For today's voter the personal is no longer political

When Americans went to the polls on Tuesday, most of them probably did not see their votes as a judgment on Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky or Kenneth Starr. And that in itself is remarkable.

Since the Lewinsky scandal broke in January, there has hardly been a single day when some aspect of it has not figured in the television and newspaper headlines. From the worthy editorial pages of the New York Times to the garish studios of the daytime talk shows, it has been universally accepted as the most vital issue of our times.

Yet, as the mid-term elections have shown, most so-called ordinary people do not see Bill and Monica as being in the same league as education, health and social security. All the inquisitorial zeal of Kenneth Starr and the obsessiveness of the "All Monica, All the Time" media coverage have forced citizens to reach tough conclusions.

They would like their leaders to be good people, but they can settle for them being good leaders. They may not be able to make a complete distinction between private life and public life, but they can live with the rough and ready notion that political morality is about policies as well as sex, and that you have to take both into account.

The importance of that conclusion extends far beyond the US. We have just been through a week in which the headlines in Britain have been dominated by the resignation of the Welsh Secretary, Ron Davies, and in this State by Bertie Ahern's public denials of vile rumours about his private life. The panic that seemed to drive Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern showed how deeply uncertain even the most astute politicians now are when they seek to draw a line between the private and the public.

Clinton, Davies, Blair, Ahern and modern public life in general have been caught between two contradictory impulses. On the one hand, political leaders have become increasingly obsessed with public image in the narrowest sense. Many of the most effective politicians in history have been loved and hated in equal measure; now, most politicians are terrified of arousing strong animosity, even among their avowed enemies.

On the other hand, politicians have been deprived of the only thing that makes a personal image genuinely political - the sense in which it is a metaphor for a deeply-felt ideology, in which the political leader embodies a set of passions and ideas that have real meaning for a lot of people.

The narrowing of political debate and the rush towards the bland centre ground make it harder for politicians to connect with the public through images and ideas. They are forced to connect through a carefully constructed personality. Television has accelerated the collapse of the public realm and contributed to the development of that most dangerous paradox - privatised politics. The very ornateness of classical political rhetoric - the kind you find in Edmund Burke or Richard Brinsley Sheridan, in Abraham Lincoln or James Larkin - was a way of placing a distance between the speaker and what was being said, of giving the message a dignity that the speaker, as a private individual, might not possess. Television, though, narrows the distance. What matters most is not the content of ideas, but the appearance of sincerity and concern. We see our political leaders in close-up and begin to judge them as we judge people we actually meet.

The illusion of intimacy makes us ask whether these are the kind of people we would like to be intimate with. Is this a nice person? Would you like him as a neighbour? Does she lead a good life? The personal inquisition that arises from all this has attractions for the ordinary citizen. For one thing, it can be immensely entertaining. Clinton discussing his inappropriate behaviour is a lot more fun than Clinton discussing actuarial predictions for the future of social security.

For another, it gives even the lowliest citizens an illusion of power. Say, for example, you are a woman with no money and little education, married to a bully, working in a job where you shut up and do what you're told. You don't have time to follow politics or world events. You don't get to make judgments in your daily life. But you do get to judge the President of the United States. What you think of his sex life is suddenly crucial - the man on the television says so.

There may not be a democracy of power, but there is a democracy of gossip. Even hearing a rumour gives you a sense of privilege. To be given the inside dope on Bertie Ahern's marriage is to imagine that you have connections, that unlike the ignorant masses, you are not fooled by the spin doctors but have sussed out the real story. You can be ignorant of everything that matters about politics but still feel enlightened.

Yet at some stage all of this has to run out of steam. As the novelty of television wears off, people begin to take it for granted that the illusion of goodness and sincerity is just an illusion.

As more and more leaders are shown to have feet of clay, people begin to assume that clay feet are an integral part of the package. As successive scandals reveal that even apparently suave facades like that of Ron Davies can conceal wild desires, suave facades lose their power to persuade. As rumours proliferate, the public develops an immune system of healthy scepticism.

Disillusion has its drawbacks but what we are beginning to see, perhaps, is the good side of disillusionment. If you don't believe political leaders are wonderful human beings, to find some of them are deeply flawed people is hardly shocking.

Bill Clinton is the perfect example of this process. The Republicans misjudged the political impact of the Lewinsky scandal because they could not face the fact that the American people knew damn well he was an adulterer before they elected him. Americans may have hoped he would behave himself while in office, but hope and expectation are not the same thing.

The binding clause in Clinton's contract with the electorate was not that he would keep his libido under control but that he would try not to get caught with his pants down. That he lied through his teeth merely showed he had at least tried not get caught, that he had gone to great effort to spare the electorate the sight of his naked desire.

It's not that the citizens of Western democracies are less moral; they are merely less gullible.

They have revised their expectations of leadership downwards, from exemplary goodness to acceptable levels of badness. There is no carte blanche for private behaviour, and if the false rumours about Bertie Ahern beating his wife had been true he would certainly be unfit for public office. But there is the sense of proportion that comes with a realism about the unpredictability of sexual desires. Increasingly, a public resigned to the inevitability of human failure is convinced sexual scandals are not resigning matters.