The presidency at risk: we need a grown-up.

Politically, the president is in pretty good shape. Vulnerable, Bill Clinton surely is: the voters aren't much inclined to believe what he says, and they respect him even less. Renewed charges that Chinese campaign contributions influenced national security policy also could hurt badly. Just as bad, the Middle East negotiations are stalled, India and Pakistan are building nuclear arsenals, and, around the world, one economy or another always seems to be teetering on the edge of disaster. But Clinton's good luck still hasn't deserted him. Monica Lewinsky is back in the headlines, but Paula Jones is more or less off the board, tales of the president's amorous escapades are having little effect on voters, and Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr has not become any more lovable, even with the help of professional image-brighteners. The economy is still turning out good numbers. For the moment, there is even hope for Ireland. And with the Clintons' approval ratings high and the president himself a limping lame duck, Republican strategists - concerned to keep their House majority - have been focusing more of their attacks on the Democrats as a party, turning to Clinton stories only to get a laugh. It's the presidency that's in trouble, and in that story, the public plays as big a role as its leaders.

At least intuitively, the majority of Americans understand the case for executive power as Alexander Hamilton set it down in The Federalist. Constitutional government exists by convention, through agreements and institutions that create a domesticated public space in which the law can rule. But outside and underneath the hedge of the laws is a fundamental lawlessness that always threatens forms and proprieties, especially through the sort of change that renders old laws at least temporarily inadequate or obsolete. Even John Locke, that paladin of liberal constitutionalism, argued that government requires some element of "prerogative," the capacity to act without, or sometimes against, legal rules. After all, when citizens act as rulers, they can't be merely law-abiding; they have to evaluate laws and policies, standing outside and above legality. For most of us, however, this exercise of sovereignty happens only in moments, chiefly in imagination or in the voting booth. On a day-to-day basis, the buck, as Harry Truman famously observed, stops with the president.

Presidents, Americans recognize, need the skill and constitutional power to deal with knaves and villains; we can't afford a president who is too honorable or tied to convention. The most conspicuously decent occupants of the presidency in recent years - Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter - are commonly regarded as failures. In recent elections, American voters have showed a decided preference for supple rascality over hampered rectitude; Clinton's very reputation for impropriety may have helped establish him as the candidate better able to build a "bridge to the future."

Nobody needs to tell us that this is a dangerous world, full of threatening presences, in which life is being reordered with scant regard for old ways and certitudes. Increasingly, technology and markets are transforming families, shattering communities, and undermining our older ideas of citizenship and self-government. Civic life seems less able to govern the forces of the time, and also less necessary. And as political community appears to afford us less support for our pride and dignity, we offer it less of ourselves. Americans feel more and more "unencumbered" (the term is political philosopher Michael Sandel's), allowed to follow an ethic of personal liberation which, in turn, encourages tolerance for the president's "private life."

In the same spirit, public life is becoming privatized, not only through deregulation and government downsizing, but through a politics in which money and lawsuits, administrative hearings and "rights talk" replace the effort to persuade and organize majorities. We are more apt to think of political leaders, including the president, as lawyers or advocates, people we hire for essentially private purposes. Bill Clinton, in these terms, is doing a good job: we put him in as CEO to fix the economy, and his character is irrelevant unless it shows up in the bottom line. If you were O.J. Simpson, would you care about the state of Johnny Cochrane's soul? And it follows, as in the 'popular recent thriller, Air Force One, that presidents also put private motives first, which is O.K., the movie teaches, so long as the Soviet general gets killed in the end.

Other problems aside, however, political leaders may - especially in times of great transformation - have to ask us to do things that cost or hurt, that trouble the existing order, or that challenge the way we see ourselves and our country. In this respect, the privatized view of the presidency, and Clinton's conduct in office, seem more and more like an anecdote without a punch line, or more charitably, an episode of "Seinfeld." As New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote, the swirl of scandal has served to distract attention from the "hollowness of Mr. Clinton's second term," just as his approval ratings often seem to serve no purpose other than "deflecting an impeachment proceeding."

The authority to do great things requires a stronger relation between people and president, one in which we give our allegiance and our willingness to sacrifice, but in which we receive moral assurance and personal responsibility from those who lead us into new ways and times. Presidents, acting for us - he took power, FDR said, "in the spirit of the gift" - mediate between convention and nature, the laws and the divine. Able to dispense mercy, presidents can bring down the apocalypse; at bottom, the presidency is hierophantic and tinted with regality, a truth partly captured in FDR's hyperbolic likening of his administration to Christ's driving the moneychangers from the temple. But the public price of that dangerous authority is the president's willingness to sacrifice his or her private self while in office, assuming a wholly public persona: In great monarchies, like the papacy, rulers often surrender their private names, just as high kings must be willing to die or to offer up those they love.

In liberal republics, the price of office, like its authority, is ordinarily not so steep. Still, if our rulers want to be taken seriously, they have to give up most of the liberty they would enjoy as private citizens. Above all, they have to show personal respect for the forms, for the very conventions and laws that a president's extra-legal public power may have to repair or reform.

At the beginning of American national life, there were strayings among the Framers. Assuming that all the charges against Clinton are true, Alexander Hamilton - "a sexual libertine," John Adams called him - was probably his match, though certainly more graceful in his predations. But when Hamilton was accused of winking at or collaborating in the corrupt schemes of his paramour's husband in order to cover up the affair, he chose to publish a self-reviling confession, sacrificing his private character to preserve the honor of his public conduct and policy. It's an example the current president has so far been unable to appreciate, let alone follow.

Bill Clinton is genuinely engaging, and even his misdeeds suggest a Tom Sawyerish kind of mischief, the sometimes very hurtful frivolities of a basically good kid. But kings who are children have always been bad omens, and the presidency of the United States is cut to an adult's measure. We will need to do better next time.

Not Icarus

A sky too bleak for Brueghel, the woods a legion of black sticks and no bird stirring. What quickens me is the way the stripped wisteria vine has writhed its way through the deck railings. Not woven, though, nor even a meander, but a series of tortured gestures. I am learning to settle for small pleasures. I have filled the sparrow feeder and tossed out kernels of dry corn for the resident crows. I have loaded the thistle tube for finches and hung a bell of barley so I can sit like some apprentice Adam listing the transient birds when they come. A piece of green wood in the hearth is snarling, and when I step out to gather logs I split two seasons back, I feel foolish for loving winter so much, like an adoring husband whose wife is indifferent to his passion. In that doleful moment, though, I find a fallen wren under the suet cage, his feet twisted up and one stiff wing reaching skyward and beautiful, still beautiful, with its rim of ice.

R.T. Smith

Wilson Carey McWilliams, a longtime Commonweal contributor, teaches political science at Rutgers University.