An article recently appeared in Insight Magazine that hauntingly describes this exact scenerio. From that article:
"The Constitution gives me relevance," Clinton told the media the day before the Oklahoma City bombing. "The president," he said, "is relevant here." He was, of course, seeking to counter his growing irrelevance. After seeing Clinton's first two years of performance in the Oval Office, voters in November 1994 had put Republicans in control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years.
Writing in the London Sunday Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard describes how things had changed by election night 1996. "Relaxing on Air Force One after the election, Bill Clinton told reporters it was the Oklahoma bombing that proved the turning point in his political fortunes. It was the moment when the militias, the Christian right and the Gingrich onslaught against government all melded together in the public mind as one rampant movement of extremism. 'It broke a spell in the country as the people began searching for our common ground again,' Clinton explained."
In fact, Clinton accomplished the opposite. Instead of telling the truth and uniting Americans on "common ground" against a foreign enemy, he chose to divide the country in order to remain in office for four more years.
http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=258777