The nation's opinion leaders continue to brood over the nation's reluctance to follow them. For months, politicians and commentators have doggedly tried to transmit their indignation about Bill Clinton to the hinterland. It's slow going. "There's a lot of indifference out there," lamented Bill Bennett, the dean of Washington outrage, during a recent TV appearance.

Indifference? That's one theory. Another is--imagination. Imagination, after all, is our basic moral gauge. If you can imagine yourself doing what someone else has been caught doing, it's hard to recommend the death penalty.

I'm not saying that most Americans daydream about sex in the Oval Office. I'm saying that many Americans have enough experience with temptation, addiction in one sense or another and the little lies that become big ones to look at President Clinton and say, "There but for the grace of God go I." As a Democrat in Congress has put it, "People understand human frailty better than political pundits do."

An expansive moral imagination has much to recommend it--including the endorsement of Jesus Christ. (Among the tactical advantages of Clinton's prayer breakfast was getting reporters to quote clergy quoting Scripture: "He that is without sin, let him first cast a stone.") Still, however humane a generous imagination may be, it poses a problem: Once started, where does it stop?

Granted, most Americans don't have trouble setting limits on forgiveness. They can't imagine themselves being, say, bank robbers. So it's off to jail with bank robbers--justice has been served! But however emotionally easy it is to condemn a garden-variety criminal while forgiving an errant President, is it logically defensible?

After all, imagining ourselves in someone else's shoes often takes poetic license. Many women, mulling Clinton's sins, don't ask how they would have acted in his situation but how they would have acted if burdened with male genes--and, perhaps, with a sense of entitlement inflated by years of alpha maledom. Maybe, for enhanced accuracy, some women throw in any distinctive Clinton genes for large appetite--and maybe even formative childhood experiences. (He is reported to have once recalled being the "fat boy in the Big Boy jeans," before his rising social stature started turning ladies' heads.)

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