination of the Starr Report. We want to see the President's answers and rebuttal in more detail than we've seen thus far. We're still looking at the evidence. We're trying to stay, more or less, as the American people are, in judging the facts as they have come out but not yet rush to a definite judgment on what should be the fate of Bill Clinton's presidency.

JIM LEHRER: Lee Cullum, what has the Dallas Morning News said editorially?

LEE CULLUM: The Dallas Morning News agrees somewhat with San Diego, Jim. There was an editorial this morning saying that Congress must begin an inquiry into the Clinton matter with dispatch as soon as possible. At the very least, he should be censured and fined, but he should have an opportunity to defend himself. So I think that here in Dallas there's also a "wait and see" attitude and let's discover the facts and the response to the facts and where they lead.

JIM LEHRER: Now, Cynthia, your paper has called for resignation but not impeachment, correct?

CYNTHIA TUCKER: Not impeachment, Jim, and, in fact, I see a significant difference between the two. We have had some preliminary discussions around the editorial board about impeachment. And we agree that based on what we've seen so far these - the misconduct by the President even as outlined in the Starr Report does not rise to the level of impeachment. In fact, I have some skepticism about Kenneth Starr's advocacy for impeachment. I don't believe that the evidence, as he has presented itself - presented it, calls for impeachment.

JIM LEHRER: All right. Well, thanks again to all five you of you.

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