The Confession Game: Assuming It's The Truth,

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The Baba and Bubba format takes the focus away from semen stains and oral sex. Walters would be constrained by being in the presence of the valiant and wronged wife, and being in the couple's house, the White House, no less. Instead, after some dignified deflection (the old "there has been trouble in our marriage; we're working it out"), the interview would come to focus on the marriage itself. The public is sick of Monica and all that anyway; the real remaining mystery is Hillary: What's her true feeling about all this? How does she stand it? Saintliness? Some Faustian bargain?

Much hand holding. When Hillary is seen to forgive Bill, in Barbara's presence, why then, 7 trillion viewers (the largest audience in history) not only forgive Clinton en masse but also dare any politician to mention the word impeachment.

The moment, a perfect distillation of a surreal time, is Clinton's greatest performance and his greatest triumph. He has done it again!

Margaret Carlson NO, THERE'S A TRAP WAITING

I don't know anybody at the top of the system...who really wants to see the President hurt," said Senator Orrin Hatch, who could inflict some of that hurt. "[If] he does come forth and say, 'I made a mistake...'[to] protect his wife and daughter...and then ask for...some sort of consideration, I think we would bend over backward to try and give him that consideration."

That's so sweet, but so unlikely. I've heard those words many times. Come to think of it, I've said those words many times, even though I've hardly ever seen it work out. The best example in my life came when my parents heard about a bunch of 15-year-olds who had talked their older friends with licenses into letting them drive around the local shopping-center parking lot after hours, creating havoc. "Just tell me if you've ever been down there," my mother urged. "It will be worse if I find out from the security guards or other parents." So I fessed up to that heady, behind-the-wheel spin from rows A to N. It's possible things would have been worse if an independent counsel had forced the truth out of me. But for copping to that escapade willingly, I wasn't allowed to get my learner's permit until I was 17.

Although everyone talks about the perjury trap that Ken Starr's grand jury holds for the President, the confession trap is just as big a hazard. Still, Hatch's offer has been gaining steam in both parties all week, so much so that the White House put some questions into its weekly poll to test it. Fruitlessly, I suspect, since those polled will inevitably overestimate their capacity for forgiveness.

This doesn't mean coming clean isn't the right thing to do--just that it isn't the panacea some make it out to be. Imagine if Clinton were to confess, reversing his finger-wagging denial and replacing it with a tortured definition of sex to help explain his earlier claims of innocence. Even if he said he did it to spare his family, the support he enjoys among a majority of Americans would sink like a stone. It's one thing to have an abstract notion that he actually had an affair and covered it up (and to have that leak from Starr's grand jury). It's another to hear it from his own mouth, to have the fig leaf of doubt removed and be forced to confront our own moral laxity in being willing to overlook it.