Your bottom-line critique of Clinton is that he failed to deliver on his promise to develop a new social safety net for the information age. I'm still amazed that despite the surplus, we didn't find a way to do more to provide child care, for instance, that it's still an individual family responsibility. Democrats really didn't put together a constituency behind the roster of things people need in an economy where they're going to change jobs frequently, where you don't have a parent at home with the kids ...

Well, you do it with tax credits, and the irony is that the guy who did so much with tax credits in public life, when it came to healthcare, he goes with a ridiculous employer mandate plan. That was silly. There's another aspect that's crucial, and here Lewinsky intervened as well. The biggest problem we're going to face is the impact of the baby boom generation on our children. Not only have we been self-centered and self-indulgent and generally obnoxious, now we're gonna be an economic weight as well. Clinton had the opportunity, he had the budget surplus, to deal with Social Security and Medicare, and he didn't do it. And he didn't do it in part because of Lewinsky and in part because Democrats wanted to be able to demagogue on both those issues.

Well, now you have a president who spent all that money on tax cuts.

Totally obscene tax cuts.

One of the ideas I was intrigued by in "The Natural" is the way you think Clinton was used as the classic mythological, psychological "scapegoat" -- that we used him to exorcise all our social demons over what the '60s had wrought in terms of sex, drugs, gender, marriage, by sacrificing him, for his excesses, some of which were also our own. He was made to pay. But you say it didn't work, that he wasn't sacrificed. But I'd say that he was: For all those things he accomplished, that you lay out so well, his presidency is still judged a disappointment. The Lewinsky mess is his legacy.

No, we can't get so wrapped up in our little world of the media. In our world he's considered a failure. There are all these people, including liberals, who say because of Lewinsky, because of the pardons, he really was an immoral guy. But the public was with him all the way. You take the Lewinsky year, when all of my colleagues were so upset about him: Nothing happened to him that year. He started at 60 percent in the polls, he ended at 60 percent. Republicans meanwhile drifted down in the polls, but journalists were the lowest -- we were lower than lawyers, for god's sakes.

The public is never going to be able to determine the difference between Al Gore's Medicare plan and George Bush's, but they do sense important things about character. They knew in 1992, that Clinton messed around, that he lied about things, but they also sensed that he really cared about them. And that opinion never changed, and he never violated it. We in the press defined character as sex, in the stupidest possible way. I'm actually pro-peccadillo. I think that politicians with an interesting sexual life have a better track record in the presidency. But there are other tests of character as well. The biggest is, are you willing to go up against your strongest supporters, for the greater good, and Clinton did that time after time.

In the book, you actually criticize yourself for a Newsweek column you wrote, "The Politics of Promiscuity," which suggested that his lax personal and sexual standards slipped over into his governing, when in fact that really wasn't true.

Right.

People said, "If he'd lie to his wife he'd lie to the country" ...

John Kennedy brought a date to the inauguration. Franklin Roosevelt ran a free-love commune in the White House during World War II, and he sicced the IRS on his enemies. There was a kind of alienated Puritanism among the fashionable press in the 1990s. People were just so, so, so upset about Clinton's sex life. And Puritans are bad enough when they believe in something, but to have a bunch of Puritans who don't even believe in anything ...

Cynical Puritans ...

Cynical Puritans! It's just ridiculous. And I think that we did real damage.

You thought Salon did the wrong thing in printing the Henry Hyde story.

Yeah ... No ... Well, actually ... I think it was going to get out there sooner or later. The public is going to find out, and be titillated and so on, and we're all going to sell more newspapers. What went wrong was not so much Salon doing the Hyde story, although I think that crossed a boundary, but ... look, the biggest change in the press is that everybody's so damn well educated. When I started in the press there were really ink-stained wretches. Not everybody went to college. Now, everybody at the New York Times and the Washington Post and Salon and Slate, most of them have Ivy League educations ...

Not me ...

So these folks can't just lap up a sex story and report it gleefully, like the public wants you to do, there has to be some deeper meaning, about morality or legality or whatever. And it has to last 18 months or 12 months or whatever, and play right into the hands of the most extreme elements of the opposition, so you wind up with impeachment, rather than a two-week story, which is all it was ever worth.

Obviously Salon didn't do the Henry Hyde story because of the morality of Hyde's extramarital affairs ...

It was because of the hypocrisy.

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