Display Error: Clinton's emotional style.

One of the most characteristic Clinton moments was at one of the- roughly five-Ron Brown memorial services. A camera caught the president laughing after the ceremony, so-like a gunslinger reaching for his revolver-he produced a tear and wiped it away in a perfect, rapid-fire gesture of grief. Clinton could handle emotion the way Michael Jordan handled a basketball, with utter command, making it do things no one would have thought possible.

The Ron Brown tear was notable, of course, mostly for its falsity. It captured a seeming paradox of the Clinton years: that our most "emotionally open" president was also one of the least honest. But this isn't really a paradox. Instead it reflects one aspect of our confessional culture, which values openness but tends also to thrive on manipulation and make-believe, on manufactured sentiments that demonstrate the correctness of their bearer. Clinton was, in many ways, the representative man of our age: the empathetic liar.

The original untruth was, I feel your pain. Moral philosophers have long recognized the tricky nature of sympathy. One critic has written of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, "For Smith, acts of sympathy are structured by theatrical dynamics that (because of the impossibility of really knowing or entering into someone else's sentiments) depend on people's ability to represent themselves as tableaux, spectacles or texts before others." Clinton was a spectacle; the most important thing was never our pain, but the fact that he seemed, so ostentatiously, to feel it.

In the second presidential debate in 1992, Clinton was widely thought to have clinched the election with his answer to a woman's question about how the national debt affected her. President Bush stumbled in his reply, understandably not seeming to have any idea what the hell the woman was asking. Clinton stepped right up to her, and talked about his fellow-feeling for all the sufferers in the Bush recession. He made the question about himself, about his fine feelings-it became a matter of display.

This tendency to self-exposure is something we associate with honesty. At that moment in the debate, the thinking goes, the repressed Bush was presumably cut off from any feelings he may have had, while Clinton forthrightly testified to his. But there is little that we are less likely to be honest about than ourselves. It is much harder to lie about, say, GDP figures for the farm sector than subjective feelings. What Clinton probably was thinking during that woman's question was, Here's a chance to bell my opponent, once and for all.

Clinton was particularly good at soaking people in a warm bath of sentiment partly as a matter of personality, but also because of his southern Protestant background, which favors open expressions of faith that might make mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews wince. This testimonial style was absorbed by daytime talk shows, which secularized it-unhinging it from most stern moral strictures-and spread it wide throughout the land. So, there is something perfect about George W. Bush-like Clinton, a southern Protestant with a propensity to talk about his heart-explaining his personal faith in a misty-eyed interview with Oprah Winfrey.

As it happens, the drive toward openness in our culture coexists with a strong censorious streak, a kind of debased and politicized puritanism. Certain things just aren't said, certain jokes not laughed at, certain attitudes not permitted-most of them involving race or any sort of judgmentalism. The last thing we want is for John Rocker to be open about his feelings for passengers on the 7 train. And he won't be admitted back to the family of man until he (preferably tearfully) confesses his hurt at having expressed such hurtful views.

So, the emotional openness in our culture tends to run in one direction, and become a matter of playacting. Take those intense episodes of exposure that dot daytime television. Never before have ordinary people told strangers so much about themselves that is so embarrassing. Then again, they often aren't quite ordinary people, but semiprofessionals-or, at least, participants in on the joke-producing the confessions necessary to drive story lines in which the villains are always Klansmen or heartless sluts.

Clinton was a high-toned version of those daytime-talk-show guests, letting it all hang out, so long as it served the story line. The court of Louis XIV depended on a facade to maintain a sense of majesty and mystery, Clinton's presidency on a sort of anti-facade to create an aura of informality and openness. But both depended on their own kind of artifice, which is why, after having been elected in 1992 as the most "real" candidate for president-and telling us everything that he has thought and felt over the last eight years, seeming to hide nothing-Clinton has still left the public hungry for authenticity.

In retrospect, two things should have been predictable if Clinton were to have an affair in the White House: First, it would be exposed, and we would know about it down to every last footnote, because his attitude, and the spirit of the age, are so corrosive of the idea of privacy (although he had plenty of help from the independent-counsel law). Second, that he wouldn't confess, at least not to what mattered. Clinton is willing to tell us everything-about his feelings, about his underwear-everything but that he lied in the Paula Jones suit. Because that would be an unflattering confession.

Instead of telling the truth, Clinton apologized, over and over. The apology was a kind of self-abasement, a way of feeling his own pain, of making out of himself such a spectacle that he would escape any other judgment: Qui s'accuse s'excuse. In Clinton's Washington, this apology without consequence became the coin of the realm. It was enough to feel bad, or appear to feel bad, to "take responsibility" for any mishap or malfeasance, and then blithely "move on."

The confessional culture tends to make standards for judgment subjective and personal. There is a selfishness at its core-and, of course, at Clinton's as well. His solipsism (with his own private meanings for words), his onanism, his extraordinary wish that the country could have been plunged into a crisis so he could improve his legacy, all depended on the notion that there was nothing-no people, no standards-outside himself that he need respect. This is why duty and sacrifice, which depend on devotion to things higher than self, are words that will never be associated with Clinton.

And neither will honesty, something buried among all the supposed self- revelations. We just know, and were told, too much. When Joe DiMaggio, an icon of a bygone reserve, famously kicked at the dirt around second base during one World Series game, you could be sure that he was really pissed. Clinton's promiscuous emotional gestures had no such spare starkness. Or, you could be sure that Calvin Coolidge wasn't lying to you when he wasn't saying anything, when he wasn't feeling compelled to make self-aggrandizing claims about the purity of his inner self. Clinton, for eight years, did little else.