President Bill Clinton, facing his gravest challenge in a career of political crises, Thursday sought redemption from his Cabinet as the House pondered whether he should be impeached for trying to illegally cover up sexual misconduct at the White House.

Clinton met Cabinet members and Senate Democratic leaders to apologize again for deceiving them about his relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. It was the first time Clinton had summoned a Cabinet meeting since Jan 23, when he assured them reports of his sexual affair with Lewinsky were false.

He continued to deny the relationship until his grand jury testimony Aug 17 when quizzed by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr who has been investigating the affair since Jan 1996.

Starr’s 445-page report and 36 sealed boxes of evidence were delivered to the House of Representives Wednesday and, 24 hours later, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Henry Hyde said the main report would be released on the Internet Friday after the Committee had reviewed it.

Clinton’s lawyer’s were quick to declare there was “no basis for impeachment” in the report and stressed all the evidence given Starr had been submitted without any cross-examination.

The White House sought to delay the realse of the report while Clinton’s lawyers had time to review the Starr material but a Democratic official conceded “I dont think we will win that fight.”

Away from the furore over the “i” word, Clinton continued to bask in approval ratings as high as 60 percent in public opinion polls – above the level most presidents receive after six years in office. Still the President has long been dismissed as a “lame duck” by the U.S. media and the drumbeats for his resignation are growing louder.

Clinton’s problems stem from his misleading statements denying sexual relations with Lewinsky in a January deposition for a sexual harassment case involving an Arkansas woman, Paula Jones. (The Jones civil case was dismissed on Apr. 1 by an Arkansas judge as lacking merit.)

Clinton’s contrition over lying to his family and the nation has been coupled with indignation over his Republican opponents stalling on legislation and warnings to voters not to let the issue sidetrack them during Congressional elections in November.

“I’ve done my best to be your friend. But I also let you down, and I let my family down, and I let my country down,” Clinton said Wednesday. “But I’m trying to make it right … I have no- one to blame but myself for my self-inflicted wounds.”

However, Clinton also called for “a time of reconciliation and healing” and said the scandal “doesn’t take away from whether we’re right or wrong on the issues or what we’ve done for the past six years or what this election’s about”.

Those words recall the Clinton who has proved to be so appealing to voters, and who survived allegations of an extra- marital affair even during his first presidential campaign in 1992. That Clinton remains tough to beat: According to recent polls from Time-CNN and The Gallup Organisation, some two-thirds of all US votes do not want an impeachment of or resignation by Clinton. Meanwhile, polls place Starr’s approval ratings at barely above 10 percent.

However, the Clinton of the polls — and of a few prepared speeches — is not the one on display among Washington officials and much elite media, who have portrayed him as an embarrassment.

Coverage of Clinton has become especially harsh during his return to the United States this week after trips to Russia and Northern Ireland. Typical of the media assault was a Wednesday editorial in The New York Times which asserted that “with Democrats increasingly allergic to their leader and Republicans no longer treating impeachment proceedings as unthinkable, Mr Clinton faces a rapid erosion of his support that imperils his presidency”.

Columnists from liberal Lars-Erik Nelson to conservative George F. Will have argued that Clinton’s impeachment is inevitable, while nightly television news this week broadcast shots of an audience outside one Maryland school holding up a sign saying, “Time To Resign”.

What’s the reason for the double vision? Eric Altermann, a columnist for The Nation, a centre-left journal, ascribes the media coverage of Clinton to knee-jerk hatred of the president by both conservatives long wary of the centrist Democrat to progressive reporters feeling abandoned by him. As a result, Altermann argues, the elite group of pundits has dumped Clinton even though, by all indications, the public has not.

The split also reveals an interesting moral divide in the United States, in which polls seem to show a notable lack of disgust at Clinton’s affair with the then-21-year-old Lewinsky, while politicians like Democratic Senators Joseph Lieberman and Barbara Boxer have chastised the president for “immoral” behaviour.

Much of the scolding, however, is just part of a short-term series of calculations: Both Democrats and Republicans need to set up moral stances about Clinton’s affair in order to position themselves for November Congressional elections. For many Democrats, attracting fence-sitting voters two months from now could require distancing themselves from the president briefly.

For others, however, Clinton remains in demand. “In my district, folks are not interested in hype; they are not interested in scandal,” said Democrat Al Wynn, a representative from Maryland who invited Clinton to a school in Silver Spring on the same week that Parris Glendening, the state’s governor, decided to cancel scheduled appearances with the president.

The scandal has clearly had an effect on Clinton, who has lacked his customary popular touch, both in domestic gatherings and during his stiff appearance last week in Moscow with a fellow lame-duck leader, ailing Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

However, Clinton’s administration has spent much of its six years in office striking back at critics and the Republican opposition — on charges ranging from corruption in the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas to allegations that presidential aide Vincent Foster, who committed suicide, was actually murdered.

Indeed, Clinton’s legal worries may be much less than his political ones. To prove perjury in the Jones deposition, Starr must show not only that Clinton lied in denying his relations with Lewinsky, but also that the lies had a material effect on the case – a hard task to perform now that the Jones case itself has been dismissed. The Lewinsky affair, though meticulously detailed by Starr’s office, has increasingly been treated by the public as an annoyance.

In the political game, however, Clinton carries with him only his past support and his reputation as a fighter. With the mainstream media and most politicians firmly against him – at least until November – he faces a tough time for ther next two months.