President Clinton is appealing to Democrats to stand by him when the House of Representatives votes tomorrow on a motion to start impeachment hearings.
Mr Clinton is reported to be lobbying Democrats in private to argue that he has not committed any impeachable offences. The White House is worried that a substantial number of Democrats will vote with the Republican majority to open the third impeachment process against a president in US history.
The motion is certain to pass because of the 11-vote Republican majority in the House, but an unknown number of Democrats are also expected to support the opening of the impeachment process with the mid-term elections just four weeks away.
Mr Clinton is trying hard to show he is not being distracted from his presidential duties by the impeachment debate. Yesterday he addressed the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on the dangers facing the global economy and the need for urgent action. He also gave details about his active involvement in the Kosovo crisis.
The White House yesterday expressed disappointment at the vote by the House Judiciary Committee on Monday recommending the impeachment hearings. The vote was on strict party lines after the Republican members rejected a Democratic compromise to limit the hearings in time and scope.
Mr Joe Lockhart, the new White House press secretary, said yesterday "the American public has a right to be disappointed. This process should be fair and bipartisan and this was neither".
Mr Lockhart was strongly critical of Republican tactics. "From the time they dumped out the Starr report and the subsequent document dumps with salacious and gratuitous material, they had a political strategy to try and embarrass the President."
Pointing to public opinion polls, Mr Lockhart said: "What public sentiment reflects is to do this in a fair way and the public will ultimately decide, but I don't think they're getting what they want."
Democrats met yesterday on Capitol Hill to discuss their strategy for tomorrow's debate on the impeachment motion and assess how many members will vote with the Republicans to open the impeachment hearings. Some observers say the number of Democratic defectors could be 50 or higher.
These would be conservative Democrats who are still angry over President Clinton's initial denial of his affair with Ms Monica Lewinsky and do not want to be accused during the election campaign of voting against an impeachment investigation. It would only be at the end of the investigation and hearings that the full House would be asked to vote whether to impeach the President, so a vote to open hearings need not be seen as condemning Mr Clinton out of hand.
President Richard Nixon resigned before the full House could vote to impeach him in 1974. The only other president to face the threat of impeachment, Andrew Johnson, was impeached by the House but acquitted in the Senate by a single vote in 1868.
Meanwhile, it is reported that Ms Paula Jones has rejected an offer by President Clinton's lawyers to settle her sexual harassment lawsuit for $700,000.