An anatomy of Bill Clinton's disintegration

I mean, would you even be able to get out of bed in the morning? Glance at your face in the mirror while you shave and comb your hair? Make small talk or assess policy over breakfast?

You've been humiliated before a global audience. You've made liars out of lifelong friends and loyal advisers, even out of your wife - people who trusted you, believed in you, staked their careers on you. "I don't believe anything any more from him," one nameless aide says in Monday's New York Times.

Now you're well on the way to becoming a unique failure among American presidents. Reagan gets, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall." Kennedy gets, "Ask not what you're country can do for you." FDR gets, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

Jeff Eldridge Sticks & Stones

Posterity aims to stick you with, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

There's no way you're getting anything done in the next 28 months, and the few meager things you've accomplished in the previous 68 aren't particularly memorable.

Some of the Democrats in Congress stick up for you; most don't. Anonymously, they say you should just quit and get it over with. A few say they never liked you in the first place. The whole team hates you, because you're the one who dropped the ball.

Your ex-girlfriend goes into seclusion and snitches on the secret romantic symbolism behind your Hugo Boss ties.

You sure as hell can't enjoy a good cigar anymore.

The presidency becomes a cross between a Tom Wolfe novel and a sinister episode of "Saved By the Bell." Nothing can change the unhappy ending ahead - not your powerful friends, not your elegant sophistry, not a wiseacre grin followed by a weepy apology.

"We have almost a virtual impeachment, a Potemkin president," your old friend Robert Reich says on Nightline, a remark later printed in the Times. "He's going through the motions of being a president, but he doesn't have very much power or authority left."

Politically impotent, humiliated, alone, and likely to face impeachment proceedings, logic dictates that you should resign. You're staring straight in the face of personal doom.

But you can't resign. Any time that thought creeps into your head, all you see is Nixon: Nixon of the secret tapes, Nixon of the scowling profile, broken, bitter, scorned by history. If you resign, you're Nixon.

Because resignation means failure.

And if you hang on by the skin of your teeth, you've still got two things - you've got rage and indignation.

Rage and indignation - that's all that's left. That's the only motive for pushing on.

Clinton can't pass sweeping legislation anymore. People question the motives and meanings behind every move, even the bombing of terrorist strongholds.

So what does he do? He launches a public pity campaign. Soldier ahead in order to let the enemies know they won't have the best of it.

Rage and indignation.

They're evident in his 4 1/2-hour grand-jury testimony. Sitting in the Map Room, red and sweaty, tripping over the meanings of "is" and "alone," Clinton pops with contempt when he talks about the jerks who "would take a wrecking ball to me and see if they could do some damage."

These are the same enemies who made him drop trou in front of Paula Jones and ask her to kiss it; the same enemies who made him launch a seamy affair with a 22-year-old kid, commit perjury about it, then conceal evidence of its existence.

It's rage and indignation that led to a Swaggartian confession of sin at a prayer breakfast, seeking "genuine repentance," then following up with a rankled, contradictory pledge to use "all available" arguments to win.

Anger can probably be a powerful motivator. It's probably not enough to propel a wounded chief executive through two years of mediocrity and disgrace - but if you're desperate and pathetic, it might be worth trying.

So why wouldn't you resign?

Because you wake up in the morning feeling like you have something to prove.

You look in the mirror and see someone who's been wronged by the wicked. You go out and carry on as usual, like nothing's ever changed, like you're playing the same game you started. Grin and nod, take solace in whatever small graces you get. Keep lying to yourself.

It doesn't matter what happens or who you hurt, as long as you don't let them win.

-Jeff Eldridge can be reached over e-mail at jeldridg@umich.edu

09-24-98