"Who is Bill Clinton?" we asked as he took the lead for the Democratic nomination back in March of 1992. Because Washington Democrats have had positions that cannot win a national election, "Every four years the Democrats send us another governor we have to get to know." In 1988, a ride in a tank helped take a fix on Michael Dukakis. But "now it appears we will get to know, or try to get to know, Bill Clinton and Hillary. The Gennifer Flowers tank has already rumbled by. But where's the rest of them?"

The Senate is faced with the same question today. Mr. Clinton's fitness to continue to fulfill the duties of the President turns on the basic question of character. Yes, there will be competing barrages of legalistic technicalities. In particular, the President's defenders, as in the papers released this week, will focus on each drop of pigment in the painting, arguing that no one of them means anything standing alone. Yet in the end, Senators should ask, knowing what we have now learned about Bill Clinton, can we trust him with our highest office?

What manner of man is it who takes sexual advantage of 21-year-old interns? Who conducts sex in the Oval Office and, according to Monica Lewinsky's testimony, while discussing affairs of state on the phone with, among others, members of Congress? Who, he now admits, lied in a sworn deposition, to his colleagues, to the American people for some seven months and until confronted with DNA evidence from a semen-stained dress? Who defends his deposition lies as not perjury by telling a grand jury "it depends on what the meaning of `is' is" ? Who offers similarly cavalier answers to 81 questions from the House Judiciary Committee, and then reacts to impeachment by the House by staging a pep rally of his supporters on the White House lawn? Who now in papers filed with the Senate dismisses criticism of all this as "myths," once again giving the back of his hand to the earnest advocates of an apologize-and-censure compromise?

Speaking for ourselves, we do not expect political leaders to be well-adjusted personalities; the demands of ambition are too great. But even by this relaxed standard, Mr. Clinton's character is over the top. The center of the dysfunction is not the sex but the lies, which come so effortlessly because at any given moment he believes them. Or perhaps the center is self-gratification taken to an extreme, a willingness to satisfy his personal appetites of the moment with his interns, his friends, his office, his party and ultimately his nation. In our therapeutic age we call this pattern of behavior narcissistic or sociopathic, but perhaps these words go too far in pretending medical precision. To describe the same phenomenon, the ancient Greeks used the word hubris.

These traits, true to the Greek sense of drama, have served Mr. Clinton exceedingly well, contributing to the charm and wit that carried him to undertake what seemed to others a hopeless campaign against George Bush, and to stage his reelection only two years after his party's crushing loss in the 1994 Congressional campaign. They have enabled him to hold off the hounds of scandal that have from the first bayed at his administration. By ruthless and adept management of the next news cycle, by response-room attacks, he was able to parry every thrust, as invincible as Achilles--except for the heel of a blue dress.

This has come at heavy cost to those close to him, as a Greek playwright or canny psychiatrist might predict. His family has been humiliated. Ms. Lewinsky is a victim. His Cabinet officials have been duped. Reputations have been tarnished in his service. Webster Hubbell and Susan McDougal have gone to jail to protect him. Vincent Foster is dead. As Jim McDougal observed, "the Clintons are sort of like tornadoes moving through people's lives."

We hope that over the next few weeks Senators are on tornado watch, pondering what winds might suddenly strike the Republic, not to mention themselves. The economy has been somewhat quarantined from the President's influence by Chairman Greenspan and Secretary Rubin. And even more by the 1994 election ending grandiose schemes such as national health care; the GOP victory that year sparked a remarkable financial rally that still continues and pulls the real economy in its wake. Yet a new Latin crisis may impend with devaluation in Brazil, and Bill Clinton is scarcely in position to provide leadership.

In foreign policy, Mr. Clinton's management has worked in the sense that the territory of the United States is not under immediate threat. Yet clouds are gathering. When Scott Ritter resigned to protest sham inspections in Iraq, one of Mr. Clinton's senatorial supporters told Mr. Ritter that war is above his pay grade; but the Commander-in-Chief finally starts bombardment of Iraq when it provides the best possible distraction from impeachment proceedings. With North Korea lobbing missiles close to Alaska, the President will now spend some money on missile defense, but perpetuates the treaty that insures that spending will be ineffective. We wonder how long managing the next news cycle will work, and worry that somewhere out there is the foreign-policy equivalent of a blue dress.

Mr. Clinton's character flaws have fallen most directly on what the Constitution calls his duty to "take care that the laws be faithfully exercised." From the first he, with the help of his wife, has done his conscious or unconscious best to make a shambles of the Department of Justice. This is the department once dominated by Mr. Hubbell, the Department that prosecuted Billy Dale, the Department that now refuses to appoint an independent counsel for the campaign finance scandal despite the urgings of Louis Freeh at the FBI and Charles La Bella, head of the Department's own investigations. Now comes Mr. Clinton's own personal perjury and obstruction, and even worse his strained defense of the same.

So the Senate embarks today on the third serious impeachment movement in our history. With the decision on witnesses postponed, there is still a chance that the trial will go down as a sham. But we suspect Senators will rise to the challenge of conducting a serious inquiry even if in the end the President escapes with a hung jury, an outcome his camp is already billing as acquittal and vindication. We would hope that as the inquiry proceeds, Senators would come to recognize that a man of the character now revealed in Mr. Clinton is dangerous in the Presidency, where the job description includes putting aside immediate appetites to tend to the future of the Republic.

While the President's defense haggles about the precise meaning of perjury, it is readily apparent that his testimony in both the civil case and before the grand jury was a massive exercise in bad faith, as of course was his lie to the public and his treatment of his colleagues. In his legalistic justifications, in his lack of remorse, his failure to admit or even comprehend that he has wronged his office, he is doing his honest best to tell us one thing. To wit, at the next opportunity he will do all of the same things all over again.

Previous article: 'Mea Culpa' August 4, 1998

Next article: Impeaching Reactionary Liberalism February 19, 1999