Did President Clinton sleep with his secretary? Frankly, I couldn’t care less. That he might have been involved in an improper relationship 10 years ago or last week is none of my business.

What bothers me is how successfully Clinton has belittled and declassed the office of president. Sure, Bush had a penchant for vomiting on foreign dignitaries and Gerald Ford couldn’t walk and chew gum, but you can forgive someone for being a klutz at least they kept their flies zipped.

We are living in an era of immense cynicism toward our government. Although the polls say our attitudes have improved, only a third of eligible voters bother to exercise democracy at election time, and most of us change the channel when political news graces our TV set.

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A century ago, politics was the national pastime. Party rallies were received with as much enthusiasm as the Super Bowl is today. The reason is quite simple there was nothing else to do. Now we have talk shows, so our excitement can be channeled into debates like, Should Linda forgive her bulimic ex-roommate for sleeping with her boyfriend’s sister?

But we are not just cynical we are impatient. The average voter is beginning to regard legal and political solutions as too slow or too compromising. The result exists in members of government who feel the best way to fix societies problems is to take away your freedom.

For example, one proposed solution to fight crime is to treat every citizen as a criminal by requiring all of us to be fingerprinted and carry a national ID card. South Africa once required this of all colored persons under Apartheid until Nelson Mandella and his supporters changed things.

Leaving live free or die stuff aside, major decisions will be made in the near future concerning how the government spends your money, and how much of it they take away. Drug legalization is becoming more possible, while supporters of the drug war yearn for more aggressive tactics that would give police Gestapo powers. Education reform is a growing concern. Leaving these issues aside, major changes are going to occur one way or another in the next decade because our government is going broke.

In the middle of all this is a president who, even in his second term, is more concerned with putting positive spins on every last detail than addressing the problems of the nation and he may have trouble keeping his pants on.

The president of the United States is still the most powerful individual in the world. The office has changed since the days of Washington. Today, a vote for a president is a vote for a line of national policy. For Clinton it was socialized medicine, which Mrs. Clinton is still touting. For Reagan it was conservative economics. For 1996 Republican primary candidate Pat Buchannan, it was isolationism.

The next president can have an immensely powerful influence on the direction our nation takes. We only can hope that President Clinton has not made us so apathetic that we observe the year 2000 campaign with as much enthusiasm as we greet CBS sit-coms.

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