Clinton wallows in presidential power

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (UW)- President Clinton must not really be President at all. He behaves more like the winner of a bizarre Be-President-for-a-Day Sweepstakes who can't contain his wonderment at the extent of his personal power.

We can imagine the President fiddling with high tech office supplies, spinning around and around in his swivel chair, or indulging his tragicomic sexual fantasies in a messy and embarrassing affair.

President Clinton lives as if his office is a weapon, not an obligation.

He lives as if there are no consequences to deal with tomorrow - only the consequences are piling up. He has been President for the day, about 2000 times in a row.

When Monica Lewinsky told the President she had a crush on him, he supposedly laughed, then asked if she would like to see his private office.

In the absence of the possibility that the President would respond to such an advance with a polite, "No, thank you," we had pinned our slim hopes to the pathetic idea that he at least entered his affair silently and with some modesty.

He did not. He chose instead to say, roughly, "Want to see my private office?" an answer that was part Boogie Nights and part The Tonight Show, part Machiavelli and part The Baby-Sitter's Club.

Unquestionably, we should not know these sad details (which come from the Starr report and not President Clinton), but we cannot ignore the details because we are angry about how Starr publicly aired private matters. Ken Starr is out of line. But so is the President.

The particulars of the affair are pitiful.

Sex aside, the President involved himself in a sloppy and sophomoric relationship with an obsessed employee.

When Lewinsky chastised the President for keeping his eyes open during their "Christmas kiss" in 1995 because it wasn't "romantic," he reassured her, insisting he was only making sure nobody could see. When she performed oral sex, he leaned against the bathroom door because it made his sore back feel better.

When they heard noises, they stumbled into the bathroom to finish up. When she gave him several ties, he gave her a marblebear figurine.

The President had hoped that ordinary Americans would empathize if not sympathize with his moral collapse, which, he hoped to convey, came under intense but not unusual sexual desire.

But President Clinton has underestimated his own degradation every step of the way. The Starr report describes behavior that ordinary Americans cannot identify with. And the President's strategy of incremental retreat and half-hearted apology indicates that he never stopped thinking he could get away with it.

President Clinton has sparked a national odyssey from reverence, to insecure defensiveness, to revulsion at his extraordinary and unique lack of self-control.

Somewhere beneath this anguish lies the relatively academic question of whether the President should be impeached. True, he has undermined himself as a husband and a father. His failings as a person are well documented. Even so, they are not necessarily indicative of incapacitation as Chief Executive.We should not impeach President Clinton because he hasn't proven that he can't perform the duties of his office. He has only made us think he can't.