When Richard Nixon sullied the White House with the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, anguished Americans atoned in the next polls, electing a pious peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter from the backwoods of Plains, Georgia, a man so abstemious that he felt guilty at the mere thought of lusting at a Playboy centerfold.

How swiftly things have changed. From the FDR's famed fireside chats over the radio, America has suddenly plummeted to Clinton's late night television confessionals (broadcast only after 10 p.m. after the children have gone to bed). George Washington may never have been able to tell a lie, but thebabyboomers of the 1990s are learning that the nation's 42nd President can barely speak the truth. In fact, he has difficulty facing the truth. It is now becoming evident that Clinton's mea culpa was a masterpiece of sophistry and subterfuge. Forsaking a golden opportunity to own up and repent for his execrable behavior, he sought to convert a moment of personal embarrassment into political capital. Judging by the latest opinion polls -- in which most Americans don't believe his denial of perjury -- the country has seen through the game. But Americans are in a terrible dilemma. They know they have a President with an unsurpassed track record of mendacity and deception. But they also know he is a leader who willy-nilly -- and one uses the inelegant phrase delicately -- has led their country to bountiful times.

These are good times for America, to paraphrase a fatuous Clintonian expression. The economy is strong, peace is at hand, and the hum of commerce and enterprise is steadily driving the engine of a freemarket to ever greater prosperity. Despite the Cassandras of capitalism and the overlords of morality, the 21st century too looks like being an American Century (we in India can of course scoff at the notion). All this in spite of a profligate leader whose wanton promiscuity recalls the dissipation of Roman nobles.

So how do the American people handle this contradiction? Happily and without qualms, it seems. Opinion polls show that Clinton still retains his high job approval rating of over 60 per cent. But at the same time an increasing number of people disapprove of his reprehensible behavior. They think he sets a poor personal example, they think his morals are weak or non-existent, they think he is incapable of telling the truth or keeping his libido in check. But do they want him to resign? No sirree. Polls show that a majority, more than 60 per cent, do not want him to quit office despite his weaknesses. His political strength outweigh his personal foibles.

Americans have said that if his maritalexcursions did not bother his wife, why should it worry them? In one revealing poll published over the weekend, 43 per cent of the respondents said Bill Clinton shared their values! Juxtapose this against a separate, unrelated poll showing nearly 50 per cent of married Americans have had at least one adulterous liaison, and you come to the conclusion that infidelity is not at all an issue here. But lying is.

Or at least, was. A poll in the early part of the year showed that 50 per cent of Americans believed Clinton should be impeached if he lied under oath. That number had fallen to 29 per cent just before his mid-August confessional, when it was known that he had played fast and loose with the truth. Faced with the hard truth that their president was a liar, "these-are-good-times-America" itself turned its back to the virtues of candour and honesty, telling the world that it can live with mendacity and adultery in order to preserve its material well-being. Everywhere one turns, the refrain now is "leavethat man alone. Hasn't he been through enough?"

Well, not nearly enough, it now appears. This is not just about a little adultery, a little womanising or a little fling. What Bill Clinton has demonstrated with a sense of finality is that he is a serial fibber who is, at the best of times, scarce with facts. His proclivity to bend the truth is chronicled in escapades ranging from his alleged intake of marijuana to draft-dodging to the Gennifer Flowers episode. And in each case, he has gone down the slippery slope of deception until he was forced into outright falsehood. Asked if he had ever smoked marijuana, he once replied,``I have not broken any laws of the country,'' knowing well that he tried hemp as a Rhodes scholar in England. Questioned if it was not true that he had had a 12-year affair with Gennifer Flowers, he replied ``I have said that before''. Said what? Similar semantic jugglery and verbal calisthenics in the Monica Lewinsky case has finally landed him in a soup now.

It's not that America isnew to decadence or deceit. For every Jimmy Carter, there was a Warren Harding. For every Calvin Coolidge (who was so unpretentious and uninspiring that when he was reported to be dead, someone asked "But how can you tell?'') there has been a Grover Cleveland. In fact, following its celebrated non-lying first president, the US had Thomas Jefferson, whose stirring declamation about "all men being equal" did not preclude him from keeping bonded labourers himself and who indeed had a roaring affair with his slave Sally Hemmings.

But Clinton turned out to be a slave to his libido. Here is a man blessed with a sparkling intellect and sublime political skills who recklessly squandered a chance to leave his imprint on the millennium as the last US president of this century (this could prove to be incorrect before long). He has done so with a flagrant disregard for the very value Americans prize most: truth. And the Americans too -- and how well they deserve him -- seem to have lost sight of their most valuedepitome. Like them, Bill Clinton symbolises the new American ideal of life, liberty and the happiness of pursuit. In more ways than one.