THE LONG GOODBYE

While the President gets on with his job,

says Mark Steyn, Bill Clinton prances

around like a spoilt monarch

New Hampshire THE United States's sudden decision to implement a Westminster constitution has passed off surprisingly smoothly. As you know, a system such as Britain's distinguishes between the 'dignified' and the 'efficient' parts of the constitutional order. After a doubtful two-century experiment in combining the two, America has wised up. For the foreseeable future, Bill Clinton will be staggering around like a dissolute monarch, accompanied by a full supporting dynasty of dodgy princelings, while George W. Bush gets on with... oh, pardon me, I should explain for non-Beltway insiders that Mr Bush is a pleasant middleaged man currently serving in the low-profile job of President of the United States. Anyway, Mr Bush gets on with the day-today business of governing, like a not terribly exciting prime minister.

This division of responsibilities seems to suit both men just fine. Mr Bush can concentrate on his priorities — tax cuts, missile defence — thereby freeing up Mr Clinton to concentrate on his priority: himself. The allegedly former President dominates the front page. One day, he's overheard doing lesbian jokes in a swank restaurant; the next, his brother-in-law Tony Rodham — if you're keeping score, he's the one behind the hazelnut scam in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia — is all over the papers for arranging a pardon for some crooked fairground operators he persuaded Hillary to hire for a carnival on the White House lawn in 1998. In fairness to Mr Clinton, in the lists of scrapes your no-account brother-in-law is likely to get into, a hazelnut scam in the Caucasus must rank as something of a long shot. Conversely, in fairness to Mr Rodham, however tacky the carnival on the White House lawn was, it surely didn't compare to the circus going on inside the building.

Meanwhile, Mr Bush gave his first joint address to Congress, carried live on every major network. No one watched. The new President attracted barely half of Mr Clinton's audience eight years ago. But Dubya's poll numbers soared. His unwatched speech boosted his approval ratings to 67 per cent. Americans of all creeds and colours stayed fixed to their cop shows, sitcoms, transsexual wrestling tournaments, and then pronounced the Bush speech a smash. After eight years of the bully in the bully pulpit, seasoned observers are having a difficult time adjusting to a presidency where the carny sideshow has a permanent 'Back In Five Minutes' sign hanging on the booth. True, Mr Bush did give his first formal press conference. But he scheduled this appearance immediately after Senator Rodham Clinton came out to issue various implausible denials on the subject of pardons, pay-offs, and whether or not she could recall if she had any siblings. The result was predictable: 'I Did Not Have Fraternal Relations With That Brother!', page 1; 'Man Gives Press Conference', page 23. Democrats are now accusing the Oval Office of practising a lethal kind of antispin, sending their man out in public only when everyone's looking the other way.

It may be objected, of course, that the 'dignified' end of this dignified/efficient separation is notably undignified. But Mr Bush is for the moment being ruthlessly efficient, driving his $1.6 trillion tax cut through Congress with a single-mindedness that seems to have taken Democrats by surprise. Perhaps they made the mistake of believing their own sneers about the pliant boob promoted way over his head by pals of his dad. On the late-night talk-shows, the dummy gags are on their last legs. There's no mileage in them, he hasn't said anything sufficiently entertainingly moronic for some time, and Clinton and his cokehead/lardbutt/hazelnut relatives keep adding new and diverting sub plots. Some Dems, crediting the vast rightwing conspiracy with a greater degree of sophistication than it normally exhibits, mutter darkly that it was the Bush crowd themselves that started the bonehead jokes just to sucker everyone.

How long this happy situation can last is anybody's guess. But Mr Clinton is clearly modelling his retirement on his pal Barbra Streisand's: there's always room for one more farewell appearance. The Bush crowd can't believe their luck. The old saw that there's no such thing as bad publicity is of almost universal application: it's true for Hollywood stars, shyster lawyers, serial killers, adulterous African-American community leaders and Democratic presidents. But the great exception to the rule is Republicans. Generally speaking, for a Republican all publicity is bad publicity. Yet the GOP now has the best of both worlds: they're in power, but nobody knows it. Every time Bush makes a statement, all you notice is that while he's talking, Clinton, his glamorous songwriting 'friend' Denise Rich, and a couple of pardoned cocaine traffickers are behind him doing a nude conga-line.

The dignified/efficient distinction clarifies the character of the Clinton presidency. His scandals tend to the monarchical, from his droit de seigneur to his Royal pardons; the latter a residual monarchical power the Founders chose to keep, the former a palace perk they thought they'd got rid of. The Dems and the press stuck with Clinton over Monica because sex is the new religion of the Left; they don't feel so ideologically fierce about Swiss business partners of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Yet both Clinton's penis and his pardons exemplify the same deranged, narcissistic approach to his office. Incidentally, in the spat between Taki and Conrad Black, I naturally incline to the side of the guy who signs the cheques. But it seems to me that the really contemptible anti-Semite here is Clinton, without whose predictable sloughing off of responsibility Taki wouldn't have had anything to get antiSemitic about. Ever since he started getting hammered for the Marc Rich pardon, the former President's defence has been: hey, the Jews made me do it. The hapless Mr Barak and co. now say this is not the case. But why should Clinton care? The vast rightwing conspiracy has temporarily been replaced by the international Jewish conspiracy. Any fall-guy in a storm.

As the neo-Clinton-haters at the New York Times fume on and the liberal New York Observer calls for Hillary to resign from the Senate, the always reliable Adam Nagourney does what he can to rally the disheartened ranks of the Clinton faithful. Writing in the Times, he painted a portrait of a lonely exPrez 'described by friends as adrift and often isolated', a man having difficulty 'trying to place his own telephone calls'. The telephone is a high-tech device many older people can have problems with, particularly if they had a full-time staff to place their calls throughout the Nineties. The 1890s, that is.

But most of us have had a century to figure Out how to operate the thing, and we're pretty much on top of it. And let's not forget that the President managed to place his own calls when he was dialling Monica for phone-sex. Eight years ago, the American press gleefully pounced on George Bush Sr because, while visiting a supermarket, he expressed amazement at a barcode scanner: within days, there were mocking cartoons of the grocery clerk explaining to the President, 'It's called a shopping cart.' But now we're expected to sympathise because, after two terms, the Emperor of the Ozarks is as bewildered as the Queen Mum trying to buy a Tube ticket.

But in its way this was the Clinton apologia pared to its essence: the President, say his defenders, is a 'complex' man, and he tends to make everything complex, even dialling for a pizza. Thus, the Los Angeles Times the other day explained that Clinton's controversial pardons were not the result of 'influence peddling, campaign contributions and electoral politics' but instead due to his uniquely boundless compassion overloading the system: 'In the final months of his presidency, Clinton was open about his unhappiness with his clemency numbers. . .. But by pushing to boost his numbers, minimising the role of the justice department and opening himself up to advice from strangers, Washington figures and relatives, Clinton helped turn what he had planned as a dignified issuance of mercy into a disorderly rush,' Other presidents have pardoned bums and sleazeballs: you approve, or you don't. But Bill Clinton is unique in entering in mitigation the plea that he just took on too much work and as a result it all got too. . . complex.

This is all of a piece with his Royalist view of the job as expressed during the Monica business — that much as he'd like to resign and sit on the beach, he must accept the burthens of office and 'get back to working for the American people'. There wasn't a single morning, he assured us, that he didn't wake up thinking about how he could make life better for the American people. The founding principle of the Republic is that the American people make life better for themselves. But the Clinton presidency was the most explicit acknowledgment yet of the neo-monarchical strain in American life: that the people aren't up to it, and they need a benign, wise Sovereign to wake up and get to 'work' on their behalf. If in the process he nails some wenches, springs his brother the Duke of Dogpatch from jail, shakes down a few well-heeled knights and squires, that's a small price for the people to pay. Needless to say, Clinton's enablers don't exactly see their fealty that way. Maureen Dowd, the New York Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning phrase-turner, keeps cranking out one column after another harping on about George Jr as a pampered son of privilege who looks on the presidency as a bauble he's entitled to by virtue of birth. Really? So far, he's asked that 'Hail to the Chief not be played during the first weeks of his administration. As Dubya enjoined Americans in his inauguration speech, the people should be 'citizens, not subjects'.

Bush's problem, of course, is that he's not 'complex'. Indeed, he is, as the press has assured us, a simpleton. And so his governance has an admirable simplicity to it. He knows how to use the phone and how to use his pardon power. He goes to bed at nine, and he doesn't see why the rest of the White House shouldn't also. Office hours, suit and tie, sensible shoes. After the Entertainment Presidency, Mr Bush is reminding us of an older American virtue: if you've got it, don't flaunt it.

Just over a year ago at the Belknap County Lincoln Day Dinner at the Laconia Country Club in New Hampshire, I wriggled free of the throng pressing round Dubya and headed for the men's room. Inside were a couple of fellows from the accompanying national press corps. 'Exactly the same speech he gave yesterday,' said the cameraman. 'Not a single new sentence.' Yeah,' said the sound guy. What a dope.' As I'm sure they noticed, in his first joint address to Congress the other day, he gave exactly the same speech all over again: same tax cut, same education plan, same reasons. You never know, it might just be that he means it.

As for Mr Clinton, shorn of office, he's beginning to look a lot less complex. Those of us who thought him unfit to be President are bemused to find so many of his defenders now think him unfit to be exPresident. But that. too, is a monarchical fate: no matter how bad King Farouk looked, he looked far worse as ex-King Farouk, without the veneer of respectability afforded by the day job. With no cabinet secretaries, ambassadors and visiting heads of government to surround himself with, there's only Hugh Rodham, with his $400,000 pay-off from an offshore account; and A.. Glenn Braswell, the pardoned fake hair-restorer peddler; and Denise Rich, Marc's ex-wife now taking the Fifth before Congress, whose only criminal record so far is the ballad she wrote for Celine Dion. 'We must not let in daylight upon magic,' said Bagebot. I'll say.

There's no point investigating Clinton's pardons, or the $250 million he's raising for a $50 million library. Bill Clinton is nothing so rational as a crook. Instead, he's up there with King Zog of Albania and Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. Nixon quit and spent 20 years rehabilitating himself. Clinton hung in there and has just embarked on the long process of de-habilitating himself.