ANALYSIS : WHITEWATER: STRINGENT STANDARD DOGS CLINTON.

Byline: Robert A. Rankin Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

It remains unlikely, but suddenly it's not inconceivable that the Whitewater affair could end Bill Clinton's presidency in scandal.

Now that Clinton's former business partners in Whitewater have been convicted of felonious conspiracy, as they were Tuesday, who can say what else special prosecutor Kenneth Starr will find?

However Whitewater turns out, the controversy raises questions of whether Clinton is being subjected to a more stringent standard of justice and political morality than previous presidents faced.

The heart of the tangled Whitewater affair, after all, stems from a modest real-estate investment Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton made almost 20 years ago in Arkansas, long before he became president.

One need not be a Clinton partisan to wonder: Could Lyndon Baines Johnson have survived such a probe into the finances of his wife's TV stations? Could a special prosecutor have put John F. Kennedy on the hot seat by raking through records of his family fortune, which his father reputedly built partly by importing illegal booze during Prohibition?

``I think the standard is kind of stupid up to this point, and Clinton handled it stupidly,'' said Gerald Pomper, a scholar of the presidency at Rutgers University.

How is the standard stupid?

``Well, what has he done wrong? We're talking about something that is 15 years old. Somebody tried to make a fast buck, but there is no indication that anything he did is bad,'' Pomper said. He said Clinton could have defused the controversy by being more candid from the beginning.

Such sentiments were more widely held until last Tuesday; after all, four years of inquiries into Whitewater by the media and Congress had failed to nail down anything very damning. Few people could even make much sense of the complicated affair.

On Tuesday, however, 12 Arkansas jurors made enough sense of it to find Clinton's former business partners, James and Susan McDougal, and his successor as Arkansas governor, Jim Guy Tucker, guilty of multiple charges of felonious conspiracy.

Essentially, they arranged illegal loans to benefit themselves using taxpayer-backed money from the Small Business Administration and Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, which James McDougal owned. For example, an FBI agent testified that $50,000 of an SBA-backed loan went improperly to the Whitewater real estate venture co-owned by the Clintons.

Clinton has not been charged and denies all wrongdoing. But both he and his wife, Hillary, clearly were involved, and Starr's investigation continues. Did they conspire too? Did they later obstruct justice by misleading investigators? Indictments - even convictions - of the Clintons cannot be ruled out, although few legal experts think either result is likely.

Rich Bond, chairman of the Republican National Committee during the Bush presidency, says if Clinton is being examined under a new standard, it is because Whitewater arises from unique circumstances.

``This is not a stand-alone situation the way that Watergate was, totally internal to the Nixon political family. This involves the national savings-and-loan scandal,'' Bond said. ``That was going on on a national scale for over 10 years, on Reagan's watch, on Bush's watch. Clinton was involved as a consumer and investor. The S&L scandal is a case unto itself.''

The S&L-related land deal is only one aspect of what Starr is now investigating, however. Also being probed for possible illegalities are bank loans to Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial campaign, the 1993 firing of the White House Travel Office staff and the two-year disappearance of billing records from Hillary Clinton's Rose Law Firm and their discovery last year in the residential quarters of the White House.

It would not take an indictment of either Clinton to inflict major political damage on the president, of course. Top aides to both the president and Hillary Clinton could face charges.

There is nothing unusual about a president and his closest aides being probed by investigators raking through old records in search of illegality.

Ed Meese, one of Ronald Reagan's closest aides, was wracked by a special prosecutor's investigation into a storm of alleged ethics investigations before finally being cleared in 1988.

Similarly, Ray Donovan, Reagan's former secretary of labor, was tried on fraud and grand larceny charges stemming from business practices before his government service, only to be acquitted in 1987.

Jimmy Carter endured a special counsel's investigation into whether a Georgia bank loan had been diverted illegally to his 1976 presidential campaign. No evidence was found, the counsel concluded - in 1979.

Meanwhile one of Carter's closest aides, Bert Lance, had been forced to resign as budget director in 1977 under a cloud of allegations surrounding his financial dealings with a Georgia bank. Lance eventually was tried on 22 counts of fraud but never convicted, as his trial ended in a hung jury.

If Clinton is being skewered by a too stringent standard, Republican partisans may find satisfaction in the irony that it was forged in the fires of Watergate, when Hillary Clinton helped the House Judiciary Committee vote to impeach Richard Nixon.

The very institution of independent prosecutor was invented because of Watergate. Ever since, the money and manpower at the prosecutors' command has made possible investigations into areas such as Whitewater that probably would have escaped deep probes in times past. Independent prosecutors became tools for extending federal power and morality deep into areas previously remote.

``The national political climate changed in the early to mid-seventies, but you still have states that are backwaters,'' said David Keene, president of the American Conservative Union and a GOP strategist.

``In the most sympathetic scenario, he (Clinton) probably didn't do any more than any other Arkansas politicians had done over the years. It wasn't that he is caught in changing times. It's that he was caught in trying to sell the principles or mores of one culture (Arkansas) in another (national) culture.''

For all the changes since Watergate, however, when it comes to what's allegedly at the heart of Whitewater, some say standards really haven't changed that much.

``When the president is being mentioned negatively in court proceedings, and people he's been associated with end up being indicted and convicted, that is a political problem,'' said Greg Schneiders, a Democratic consultant. ``It always has been and it always will be.''