President Clinton may be known as the Comeback Kid but the comeback is now looking rather more uncertain. Earlier talk of a pragmatic compromise deal over the Lewinsky affair has been replaced with speculation about many further details being made available as the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee prepares to vote for releasing the tape recording of Mr Clinton's evidence to the grand jury and much other material. The next few days will be crucial in determining which way public opinion is to be swayed. The key question is whether the president's undoubtedly reckless affair with Ms Lewinsky and his misleading attempts to deny it merit the description "high crimes and misdemeanours", sufficient to justify impeachment or resignation. The Starr report certainly does not establish with anything approaching legal certainty the 11 charges it lays against Mr Clinton. At crucial points it evades or fails this test. As the report's many critics have said, in this legal light the details provided of sexual encounters are gratuitous, even if they have succeeded in blackening the president's name, weakening his authority and demeaning the office he holds.
In this political light the House of Representatives has a very difficult decision to make. Its members, notably his Democratic colleagues, must decide whether the political damage done merits a vote against Mr Clinton. Many of his own party colleagues are shocked at how he misled them and fearful of the electoral consequences. There are proposals to censure and perhaps to impose a financial penalty on Mr Clinton, which are well-grounded and deserve to be taken seriously. There is no shortage of advice that he should dispense with the tortuous defences mounted by his legal team, admit he was grievously wrong and attempt to move on as rapidly as possible.
Were he to consider resignation seriously in response to his political unpopularity he must be aware it would upset the constitutional balance between the Presidency and Congress, setting potentially grave precedents for presidents to come. But he may well find it impossible to resist the pressure to resign if the affair drags on unresolved in a weleter of bitter interparty recrimination and sexual witch-hunting, as popular disgust with new evidence released mounts (including that which may show he committed perjury) and amid growing scepticism about his political effectiveness.
On the evidence to hand so far neither Mr Clinton's original lapse of judgment nor his subsequent efforts to cover it up merit impeachment or resignation. It is very much to be hoped that political decisions along these lines can be made rapidly, not drawn out into the election campaign and beyond it. According to opinion polls the US public has reached similar conclusions; there are solid majorities against impeachment and for some kind of censure, amid general agreement that he is doing an effective job, even if his personal reputation has definitely been damaged by the whole affair, as many newspapers outside Washington have called on him to resign. The next few weeks will tell whether these judgments stand up or whether Mr Clinton's political position has become unsustainable.
One way or another it is becoming daily more apparent that effective international leadership by the United States is necessary in a world that has suddenly become more unstable economically and politically.