GERALDO'S AMERICA (AND BILL CLINTON'S)

Last week, I experienced my lowest moment since puberty: I found myself being lectured about truth, honor, and ethics by the gossip columnist for the National Enquirer. Actually, not lectured, but screamed at before a daytime TV audience. "You," the columnist shrieked, his portly body rising indignantly from his upholstered chair, " you are a supercilious snob who has been looking down her nose at everyone this whole program!" The audience applauded as I sank lower into my upholstered chair.

The program, this supercilious snob is embarrassed to admit, was The Geraldo Rivera Show. No, not the semi-respectable nighttime show on which Newsweek's Howard Fineman appears; the daytime show. Don't ask how I found myself there on a panel of "experts" to discuss the Clinton scandals. Let's just say I didn't know there was a daytime Geraldo, and the publicist who booked me on it will not be receiving his box of Christmas chocolates this year.

Alas, once you are ushered into the studio on one of these shows, there is no escape. You are hooked up to a microphone. The doors are sealed. The audience looks at you with the relish and anticipation of the Roman mobs who watched the Christians stumble into the Coliseum.

As "experts," we'd been brought in to view news clips from the scandal -- Bill Clinton wagging his finger and denying sexual relations with "that woman" ; Hillary Clinton standing by her man on the Today show; the presidential embrace of the beret-wearing Monica Lewinsky -- and then "analyze" them. Did the Clintons look sincere? Did the president hug Miss Lewinsky the way he hugged every woman? My fellow "experts" included two female lawyers, one of whom believed you could tell a lot about people from their auras. There was also a "specialist in body language," a Californian speech therapist who thought you could decode secret messages by playing recordings of speech backwards, a bubbly pop psychologist, and the Enquirer's senior editor and gossip columnist, Michael Walker.

It quickly became clear that I was the only one in the studio who was scandalized by the president's alleged behavior in the Oval Office. Every time Kenneth Starr appeared on the video monitors, there was low grumbling and hissing. Every time it was asserted that whatever the president did -- or for that matter continued to do to hide it -- was a matter of privacy, enthusiastic applause erupted. Pretty soon, I began to feel like the Limburger on a party cheese plate. The audience shook its head and rolled its eyes as I offered the usual platitudes about the importance of character in our leaders. Walker, waving his large mood ring at me dismissively, insisted nothing had been proved, and besides, it was that "scumbag" Ken Starr whose character we should really be worried about.

This is all par for the course in punditry these days: Bill Clinton is a victim, Hillary Clinton is a victim, Monica Lewinsky is a victim, Sidney Blumenthal is a martyr. It is only Ken Starr -- and his "Attila the Hun" tactics, as Geraldo put it -- whom we should deplore. I stuck to my increasingly stinky role as Limburger, growing more sullen by the moment, wondering to myself where on earth all those people who voted for Reagan went, when Walker suddenly went ballistic. We were discussing Monica Lewinsky's mother and her appearance before the grand jury. Geraldo showed a clip of Marcia Lewis leaving the courthouse, looking distressed. Would Miss Crittenden, he asked, at least concede that Ms. Lewis was sincere in her distress?

Yes, I said, now thoroughly cranky, of course she was distressed. She should be distressed. After all, if it's true that she egged her daughter on in an affair with the president and then urged her to lie about it, she has done something awful and ought to be mortified. You can't arrest parents for giving bad advice to their children, but they should certainly have to face the consequences -- even if those consequences include being hauled before a grand jury. Walker was incredulous, as was -- judging by the expressions on the audience's faces and Geraldo's curling lip -- everyone else. Was I serious? Walker yelled. Was I really so cruel to think that Marcia Lewis deserved this?

Then I lost my temper: Well, Mr. Enquirer, I replied, what was so wrong in suggesting that parents should teach their children to tell the truth? If she were my daughter, I went on -- rather recklessly because Walker's eyes were now bulging -- first I'd box her ears. Then I'd march her into Mr. Starr's office myself and insist she tell the truth.

Walker practically flew out of his chair. For a moment I thought he was going to attack me, like one of those agitated boyfriends on Jerry Springer. " Box her ears? What century are you from?" he thundered. Then he leveled the snob accusation. Geraldo stood by, watching the exchange with the serene detachment of an emperor enjoying the spectacle of lion ripping apart victim.

Mercifully, we went to a commercial break.

It was only later that I learned Michael Walker's vociferous defense of the president was not entirely disinterested. The president's personal lawyer, David Kendall, is also, coincidentally, the lawyer for the National Enquirer. While the tabloid denies Kendall has offered them tips or leaks, the Enquirer has given the president noticeably sympathetic coverage. It was the Enquirer that hired private eyes to dig into the background of Ken Starr (and came up only with the embarrassing, but hardly incriminating, photographs of Starr dressed as a woman for a high-school play). It was the Enquirer that published an article that attempted to discredit Kathleen Willey, the White House volunteer whom Clinton allegedly groped when she asked him for a job. According to Newsweek, the Enquirer paid Willey's friend, Julie Steele, $ 7,000 for a photograph of Willey and the president -- after which Steele suddenly changed her story and announced that Willey had confessed to her that Willey's account of being groped was a lie. The photo accompanied an article that depicted Willey as a "conniving woman" who hoped to "cash in on her alleged liaison" with the president.

So -- stop the presses -- the Enquirer isn't a bastion of fairness and impartiality. But what was truly creepy about my encounter with Walker, and in fact the whole Geraldo experience, was coming face to face with the utter shamelessness of a certain type of Clinton defender. These defenders do not believe that the president is innocent. They are not even agnostic. They simply don't care that he is guilty -- whether of sexual misconduct or perjury or even obstruction of justice. Indeed, they appear almost liberated by the president's behavior, and buoyed by his public support. It's as if in the president's ability to skate free, they have finally found personal absolution for their own lives.

In his memoirs, Geraldo Rivera describes receiving oral sex in a boat in Central Park from a woman whom he heavily implies was Maggie Trudeau, the ex- wife of the former prime minister of Canada. In another era, really not so long ago (maybe last year), a man who coarsely described his sexual exploits, and even offered up the woman's identity, for public consumption would be regarded as -- how shall I put it? -- not a gentleman. But Geraldo tells this story with undisguised pride. In his mind, he's a stud, not a cad. And now, hot damn, so is the president of the United States! Call it the Revenge of the Creeps. No more cowering before angry wives at parties. No more having to pretend you're a sensitive New Age guy. Put away the hair shirt. You're free to use women and boast about it, just as in those halcyon days of the 1970s. Thanks to the Big Creep, all the little creeps can once again boast, to roars of approval from their jerky that the little hussy was just askin'for it. And, amazingly, they can remain members in good standing of polite liberal society.

In this, the creeps appear to have the public's hooting support. It was only a few years ago that liberals warned that the religious Right was on the march, on the verge of imposing its narrow-minded, God-fearing morality on everyone else. Well, one could hope. Instead, the president's behavior has brought together the strangest bedfellows, as it were, united in their admiration for Clinton's studliness. The Rev. Billy Graham has offered his forgiveness for the guy because, as he jockishly observed, "I know how hard it is [for the president]. . . . I think the ladies just go wild over him." The president's plight also brought Hugh Hefner out of cryogenic suspension to comment, a la Austin Powers, that "we have a playboy in the White House. . . . Try as it may, the puritan mob will not be able to put Clinton into the stocks." And the creeps of the pundit class have chimed in. As Eric Alterman of the Nation put it: "If you cheat on your wife, you have to lie about it. . . . It's no big deal." Right.

Meanwhile, the president's critics, in attempting to explain Clinton's otherwise bewilderingly high popularity ratings -- ratings that seem to climb with the release of every sordid new detail -- are reduced to mumbling that the American people are simply showing how fair-minded they are, by reserving judgment until Ken Starr makes his case. But I don't believe this is so. If the public were so fair-minded, it would also be reserving judgment about Ken Starr. Yet the polls, which began by showing that the public was willing to tolerate a presidential extramarital affair but not perjury, now show that the public is willing to tolerate perjury but not subornation of perjury.

That the voters who supported Reagan can now support a man like Clinton is, however, maybe not so odd as it seems. A friend of mine offered the following observation: People loved Reagan, she said, because he appealed to what is best in us; and people love Clinton because he appeals to what is worst. There are a lot of baby boomers who, as they settle into late middle age, remember their youth with equal measures of embarrassment and wistfulness. They may not have gotten it off with the wives of former prime ministers or behind their desks with interns. They may never have visited Studio 54, not even past its heyday. But they remember a few steamy nights with people not their spouses. They remember getting high and listening to Dylan and curling up with a chick whose name they've forgotten but whose musky perfume they can still recall. They may be on their second or third or fourth marriage. And after the moralistic chill of the past decade, as the careers of CEOs and military officers have fallen over an indiscreet remark or naughty joke, these boomers might now be ready to say enough is enough. They, too, are sick of being hectored by the feminists. And since feminist morality is the only morality they can imagine, the feminist excuses for the president have provided Geraldo and company exculpation for the crudest standards of behavior. If you're not judgmental about Clinton, after all, then perhaps you can avoid being judgmental about yourself.

Towards the end of my Geraldo ordeal, we watched a clip of Ken Starr leaving his home. That was all he was doing: simply walking. Geraldo, who had been defensive of every clip of the president, suddenly let loose at the sight of Starr, ridiculing his clothes, his supposedly "smug" smile, the way he walked. And here, I thought, we finally reached the heart of creepiness. Geraldo and his guests and his audience sneer at Ken Starr not because they believe he is a madman on a vendetta but because, as Geraldo so devastatingly pointed out, Starr is a square in a suit. What Geraldo did not say, but of course meant, was that Starr is precisely the sort of square in a suit who still believes a creep is a creep, not a victim.

Danielle Crittenden is editor of The Women's Quarterly, published by the Independent Women's Forum.