The Cost Of It All

Imagine spending your whole life wanting to be President and being told time and again that you could be. The favored child, you get the master bedroom. Your teachers call you a diamond in the rough. When you make mistakes, you charm the facts and the language into doing your bidding, and like magic, the problem goes away. You can have whatever you want. And when you reach the crowning glory, Hail to the Chief, you find that your luck and timing are so peerless that you get to preside over the most peaceful, prosperous era in the country's history. You dream of greatness, statues, monuments, your name next to your heroes', maybe even your face on a coin someday.

Now flip it. Most of the country thinks you are a liar and a cheat. A zealous prosecutor is working overtime to put you into early retirement. Every single night, the comics who truly write the first draft of history spit on you and smile. Your attempts to hide behind the powers of your office have diminished them as a result. Your hands are tied overseas; at home your agenda is dead. Your only daughter is back from college, and whatever you decide to say, you have to explain to her first. Your wife looks the way she did the day her father died. Psychiatrists report of teenagers who act up and behave badly who are using, as their last line of defense, "Well, hey, Clinton got away with it."

More than any politician in memory, Bill Clinton does not hide his dark underbelly; he rubs it lovingly; it is part of who he is. His inconstancy makes him flexible; his mistakes have made him smarter; he is a glutton for sympathy. And so last week, as he considered what to say under oath, the best and worst in him took the measure of the hopes and fears in us.

From its very first days this scandal has divided the nation between those who want to leave Clinton alone and those who want him to pay, between those who think everyone lies about sex--that he has been persecuted just because he is President--and those who think this fate goes with the job. Presidents aren't like kings, but they aren't supposed to be like the rest of us either. The office confers a mystic expectation, a combination of Roosevelt's brains and Johnson's clout and Reagan's grace, that helps Presidents persuade Congress and the people to follow their lead. The agony of Clinton's choice was that his best chance for survival demanded that he declare himself less than we expect a President to be and more like the rest of us after all.

The moment Clinton confesses to anything, he loses some magical powers; his decisions during the past seven months have already cost him some actual powers as well. The shrapnel from this scandal is now embedded in the polity, the culture and the law, and it will take more than the passage of time to dig it out. The wreckage spreads across the whole field of battle: his moral authority, his ability to respond to a crisis, his room to negotiate with a Congress that might soon be his judge, and his ability to get the advice he needs.

As for the rest of us, there is no going back. Boundaries have been broken and precedents set about the personal privacy of public figures that are already down in permanent ink. We may hate that this is so; we may curse every sex scandal to come along for the next generation; but whenever the next one does, it will have a new historical marker: "Not since the Clinton scandal..."