FOR much of 1974, America was gripped by Watergate fever.
An estimated 90 per cent of the country watched blanket television coverage of Congress' impeachment hearings, crowds gathered for days outside the White House, and car bumper stickers said of president Richard Nixon: 'Honk if you think he's guilty.' When Nixon resigned rather than face a Senate impeachment trial, the nation's sense of shock was tempered with a huge collective sigh of relief.
But the public is barely casting a glance towards Capitol Hill 24 years later as the House of Representatives moves towards voting to impeach President Bill Clinton.
'It's totally different now,' said presidential scholar Stephen Hess, of the Brookings Institution in Washington. 'This time there is no electricity, outside, perhaps, of a ring around the Capitol.
'In 1974, there was the expectation that we were about to depose the first president in US history. There is no expectation of that now.' Political pollster Patrick Caddell said the public's apparent indifference was 'the weirdest disconnection that I have ever seen in American politics between the elected and the electorate.
'This really does say something serious about the health of the body politic that the American people are not more engaged in this.' While cable news stations have provided live coverage of Judiciary Committee hearings, major networks interrupted regular programmes only when the panel voted on Friday on the articles of impeachment.
'There seems to be little appetite on the part of the public for extended coverage of this,' CBS News spokeswoman Sandra Genelius said.