Bill Clinton is some filler. Once the great hope of liberal aspirations, he's become the paste in a sandwich between female stereotypes Hugh Hefner would be happy to embrace. Hillary and Monica: a woman wronged, a woman scorned. You'd think a former student of history would know better.
Any day now someone may charge President Clinton with sexual racism. if nothing else, it seems fairly certain he likes his women white. This from the man who promoted positive action programmes for women and minority groups at a time when it was set to go out of style. That from a politician who rightly pleads for personal privacy, yet confesses his concern about how he'll tell his wife of his infidelity to an intermediary sure to inform the international press.
The greatness of any leader derives not so much from what he or she might do faced with, for instance, a third world war. The challenge is in rising to the times that are in it, even when they are gossipy, celebrity-centred and far too personal for the common good.
Kenneth Starr's investigations were trivial, but the President's admission that he had been very economical with the truth is not. If the inquiries made were once beneath him, then the outcome is that he may have responded by stooping lower still.
The same week, his decision to bomb Sudan and Afghanistan resulted in the death of innocent people. The bombing of terrorist targets overseas happened by coincidence, his aides asserted, on the same day Monica Lewinsky testified under oath, soon after she confided to that new breed of informants called "friends" that Mr Clinton actually encouraged her to think they had a future together.
In a sense, the President's very lack of a good come-on line says it all: he wrapped her ties around him, then went and hanged himself by denying what that meant.
Before Mr Clinton was first elected, when the Gennifer Flowers allegations were threatening to ruin his chance, Hillary Rodham Clinton told us she was "not some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette." That slogan was tantamount to an election promise.
The words shouted to the whole world that she was different from the First Ladies who had gone before implied a tacit criticism of the way they had behaved. It was, in a sense, Ms Rodham Clinton's guarantee that together they would articulate a clear, contemporary role for the First Family, one that fitted the union better than the models used before. She seemed more than credible.
Jackie Kennedy, Ladybird Johnson, Pat Nixon, Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush. Hillary would break the mould of the American political wife, a breed she tried to rename spouse. Yet Ms Rodham Clinton has, despite herself, become a parody of some of their worst moments.
And unlike Diana, Princess of Wales, who refused to live as a brood mare for the British royal family, Rodham Clinton's future may depend on how well she fulfils a traditional role.
The dark glasses with which she faced the cameras the morning after Bill apologised to her through television hint at the far more tragic image of Jackie Kennedy at President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's funeral.
The endless hand-holding between Ms Rodham Clinton and the President looks perhaps even more Hollywood than did the mitts of Barbara Bush or Nancy Reagan in the fists of George or Ronnie. If Rosalynn Carter had to listen to her spouse tell the world how he harboured lust in his heart, Rodham Clinton must hear her spouse refer his lust to a different organ altogether.
The potential hubris at the heart of her dilemma is that her own political power rests on a stereotype she had been determined to reject, the idea that men are victims of their own bodies, floundering in a wave of uncontrollable desire, with women the ultimate arbiters of social and ethical behaviour.
It is a scenario straight from one of Camille Paglia's wilder essays, full of compelling theatricality but innately flawed.
We are now asked to believe that this otherwise brilliant woman, who could herself become the first female president of the United States, did not know of her husband's philandering with Monica Lewinsky in either legal or biblical understandings of the term. We are invited to believe Ms Rodham Clinton is in the same boat as women who wait up for their husbands to come home after a night shootin' the breeze with the good ol' boys. Most of all, we are asked to accept codswallop in the name of Realpolitik.
Starr tried to question the President's moral authority by invading his physical integrity. Opinion polls suggested his route was wrong, but it's a measure of the times that if President Clinton had instead been found in possession of Viagra because he had an impotence problem, his public image would most likely have been damaged sooner.
Being president and seeming virile are as closely bound as latitude and longitude. The spin we're now being sold rests securely on that myth, with an architecture big enough to accommodate as many possible storylines as an afternoon soap opera.
But while the President was loath to join the cast six months ago, now he seems happy to play the romantic lead, a Garth Brooks with cruise missiles and a wife who holds his political future in her arms.
The President says he is worried that the public discourse is being cheapened. It is. The question is by whom. Independent counsel Starr, the man who moved from defending the tobacco industry to investigating the Whitewater-now-Zippergate debacle, has indeed achieved the near-impossible feat of introducing the politics of lap-dancing to the culture of The Little House on the Prairie.
Until last week Mr Clinton seemed above it. Now he risks resembling an ageing rock star, with a foreign policy whose itinerary is as strategic as a comeback tour.