"His numbers are good." That should be the official White House slogan of 1998. Every time the Monica Lewinsky controversy heats up again, President Clinton's aides cool themselves down by reciting polls showing that most Americans still support his presidency.
The White House is so fixated on short-term survival that its loyalists seem unable to perceive the irony of Mr Clinton's second term. Here is a politician who has dreamed of the presidency since he was a boy; who pores over biographies of his predecessors looking for guideposts to greatness; who 18 months ago pledged to lead America to a moral renewal. Yet the President who nurtured such high aspirations is now reduced to taking comfort in polls that show he is liked but mistrusted.
Give Mr Clinton his due. When the Lewinsky episode erupted six months ago, Washington was abuzz with speculation about the imminent collapse of his presidency. The polls testify to the genius of Mr Clinton and his advisers in the tactics of political survival.
But "the numbers" obscure the true state of his presidency. The collapse is not imminent. It happened months ago, if you judge by the standards Mr Clinton laid down for himself after his 1996 reelection. What's been lost in the wreckage is the defining idea on which a supremely ambitious President hoped to rest his second term. The idea was a concept of presidential leadership by which Mr Clinton hoped to transcend conventional governance and devote himself to the nation's civic rehabilitation. Mr Clinton believed he could take a country divided by cultural values, ideology, and race, and unite it around themes of reconciliation and shared responsibility. Quoting scripture, he pledged in his second inaugural address to be "a repairer of the breach".
But a President who hoped to lead by moral suasion has lost his voice. It is difficult for a leader to offer himself as moral tutor while simultaneously starring in a national burlesque known as the Lewinsky scandal.
Little wonder that the presidency-as-pulpit model Mr Clinton embraced in 1997 has been virtually abandoned in 1998. Antismoking legislation died amid partisan wrangling on Capitol Hill with hardly a sign of the national crusade Mr Clinton vowed to wage on its behalf. For a year Mr Clinton has tried to sponsor a "national conversation on race", while making no sustained effort to challenge the country or say with precision how he proposes to unify the nation on its most divisive issue. It's a little awkward to play the preacher when the congregation is talking about your "genetic material".
The other problem is that Mr Clinton, now living by a survivalist ethic, has relied upon the very same scorched-earth political tactics he once warned are destroying the nation's civic health.
Far from "repairing the breach", he and his advisers have methodically exploited it. The divisiveness, suspicion and low expectations of leaders that pervade US politics have turned out to be a great advantage for the White House in the remorseless battle between the President and his accusers.
The strategy, crafted in twice-daily White House damage-control meetings, is to generate public anger and mistrust towards those accusers. The strategy has worked so far.
More self-consciously than probably any other President, Mr Clinton has sought to pattern himself after illustrious predecessors. He has made comparisons between his presidency and those of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
The hard core of people who always despised Mr Clinton, and never accepted the legitimacy of his presidency, can gloat at his debilitation. For most of us, though, it's hard not to be struck by the poignancy of his predicament as a second term that began with promise races by. No matter how the investigation finally ends, Mr Clinton must be forever haunted by the gap between what was, and what might have been.