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Mr. and Mrs.President

See How They Ran

On Wednesday, Federal District Judge Susan Webber Wright stunned Washington and the world when she summarily dismissed Paula Jones's civil lawsuit against the president of the United States. The sober 39-page ruling was unequivocal. "There are no genuine issues for trial in this case," Wright proclaimed.

Wright is correct. For weeks, even conservatives had been murmuring that Paula Jones had not proved that Bill Clinton's lechery actually harmed her.

And Jones's suit was never about perjury, suborning perjury or obstruction of justice, which remain special prosecutor Kenneth Starr's concerns.

Still, Hurricane Paula has stirred up many genuine issues, transforming the Clinton presidency and the United States in its wake.

So far, Clinton has benefitted from presiding in the age of O.J.

American culture indulges celebrity excess and fosters doubts that any public figure remains privately virtuous. Clinton's supporters have exploited the perennial recipe for presidential success - peace and prosperity - along with Clinton's roguish charm, to reject Americans' traditional demand that their president be an "ideal man." This new virtual presidency distinguishes between the man and the job. Thus, two-thirds of the nation can approve of the president's performance, while nearly two-thirds can also find Clinton guilty of repeated sexual misconduct.

The O.J. Simpson murder trial proved that you can win in a court of law and still lose in the court of public opinion. Even with the dismissal, Clinton's presidency is in tatters. His basest impulses as predator-in-chief have threatened his grandiose ambitions to shine as commander-in-chief.

Rather than ascending to the presidential pantheon for being as honest as Abraham Lincoln, as bold as Theodore Roosevelt, Clinton risks descent to the presidential rogues' gallery for being as slick as Richard Nixon, as wanton as John Kennedy.

After years of suppressing "bimbo eruptions," Bill Clinton finally has been scorched. Paula Jones not only refused to be bought off or silenced, her lawyers' search for other victims exposed Monica Lewinsky and Kathleen Willey, and might have panicked Clinton, Vernon Jordan and others into witness-tampering. During his deposition in the Jones case, Clinton finally admitted that he slept with Gennifer Flowers (only once, he insisted).

Jones's outrage and Clinton's behaviour have derailed the presidential agenda and helped legitimize the trashiest of talk.

Without the Jones lawsuit, Americans now would be blithely ignoring the president's pleas to talk about racism, budget surpluses and the evils of smoking, rather than trading dirty jokes about life in the Oval Office.

Whatever its outcome, the Jones crusade has transformed the debate about gender relations at work. In October 1991, six months after Jones first encountered Clinton at the Excelsior Hotel, the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas showdown introduced most Americans to the phrase "sexual harassment." The two cases make a pair of mismatched bookends. If Professor Hill's accusations suggested that any kind of workplace lechery could be defined as sexual harassment - even a cloddish joke about pubic hair on a Coke can, Jones learned that even an impromptu gubernatorial peep show might not be harassment.

If Justice Thomas's nomination hearings revealed that feminists would unite against all the men who "just don't get it," Jones vs. Clinton showed that American women are, in fact, divided.

Since 1991, while American courts have begun to define what creates a "hostile work environment," the media have reduced this serious issue to a farce. Reporters emphasize ridiculous cases, as when young schoolboys were charged with "harassing" girls during recess. These stories, and the rise of overzealous gender-relations consultants, have instilled the fear of God, or at least of million- dollar lawsuits, into corporations. Amid important efforts to weed out oppressive behaviours, stale and unrealistic codes of conduct have flourished.

Clinton, in some ways, has been lucky. Rumours about his amatory impulses have seeped into popular consciousness during a backlash against this new puritanism. Historically, Americans have seesawed between collective crusades to purify the body politic and individualistic demands to allow people great freedom and privacy. Feminists themselves disagree over whether and when sex is liberating or oppressive. Two weeks ago, Patricia Ireland of the National Organization of Women broke her long uncomfortable silence to declare that Kathleen Willey's tale of presidential groping sounded like "sexual assault."

Gloria Steinem replied that Clinton's retreat when rebuffed proved he had not harassed Willey.

Steinem's apologia revealed that many feminists prefer condemning a black conservative than a pro-choice president. Clearly, Steinem, a free spirit who went undercover as a Playboy bunny in the 1960s, recoils at this new Victorianism, this revived caricature of women as helpless victims terrified of male bosses, blanching at the mention of once unmentionable acts.

With over half the public applauding the Jones dismissal, Americans are rejecting the growing criminalization of sex, just as in condemning Kenneth Starr they reject the criminalization of politics. The Watergate scandals of the 1970s triggered an ever- escalating political arms race.

Washington's elaborate scandal-sniffing machinery has pushed one politician after another to the brink, as ham-handed attempts to cover up misdemeanors often swelled into elaborate conspiracies meriting felony charges. Special prosecutors have paralyzed the Carter, Reagan and now Clinton administrations for months at a time.

This unfortunate tendency to take opponents to court rather than defeating them at the polls reflects a litigation mania. Too many people like Paula Jones who feel morally wronged try to right it in court.

Jones only initiated her politically charged suit three years after the alleged incident, when Clinton was already president. The case fascinated Americans because the president's personal morality is a political issue. In distinguishing political and moral concerns from legal ones, Wright showed that the law is not a broad bludgeon to express momentary whims but a delicate instrument of limited use.

The parade of political prosecutions that Judge Wright, for one, refused to join has made American politics unduly nasty. The pile of Republican and Democratic scalps reinforce the relativistic "everybody does it" defence, making once-unacceptable behaviour acceptable.

Clinton has repeatedly justified immoral and outrageous acts on the grounds that they were not illegal - or that he has not been charged. He and his henchmen auctioned off nights in the hallowed Lincoln bedroom to the highest bidders, and subverted America's flawed campaign laws by obscuring ethical constraints in a haze of legalisms.

Clinton's feeling of "vindication" after Wright's dismissal illustrates how dangerous it is to rely on the legal system for moral clarity. If the allegations about his predatory behaviour are true, Clinton should not have been slapped with a lawsuit, simply slapped - by Jones, Willey, his wife, Hillary, and, perhaps, others too fearful to tell their tales.

This week's stunning turnabout proved that the Bill Clinton follies remain highly unpredictable. Paula Jones is contemplating an appeal. Kenneth Starr is not ready to fold. And this long national nightmare, unfortunately, remains far from over.

Gil Troy is chairman of the history department at McGill University and author of Affairs of State: The Rise and Rejection of the Presidential Couple Since World War II.