Southern gothic.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Presidential prevarication - Editorial

The price of presidential prevarication

It has become clear that the Clinton era's twilight years will be a gloomy dusk, filled with the whispering of ghosts and the casting of unsettling shadows. The Juanita Broaddrick rape charge - uncomfortably credible and insufficiently countered not merely by the president's lawyer but, more disturbingly, by his friends and political allies - casts a pall over a White House that has not wanted for dark clouds. As with the debunked story of his lathering a prostitute's child, that the president's supporters plainly see him as capable of such an act, if not necessarily guilty in this particular instance, is to damn the man as fully as his most vociferous enemies.

When Bill Clinton took office six years ago, there was something of the atmosphere that surrounded Andrew Jackson's triumphant arrival in Washington, D.C., in 1829: Here was a new kind of politician, both regionally and ideologically, a figure from the western, rough-and-tumble fringes of the South, a man of humble roots who claimed a strong emotional and experiential bond to the common people, a leader who would inaugurate a new age in national politics. Charged with ushering in the next American century, Clinton would not only oversee the "most ethical administration" ever (an unintentionally ironic boast, that), but would fundamentally restructure government and American life for the better.

But he has succeeded in nothing so much as transforming the White House from a symbol of august leadership and sober authority into a decaying Southern manse out of the pages of Poe, Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams. Famously raised in a dysfunctional family - the story of how young Billy stared down his alcoholic, physically abusive stepfather was early on made part of his legend - Clinton has himself emerged as a passive-aggressive national patriarch who alternates between fits of angry, finger-waving indignation and dew-eyed, lip-biting confessions before announcing that, starting tomorrow, he will be a changed man.

In an age of arch cynicism toward politics and politicians, he has distinguished himself as so thoroughly Machiavellian that it is universally acknowledged that his own word in the Broaddrick matter is worthless. In a way that was unthinkable before his presidency, we are left puzzling over the subtext and latent meaning of every utterance the chief executive makes and every action he takes, whether the topic is sexual harassment or the...