THE TROUBLE WITH CHARACTER

By Richard Stengel

Once upon a time (and it wasn't so long ago) parents fondly told their sons and daughters that they could grow up to be President. Nowadays the option is still there, but Mom and Dad would generally prefer that Ashley shoot for dental school instead. In two recent polls, one conducted for CNN and the other for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, only about a third of parents said they would steer their kids toward the White House. The parental attitude is, it's a dirty (and thankless) job and someone else should do it.

On best-seller lists, someone else is, and he's not exactly a moral paragon. In the current best seller Absolute Power, the Leader of the Free World, the heir of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, almost kills a paramour during rough sex and then aids in the cover-up. In the summer's hot title Exclusive, the President of the United States murders the baby his girlfriend refused to abort. In the film Escape from L.A., the Chief Executive orders the assassination of his own daughter, while in the movie version of Primary Colors, John Travolta is slated to play the lyin', cheatin' and stealin' First Stud. By today's standards of popular culture, Richard Nixon was a saint. Jail to the Chief.

If you believe Bob Dole, President Clinton has singlehandedly besmirched the highest office in the land and is the primary cause of the public's distrust of government. Last week, in the wake of Dole's final debate with Clinton and with less than three weeks to go until Election Day, Dole made the centerpiece of his campaign not his 15% tax cut but Clinton's moral fitness. "We're just starting to get tough," he told an audience in Riverside, California, noting that for the next 19 days he would highlight what he called "the sleaze factor" in the White House. "Never has America seen a politician," Dole said, "who brags so freely about promises he never kept, votes he hasn't earned, goals he never accomplished or virtues he never displayed."

But in the debate, despite his handlers' touting of his aggressiveness, Dole was curiously ambivalent, the reluctant prosecutor. Less than 10 minutes into it, in response to a touchy-feely question from a schoolteacher lamenting the lack of civility in public discourse, Dole said, "There's no doubt about it that many American people have lost their faith in government. They see scandals almost on a daily basis." He then glancingly cited the 900 FBI files that turned up in the White House, without explaining the potential abuse of power they represented. And when he did raise questions about the Democrats' sloppy handling of foreign contributions, Dole lapsed into disjointed senatorial shorthand: "Campaign finance might help, might help contributions coming in from Indonesia or other foreign countries, rich people in those countries, and then being sent back after the L.A. Times discovers it-- $250,000." Dole's invocation drew little response from the earnest San Diego audience. Their attitude seemed to be, if this was his use of the bully pulpit, he seemed more like the pulpit bully.

As the so-called character issue finally lumbered to center stage of the campaign, the press continued to be confounded by the fact that most Americans believe Dole has a "better character" than Clinton, yet most prefer Clinton to be President. But to American voters, there is not much contradiction here. To them, it's not so much character as competence mixed with compassion that matters. In the post-cold war era, when ideological differences between the parties are receding, voters know that they are not so much electing the Leader of the Free World as voting for the Mayor-in-Chief.

And when it comes to electing mayors, Americans have never been fussy about character. The mayor can cheat on his taxes or his wife, but if the garbage is picked up and the snow plowed, no one cares very much. Like the mayor of these United States, Clinton has done a decent job of minding the store, keeping the economy ticking over, and steadily announcing small-bore solutions to everyday problems, proposing school uniforms, cellular-phone service to fight crime, and curfews. Without World War III to worry about, the Chief Executive turns into President Pothole.

In a way, mending roads is a model for the Clinton presidency. Mark Penn, half the New York City duo of Penn & Schoen Associates, the President's pollsters, once likened Clinton's popularity to that of a former client, the rumpled, motor-mouthed mayor of New York City, Ed Koch. Koch was elected three times not because voters trusted him or wanted their children to grow up to be like him, asserts Penn, but because he helped make sense of a confusing time. He talked and listened and talked some more. In the latest abc News poll, 73% of voters say having a caring President who "understands the problems of people" is more important than having a President with the "highest personal character." We have moved from the President as stern Father Knows Best to what Robert Bly in his book The Sibling Society suggests as the President as Older Brother, maybe a little wiser but not without familiar flaws .

Several years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested that Americans were "defining deviancy down," arguing that out-of-wedlock births, for example, had reached such epidemic proportions that Americans had lowered the threshold of acceptable moral behavior. When it comes to the highest office in the land, voters have defined the presidency down. Richard Nixon's crimes, John Kennedy's infidelities, Lyndon Johnson's ballot rigging, Ronald Reagan's and George Bush's involvement in Iran-contra--these disclosures have so eroded the moral capital of the highest job in the land that Americans expect less from the man who holds it. Dole can try to argue, as he did last week, that "there is one thing history will not forgive: to hold an office and leave it diminished." But if history won't forgive you in the end, the American people apparently will.

To the dismay of modern virtuecrats like Bill Bennett, we are defining character down too. But the Baby Boomers do it differently from the Generation X-ers. According to fallen Clinton guru Dick Morris, the Baby Boomers look at the President and say, "Heck, he didn't do anything I wouldn't do, and at least he's trying to make sense out of it all." But younger voters are more gimlet-eyed and take the view that character is as character does. "They look at the character debate as a cover for party politics as usual," says Gen-X pollster Jefrey Pollock.

When it comes to politics, some say Americans are becoming more European, more willing to tolerate peccadilloes in their leaders without calling for the guillotine. But if one day Americans, like the French, end up tolerating a President with a separate family on the side, it won't be out of some Gallic lack of puritanism. It will be out of a weary, hard-won, American-style pragmatism. It will be because Americans have decided that it just plain makes sense to carve out distinctions between private morality and public character.

The character flaw that brings Presidents down is not a lack of conviction but, perhaps, too much of it. The one unpardonable sin is hubris. "Filegate has legs," insists Republican pollster Frank Luntz--not just because the White House seemed to think it could requisition 900 FBI files with impunity but because it initially dismissed Filegate as a "bureaucratic snafu." It sounded too much like, "We are too far ahead in the polls to give you an adequate explanation."

Ultimately, the way Dole has raised the character issue this past week reveals as much about his character as Clinton's. He telegraphed an all-out attack and then went halfway in the debate, making himself look vacillating and changeable, the very things he accuses the President of being. Dole waited until the last few weeks of the campaign to raise ethics in a serious way, making him seem more expedient than honorable, the same thing he accuses the President of being. It seems a political illustration of Freud's tenet that we accuse others of the flaws we see in ourselves.

Dole can say Clinton has no core beliefs, but that's not quite how voters see it. The flip side of someone's being indecisive is that he is still searching for the answer. Voters see Clinton not as having waffled but as having heard their message. Clinton got his comeuppance in 1994. Then, just as he did in Arkansas after voters threw him out of office in 1980, he set out to prove, "I get it, I really get it now." Whether or not that is high or good character is hard to say, but it is penitence, shrewdness, and perseverance. And in the end, that may be character that's good enough.

For continuous campaign coverage, visit the TIME/CNN Website at AllPolitics.com