Master of TV weaves his charm in tawdry sex tale

To the truism "Never give a sucker an even break" can now be added a sub-clause: "Never give Bill Clinton a long run on television." If there is one thing Bill Clinton's enemies should know by now, it is not to give him an opportunity to dominate the television screen. Even if he doesn't know that what he's saying is for broadcast (and it's clear that in this instance he at least suspected that it was), Clinton on camera is a formidable presence.

This is, after all, the man whose first instinct when faced with terrible trouble over Gennifer Flowers in 1992 was to go on a chat show and appeal directly to the viewers. How could Kenneth Starr and the Republicans in Congress have convinced themselves they could destroy this man by putting him on the small screen for four hours?

They managed to achieve two things they would probably be happier not to have accomplished. The first was to prove that one of the reasons Clinton has been elected as a two-term President is that the Republicans still don't understand the power of TV. They haven't grasped that what matters most on the screen is how someone looks, not what they say. Clinton, for the most part, looked relaxed, sincere and presidential.

And the other thing they achieved was to let Clinton weave his attractive face, his pleasant voice, his wry smile and his good ol' boy manner into the nasty facts that everyone in the universe already knows.

Once Clinton's testimony became a TV spectacle, the rules that apply became the rules of television. And one basic rule of television is that if you put a nice-looking, well-dressed, beautifully groomed man with the camera focused exclusively on him up against some disembodied voices, the nice-looking man wins every time.

Unless, of course, those voices were making sensational revelations. The problem for Clinton's enemies is that while the testimony contained much that is sensational, there were no revelations. It was certainly not a revelation that Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky and lied about it. The assumption of those hostile to him was, presumably, that words that seem evasive on paper would seem even more shifty and dishonest when you watch the President deliver them.

In fact, the opposite is the case. Here, after all, is a consummate politician, a man who has plenty of practice at taking ambiguous words, evasive replies and vague language and delivering them with passion, aplomb and the appearance of authority. It is what he does for a living.

If he can do it in debates about the funding of the IMF or in stump speeches that he has delivered dozens of times before, it is hardly surprising that he could do it in August when his reputation was on the line.

The only occasions when Clinton seemed to squirm were those when the vast majority of the American television audience was probably squirming too. And, here, the rules of television also work in his favour. Most of the questions he refused to answer contain graphic sexual descriptions, including one of an act involving a cigar.

IT IS very unlikely that the main evening news programmes will want to broadcast those questions repeatedly, and it is certain that Republican candidates will not want to use them in their political advertisements. To a considerable extent, the very grossness of the acts protects Clinton.

On the other side, watching the testimony actually unfold will probably give some weight to Clinton's contention that there was "some sort of a gotcha game at work". Many of the questions, like asking Clinton to recall the tie he was wearing on August 6th, were ridiculously petty. Much of the questioning was repetitive. A great deal of it broke the prime rule of television by being hopelessly dull. The first thing that Americans watching their President's grand jury testimony will have discovered is what anyone who has ever been at any kind of legal procedure already knew: that these events are unbelievably tedious. Viewers used to the courtroom dramatics of LA Law or Murder One will probably have found the Clinton testimony shocking, not for its content but for its boredom, complexity and lack of a great moment when the prosecutor demolishes the witness and the witness admits his vileness.

In the American mind at the moment, both Starr and Clinton figure as crude caricatures. The inquisitor and his assistants seem like stereotypes of mad Puritan snoops, at once horrified by sex and obsessed with it.

The President seems like a stereotype of the 1960s spoiled brat, selfish, irresponsible and insisting on being fed on demand. Nothing in his testimony could have made Clinton's personal reputation much worse. Some things in it may have made it slightly better.

Even in his weakest area, the bizarre literalism of sticking to the legal definition of "sexual relations", Clinton actually made some politically effective points. He may be on weak ground when he claimed in the abstract that he "defined sexual relationship the way that most Americans do". But when he put it more concretely - when people say "Jane and Harry have a sexual relationship . . . they mean they were sleeping together . . . having intercourse together" - he may have got some heads nodding in agreement in some living rooms in Middle America.

He also hit some nerves with his references to the Anita Hill/ Clarence Thomas hearings, when he remarked that though both of them gave different testimony under oath, both of them probably thought they were telling the truth. This is probably what most Americans think.

Equally, describing sex as "the most mysterious area of human life" or reminding his inquisitors that "love can mean different things" made Clinton seem like a fount of common sense and made it seem that it was his questioners who were being too literal and nit-picking.

There is a strange kind of democracy, and a strange definition of citizenship, at work. If the Americans watching their President's testimony on television were typical of the electorate as a whole, most of them didn't bother to vote in the 1996 election. Most of them won't vote in the mid-term elections this November.

But even the apathetic are expected to have a firm view on the nuances of what the President said and meant in a legal deposition and four hours of grand jury testimony.

Many of them may well decide that in this case apathy is not a bad policy.