Day Of Deliverance

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Some wounds have to get worse in order to get better, which helps explain how it happened that President Clinton, accused of skanky behavior toward a young employee, actually began sometime this past winter to look forward to the moment he would be hauled into court. The Paula Jones lawsuit left a deep bruise, a story that turned more purple with each passing week as it brought us Monica and Kathleen and Dolly and the whole national conversation about what kind of sex isn't really sex. And just as the pain grew most acute, when accusers were unearthed almost daily with old charges ranging from rudeness to rape, Judgment Day came at last. We could finally understand that Clinton was willing to bet his presidency on a trial--because he might just get it back if he won.

Judge Susan Webber Wright's stunning decision to throw out the Jones case was an antidote to a poisonous winter of scandal. For the President, it was as close to a verdict of not guilty as he's ever likely to get in a case involving his sexual conduct. It left Ken Starr defending the continued relevance of his investigation even as White House aides spun out his obituary. It threw much of the press corps, especially its most aggressive investigative wing, into a defensive crouch. It inspired Newt Gingrich to marvel at the President's "courage." It gave feminists an excuse for their pragmatic hypocrisy. It left Jones' mentor Susan Carpenter-McMillan standing beneath her umbrella in a downpour, saying "The angels are crying" for her client. It left a fleet of lawyers watching Jones head off to her health club in her old Mercedes and wondering if they would ever see a dime in legal fees.

For all the fizzy talk of vindication, the only players clearly exonerated were the American people, who had since the beginning viewed this whole drama skeptically, not doubting much whether Clinton had actually done some of what Jones claimed, but doubting whether it mattered. Judge Wright just yanked the chattering class up to where the American people have been for years.

As for the President himself, arriving home from 11 days of huge crowds calling him His Excellency to a stock market toying with the 9000 mark, there was a moment of joy and relief. "I feel now that I'm freer to keep doing what I'm supposed to be doing," he told TIME on the flight home. "It removes whatever obstacle this case would have been to my giving everything to this job for the next two years."

How does he rebuild his presidency now? The easy answer is that he doesn't have to, that he can let Wall Street make people rich, and Hollywood make them happy, and if he just stays out of trouble, and beyond Starr's reach, he goes down in history as a lucky survivor. The harder answer is to seize the moment and put it to good use, an effort that assumes voters will continue to separate public from private conduct. Can he return smoothly to the agenda of moral exhortation he laid out for this term--mend race relations, find an AIDS vaccine, fix public schools, demonize tobacco--when the polls that have shown rising support for his policies have also shown falling regard for his character? However cleanly he escapes this episode, it has been stitched onto him, like Peter Pan's wayward shadow, a dark image of recklessness and dishonor that risks becoming one of his presidency's most distinguishing characteristics.