Clinton's Crisis: Truth or...Consequences

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Certainly no audience to the spectacle was more entranced than the G.O.P. lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who shared the general belief that when your opponent is shooting himself in the foot, you don't get in the way. Early on, the Republican leadership spread the word to members not to comment or get involved in the scandal lest they lend credence to the idea that this is just another Republican attack. "We're trying to keep the fruitcakes under control," said one G.O.P. staff member. "For us it's better if this thing drags on for a while," the staff member joked. "At least we don't have to come up with an agenda."

Thus Newt Gingrich said he wanted to wait until all the facts were in; Trent Lott said that the allegations were "very serious" but that he'd been in Mississippi for two days and wasn't sure about the details. The political calculation among Republicans could be that a wounded Clinton who serves out his term is better than an incumbent President Gore who has put all this ugliness behind him. It was a measure of the President's free fall that his own former chief of staff Leon Panetta told the San Jose Mercury News that if the allegations are true, it might be better "if Gore became President and you had a new message and a new individual up there. The worst scenario is if there's substance to it and it drags out." For their part, other leading Democrats were loudly silent.

In the midst of last week's public carnage, it's hard to imagine, but there were those who could see a strategy forming. Clinton will never resign, they insist; he will fight every inch to avoid becoming the second President in history to resign in disgrace, as opposed to one of several tarnished by sexual scandals that future historians might just decide to ignore. He will try to change the subject, with lots of purposeful activity, outlined in the State of the Union, a new balanced budget, a response to Saddam Hussein. Let people get used to some further degradation of the public discourse; spread the word, quietly, that Lewinsky was a flighty, gossip-mongering groupie. Above all, trust that if the affair ever wound up being tried before the Senate, that is the last body that would comfortably sit in judgment of a man who believes that a relationship based on oral sex is neither sexual nor a relationship.

That doesn't mean that there will be anything left of his presidency. Clinton's grandest ambitions for his have already, repeatedly fallen prey to his scandals; one reason the whole health-care initiative fell apart was that it was a bad idea, but the other was that lawmakers could just ignore him as long as he was in deep trouble over Whitewater. A leader without ideology, with no movement to lead or party to follow, has only his stature and powers of persuasion to move an agenda. And those are dwindling fast. --Reported by Jay Branegan, Margaret Carlson, Michael Duffy, J.F.O. McAllister, Viveca Novak, Douglas Waller and Michael Weisskopf/Washington