THINKING SERIOUSLY ABOUT BILL CLINTON, WHAT'S FAIR & UNFAIR

Let's all stipulate to the fact that Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton has had extramarital affairs during his 16-year marriage to wife Hillary.

I have several friends who've lived in Little Rock, the state capital, for some years. Little Rock is a large small town (not much bigger than Springfield, Missouri). About these friends of mine, several things can be said. My friends all know Bill Clinton personally, some quite well. A few routinely attended social gatherings with him; another has waited on him at restaurants. All like Clinton, to varying degrees. All admire the abilities that have been on display in a career that has seen this former Rhodes Scholar, this Yale and Georgetown grad, rise to be Attorney General while still in his 20s; to be the nation's youngest governor, at 32; and now, age 45, to frontrunner status in a Democratic presidential nominating race.

And all are agreed, and have been for years, that Bill Clinton has had extramarital affairs. This is widely known in Little Rock, and indeed statewide in Arkansas, one of our least populous states. If you listen carefully to the Governor himself, he takes care not to dispute the fact.

Clinton is tall. He's broad-shouldered. And he is, as columnist Mary McGrory observed last week, radiantly handsome. He possesses an easy manner and a smooth-as-molasses Arkansas drawl that causes most folks to say of him: "Hey, I like this guy. He's bright. Let's at least listen to what he has to say." Further, as Mike Royko would observe, he has great hair. He is, in short, a straight-from-central-casting candidate for our electronic media age, of the sort that has been all-too dominant in our national political life since the advent of charisma candidates such as the Kennedy brothers. (One wonders: Could any candidate as homely and ungainly as Abraham Lincoln he of the squeaky voice be taken seriously today?)

And Clinton's had extramarital affairs. So what? Absent some clear evidence that his playing-around had a direct impact on his discharge of the public trust, what is the relevance?

Did he take the girl (or girls) with him for a Carribean soiree via the state airplane, courtesy of the taxpayers? Did he incur thousands in state telephone bills for long distance keeping-in-touch with the paramour(s)? Did he wine and dine them at state expense, in expensive restaurants?

No such evidence has surfaced. Instead, what you have is Governor and Mrs. Bill Clinton acknowledging "past pain" in their marriage, saying they're in love and committed to the marriage today, and adding, "Let that be the end of it."

What is the point of further inquiry? To learn whether they met at her apartment, or the Howard Johnson's, or the Holiday Inn? And what useful information will this add to our store of knowledge? St. Augustine, of the fourth century A.D., wrote of his early sexual indiscretions in his famous book, "Confessions". Could such a saint run for public office in America today?

The Clinton affair is clearly distinguishable from the Olympian sexual exploits of a John Kennedy, or from the downright weird, "I-dare-you-to-follow-me-around-and-see-how-boring-my-life-is" adventures of former Colorado Senator Gary Hart. John Kennedy, we now know, was behaving with suicidal recklessness, jeopardizing the national security and his own administration by carrying on with among many others a mafia girlfriend he shared with a big-time Chicago mobster. A sex scandal containing raw material not unlike John Kennedy's life actually brought down a British government in 1963, while JFK was cavorting with bimbos, two and three at a time, for nude swims in the White House pool.

Recall that after issuing his challenge to the media and inviting scrutiny, Sen. Hart was caught virtually in flagrante with Donna Rice. There were pictures whose authenticity was undisputed.

Nothing like this has surfaced with Clinton, despite plenty of media attempts to get at such information.

The Star tabloid promises more in its next editions, right alongside stories about the latest Elvis sightings and women who gave birth to two-headed calves. The Star paid the woman an undisclosed amount for her story, which, by the way, a year and more ago she was herself denying. Contradictions and falsehoods are abounding in her background.

The likelihood that I will ever vote for Bill Clinton, for president or for anything else, is low. His character is relevant, but he doesn't deserve this. No candidate does. Bill Clinton deserves what all candidates deserve: to be assessed on the wisdom or unwisdom of his policy proposals, their good sense or lack of it, their workability or unworkability, their commitment to enhancing the freedoms we Americans cherish, or their lack thereof.

And we can only deplore the feeding-frenzy nature of a national press corps that has taken checkbook "journalism" from a sleazy supermarket tabloid and elevated it into the status of this week's national obsession.

Enough already. Give the man a break.