The presidential campaign of 2000 managed to keep philosophy fairly well hidden. Afraid that any traits of character could later be used as evidence of bad character, both Al Gore and George W. Bush refused to offer even a glimpse of themselves as flesh-and-blood human beings, obfuscating any hints of how their personal attributes might translate into conceptions of the right way to act. Seeking to rally their base while attracting as many of the undecided voters as possible, both chose reiteration over reflection, avoiding statements of principle and purpose at any cost.

This was a campaign so scripted that no debate, press conference or gaffe could deter the candidates from remaining, as they liked to say, on message.

How extraordinary, then, that the most predictable presidential campaign in American history was followed by the most unpredictable finish of our times. Facing a tie vote that no one anticipated, Democratic and Republican operatives found themselves having to react quickly and spontaneously to real-world events, and to do so without the benefit of focus groups and tracking polls. And what we saw as a result, beyond the endless discussions of tactics and endgames, were hints about the underlying philosophies of each camp.

Take, for example, the question of truth. For more than 2,000 years, Western philosophy has been premised on the notion that it is possible to make accurate claims about what is true. At one level, of course, politics has little to do with the pursuit of truth as philosophers understand it: candidates for office are not expected to say what they really believe and, once in office, they would be remiss if they did not disguise their intentions and confuse their enemies. During the campaign, both George W. Bush and Al Gore proved themselves adept at that kind of politics; understanding full well that voters might not like the actual details of their tax cuts or plans for Social Security and prescription drug benefits, they adopted the rosiest economic assumptions or simply ignored discrepancies. Had the campaign ended with a clear victory for either man, he would have taken office as just one more politician who was less than forthright in his campaign.

In the campaign’s aftermath, Gore, relentless in his quest to challenge the Florida secretary of state’s certification of the election, necessarily upheld the proposition that the truth of who had won could be established. Bush, by contrast, revealed something deeper than the typical politician’s willingness to manipulate the truth for his own purposes. In his determined effort to prevent anyone from ever knowing who actually won the state, he implicitly endorsed the notion that there was no truth even worth manipulating. When promulgated by left-wing academics skeptical of truth claims held to be timeless and universal — such claims, they argued, denied the proclivity of dominant groups to impose their values on the oppressed or the marginalized — postmodern skepticism has faced derisive rebuttal from political conservatives. But when it was expressed by George W. Bush and his supporters in their efforts to explain why it was unnecessary to count votes, conservatives applauded. Bush will be our first truly postmodern president, the first of whom it can be said that when asked how he came to be the winner, he can respond that it all depends on the perspective one brings to the question.

We know, because President Clinton reminded us, that politicians who lie too flagrantly are hobbled in their exercise of authority, for if they are willing to lie under oath or in front of a camera, why should we ever believe them again? Yet the very fact Bill Clinton was caught in a lie underscored truth’s priority. Only when we agreed that something happened in that case — that Clinton had an affair with an intern — could we punish Clinton. As a postmodern president, Bush will face a challenge to his authority far greater than Clinton’s, for the foundation of his legitimacy will hinge on the proposition that ultimately it did not matter whether his victory was real or not.

A president elected in a world beyond truth and falsity will not find it easy to govern. For all the manipulation and dishonesty associated with politics, there are moments, usually a country’s finest, when political leaders express a truth upon which all people of goodwill can agree. When Franklin Roosevelt rallied domestic support for American involvement in World War II, he did not suggest that the Japanese may have bombed Pearl Harbor; he spoke movingly of the fact that they did. And when the war ended, the truth of the Nazi genocide made it clear to all but the fanatic few why the tremendous number of lives taken in the war was justified.

Without truth, in the end, there can be no politics. There can be no purpose that requires government to take action for the collective good.

The campaign after the campaign also told us much about the way the winner thinks about another perennial question of philosophy: the meaning of justice. Justice is merely the interest of the stronger, says Thrasymachus, a character in Plato’s “Republic,” and ever since, philosophers have tried to show why Thrasymachus was wrong. Their answers have varied, but from the 18th century German Immanuel Kant to the 20th century American John Rawls, one answer has had strong support: Justice consists in doing what is right irrespective of whether we stand to benefit personally or not. Both philosophers demonstrated their point by developing ingenious thought experiments that ask us to consider how others unknown to us might act under the same circumstances.

As with the truth, we do not expect saintly behavior from our political candidates: The end, for them, invariably justifies the means. Yet a tied election offers a perfect opportunity to consider what justice requires: Since each man knows that but for a butterfly ballot his position could be interchanged with that of his opponent, it is relatively easy for each to understand the gist of the other’s position. Indeed, both candidates were willing to take the identical positions of their opponents when it suited them: asking, for example, that the intent of the voter count when Democratic votes were at stake but not when absentee ballots were missing an identification number, or claiming federal courts should resolve the dispute in some circumstances but not others.

One might expect, therefore, that Vice President Gore and Gov. Bush would each have considered the conditions under which his own victory would have been viewed as unfair by the other man. Although both men fought to the bitter end, only Gore acknowledged there were conditions under which he would recognize his opponent’s victory, no matter how sure he was of his own claim to the office. For Bush and his entourage, by contrast, Thrasymachus said it all: They were the stronger; therefore their claims were the most just. On the question of truth, Bush showed himself a postmodernist. On the question of justice, he reverted back to the pre-modern Athenians.

It is not so surprising that Bush identifies justice with strength. Kant and Rawls developed their ideals of impartial justice to undermine claims by monarchs or autocrats that unearned privilege could nonetheless be justified. By background and temperament, Bush belongs to a tradition of noblesse oblige in which aristocrats dispense justice as they see fit, not as universal standards demand. From such a worldview, loyalty counts for more than justice; indeed among the virtues, loyalty and justice are opposites. Only by demonstrating his immunity to claims of fairness does the acolyte prove his loyalty to the chief. And no better indicator of loyalty can exist than those personal ties of kinship so distrusted by Kant and Rawls. Bush put his faith not in a just outcome, but in a brother in Florida and a cousin at Fox News.

As president, Bush will have to deal with people with whom he shares no ties of blood or even belonging. How will he understand them? The power of justice does not lie in taking the concerns of others as our own; a president who tries to feel everyone’s pain cannot distinguish between illness and hypochondria. Justice only asks us to allow the claims of those foreign to us be judged against commonly agreed-upon standards. A president unwilling to acknowledge that a fellow citizen, whether Republican or Democrat, has a claim to victory is unlikely ever to understand why Europeans, Asians and Africans might believe their concerns about global warming, disease and poverty have warrant. When loyalty counts more than justice, we can be sure that parochialism will guide our affairs more than principle.

Ethics — doing what is right, shunning what is wrong — is a third preoccupation of philosophy whose contours can be revealed in an unscripted election campaign. At times of widespread religious belief, God’s commands are usually understood as the foundation of ethics: Murder and adultery are wrong because they are forbidden by the Ten Commandments. In the pre-Florida phase of the campaign, both Sen. Joe Lieberman and Bush invoked their religious beliefs to make the point that they were ethical people with a strongly inscribed sense of right and wrong.

So long as the campaign was scripted, candidates had numerous occasions for the proper expressions of piety, such as speeches in church or invocations of compassionate conservatism. But when the script was torn up, we could see the degree to which their religious pronouncements influenced their conduct. For all his single-minded determination to win, Lieberman, perhaps because his God knows something of vengeance, never seemed a hypocrite. Such was not the case with Bush.

Not once during the campaign after the campaign did we see Bush display Christian virtues. His early triumphalism conveyed the exact opposite of Christ’s humility. He could barely hide his inability to forgive his brother for messing up Florida. No sense of charity could be detected among his zealous supporters. He chose not to consort with the meek and the lame. Whatever his words, Bush’s acts proved that we do indeed live in a post-Christian society in which agreement on what is ethical and what is not can no longer be deduced from common religious texts.

Had George W. Bush won the election on election night, we would have reason to worry that he would turn into a Republican Jimmy Carter: a man willing to allow his faith to interfere with the realpolitik his office demands. Now that the campaign after the campaign reveals a man so unmoved by any sense of Christian ethics, we face the danger of a man whose conduct will be governed by no ethical commandments at all. Americans have never been able to make up their minds whether they want their politicians guided by ethics or efficiency. Now they know that, when it comes to favorite philosophers, their new president is guided more by Machiavelli than by Jesus. For those who worry about the separation of church and state, relax: Neither President Bush, nor any of his key aides, will be able to invoke Christian piety and sound believable.

The election of 2000 showed us how bitterly ideological and self-interested our political class can be. Yet given how empty of meaning our campaigns have become, the events leading up to the December Supreme Court decision did a favor for the entire country. Finally Americans had a chance to witness why politics, in both its tactical and its philosophical sense, matters. It is too bad that they had to cast their votes before the actual campaign took place. Perhaps on some future occasion they will once again be reminded that when we choose our leaders, we also choose our way of life.

Fed up with what they understood to be widespread moral decline in America, organizations like Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition — the politically astute successor to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority — raised funds, rallied voters, recruited candidates and provided the ideological zeal for a moral crusade. At its roots was a belief that America had lost its traditional moorings in Judeo-Christianity, and that loss had led to increased rates of divorce, abortion, crime, alienation, homosexuality and a lack of national purpose. Only through committed political action, the Christian right held — opposition to abortion, a return of prayer to schools and the teaching of firm standards of right and wrong — could America once again be made morally whole.

Leaders of the religious right never doubted that the majority of good Christians throughout the land shared this outlook on the world. I did, because over the past four years I interviewed 200 middle-class Americans, including people in such heartland places as Tulsa, Okla., San Diego and Cobb County, Ga., as part of my book “One Nation, After All.” Many of my respondents were deeply religious; Christianity was for them at the center of their lives and the source for their understanding of good and evil. But with a few exceptions — roughly six of the 200 — most of them viewed religion as a private, not a public, matter. God tells me what to do, they often said, but my God cannot tell another what to do; only his or her God can do that.

America’s distrust of highly politicized forms of religious expression takes many forms. One, almost unnoticed by the polls, is the fact that African-Americans are among those most attracted to the religious messages associated with conservative Christianity, but at the same time they vote Democratic because they distrust conservative political positions. A similar tension can be found among devoutly Catholic Latinos, many of whom would love to vote Republican but are turned off by the party’s stance on immigration.

Furthermore, Americans of all races tend, when faced with a conflict between commitment to a principle and the lessons of personal experience, to opt for the latter rather than the former. In theory, many Christians believe, you have to accept Jesus in order to be saved, but they also know (and like) enough people who might be Jewish, Muslim or agnostic not to take that dictum too literally. The truth is that most Americans simply want to be nice. The trouble with hell-and-damnation style preachers like Pat Robertson, one of them told me, is that they all too often are mean.

I was at first taken aback by the widespread rejection of religious absolutism I discovered. After all, I reasoned, groups like the Christian Coalition can afford to pay for high-priced research, and no doubt they must have discovered that the old-time religion was still alive in America. But the more I listened, the more I gained confidence in my findings. After all, we know that Americans love God and hate politics. So why, I asked myself, would they want the one confused with the other? I knew that many leftist intellectuals had ignored public sentiment on such touchy issues as crime or welfare. Surely it was possible that right-wing intellectuals could make the same mistake in reverse, assuming, almost as a matter of course, that what they believe has to be what everyone believes — or at least ought to believe. Many Americans consider themselves conservative and many more consider themselves Christian, but none of that translates into automatic support for organizations promoting a program they describe as conservative Christian.

Four years ago the religious right was poised to take over one of America’s political parties — not an insignificant feat considering that we only have two. Now, thanks to its misreading of the public mood, including the mood of large numbers of its own followers, it may have lost its chance for good. Politically mobilized conservative Christians have been looking for an issue that would win them popular support. For a time they thought they had one: “partial-birth abortion,” a particularly gruesome way of terminating the life of a fetus and one they hoped would open the door to greater restrictions on a woman’s right to choose. But the Republicans’ proposed ban on partial birth abortion never garnered enough votes in Congress to prevent a presidential veto.

Faced with an impasse on this moral issue, the religious right started to look for another one. And, not completely to its surprise, one fell right into its lap. The president of the United States turned out to be a nefarious Lothario, one who shamelessly practiced weird sex in the Oval Office with a woman not his wife — and then, to top it off, brazenly lied to the American people when questioned about his behavior. Here was America’s moral decline proclaimed in billboard-size capital letters. Everything that agitated the Christian right — loose morality, the collapse of absolute standards of right and wrong, the insouciance of youth — became the stuff of daily headlines. With Professor Romeo in power, who needed partial birth abortion? The president’s conduct gave the religious right just want it wanted: a symbolic crusade around morality that they could ride right into national power.

And so conservative Republicans, led by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, transformed the 1998 election into a referendum on morality. Helping them in their cause was supposedly nonpartisan special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who, with impeccable timing, released to the American public documents and videotapes demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt how deeply immorality had seeped into the highest rungs of power in America. True, there was something a little odd in the fact that moral conservatives were ensuring that the eyes of the American people were never taken off the pornographic material that was filling the airwaves, but it has always been the case that those who most strenuously denounce sex are also obsessed by it.

As recently as mid-September, Republican conservatives could barely contain their glee. Despite polls showing that Americans had had enough of the whole business, the Republican Party never retreated from its bet that Clinton’s troubles could give them a way of promoting their interpretation of America’s moral decline. As far as they were concerned, the only question to be answered in the elections of November 1998 were how large their gains would be.

Those gains, it turned out, were small — and they went to their opponents. For the first time since the Civil War, the political party of a sitting president gained seats in Congress in the sixth year of his presidency. And the election is just the tip of the iceberg, for we have yet to grasp fully how significant is the transformed moral atmosphere in the United States. It is not that Americans are prepared to elect Barney Frank as their president — although his savaging of Starr on the witness stand last week seemed a measure of the nation’s recent political turnaround and the right’s declining fortunes. But at the same time the results have buried for the time being what once was a very effective political tactic associated with the right: efforts to focus attention away from its economic program, which tends to favor the wealthy, by concentrating on symbolic moral issues that seemingly had great popular appeal.

Some have suggested the election results were merely due to the booming economy. But that’s hard to believe, if for no other reason than in the month before the election, the stock market was careening wildly and financial analysts were worrying publicly that Asia’s economic crisis might be coming to our shores. Nor can it be true that the public was thrilling to Democratic messages on education or Social Security, for whatever was being said on those subjects could barely be heard in the Tripp-Goldberg-Lewinsky din.

It seems far more reasonable to believe that the 1998 election was a referendum on morality after all. Americans were presented with two sharply contrasting theories about the role morality should play in politics. One held fast to the idea that private morality is public business, and that government has a role to play in ensuring that we live by agreed-upon moral standards. According to this view, people who violate what is considered proper morality should be held up to public exposure, ridiculed and, in extreme cases, punished. The other theory argued both that private conduct is beyond the reach of the state and that scrutiny by intrusive public officials armed with potentially coercive power into private conduct is itself immoral.

In all likelihood, most Americans would rather not choose between these theories, finding some element of truth in both of them. But the Republicans would not let them avoid a choice, insisting, as they did, that the future of the republic hinged on which path Americans wanted to follow. That was surely their biggest political mistake. For, it turned out, there is no single group of Americans out there so convinced that we are going to moral hell in a handbasket that we had better turn over our affairs to Newt Gingrich. People who tend to be laissez-faire in their economic views are also generally laissez-faire in their moral views.

Others with serious reservations about the state of morality in America do not believe that we can find the cure for sick souls by attacking the president for his adulteries. Still others feel that no one, however sinful his acts, should be exposed to demeaning rituals of a prying special prosecutor, especially after he confesses his sins. The America we live in, as opposed to the America of the Christian Coalition, believes in forgiveness and tolerance just as strongly as it believes in God, country and family.

Where will the religious right go next? Already Ralph Reed, who is now a Republican political consultant, has been saying that he warned the party to avoid the issue of the president’s conduct. But if Christian conservatives cannot illustrate their views of moral decline by pointing to someone as visible as the president, they may not be able to illustrate them all. If they drop the theme, however, they drop their raison d’être. Since no organization can do that, one assumes that the Christian right will persevere much the way many on the left persevered under Ronald Reagan: marginalized, shrill, but patiently hoping that their day will come again.

President Clinton will clearly survive his troubles, as Republicans will look for a safe way to escape from the impeachment process they launched. Starr’s appearance last week didn’t change the minds of House Judiciary Committee members. But the reaction from the viewing public — and the wider Congress — seems to be: Enough.

But the far more important consequence of this election has little to do with the last two years of Clinton’s presidency, and even less to do with the prospects for his successor. 1998 will be remembered as a watershed election. For what Americans said in the course of voting was that morality was something deeper than “inappropriate” sex. True morality lies in our efforts to find the right way to balance agreement on common values with respect for individual freedom.

Convinced that privacy and individual freedom are antagonistic to, rather than crucial ingredients of, morality in the modern world, Republican conservatives violated the sanctity of America’s implicit moral rules by politicizing morality on the one hand and trivializing it on the other. As a consequence of 1998, we are unlikely to be witnessing anytime soon a return to the conservative Christian agenda that seemed so promising to its advocates, and so ominous to its opponents, just four years ago.

Fed up with what they understood to be widespread moral decline in America, organizations like Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition — the politically astute successor to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority — raised funds, rallied voters, recruited candidates and provided the ideological zeal for a moral crusade. At its roots was a belief that America had lost its traditional moorings in Judeo-Christianity, and that loss had led to increased rates of divorce, abortion, crime, alienation, homosexuality and a lack of national purpose. Only through committed political action, the Christian right held — opposition to abortion, a return of prayer to schools and the teaching of firm standards of right and wrong — could America once again be made morally whole.

Leaders of the religious right never doubted that the majority of good Christians throughout the land shared this outlook on the world. I did, because over the past four years I interviewed 200 middle-class Americans, including people in such heartland places as Tulsa, Okla., San Diego and Cobb County, Ga., as part of my book “One Nation, After All.” Many of my respondents were deeply religious; Christianity was for them at the center of their lives and the source for their understanding of good and evil. But with a few exceptions — roughly six of the 200 — most of them viewed religion as a private, not a public, matter. God tells me what to do, they often said, but my God cannot tell another what to do; only his or her God can do that.

America’s distrust of highly politicized forms of religious expression takes many forms. One, almost unnoticed by the polls, is the fact that African-Americans are among those most attracted to the religious messages associated with conservative Christianity, but at the same time they vote Democratic because they distrust conservative political positions. A similar tension can be found among devoutly Catholic Latinos, many of whom would love to vote Republican but are turned off by the party’s stance on immigration.

Furthermore, Americans of all races tend, when faced with a conflict between commitment to a principle and the lessons of personal experience, to opt for the latter rather than the former. In theory, many Christians believe, you have to accept Jesus in order to be saved, but they also know (and like) enough people who might be Jewish, Muslim or agnostic not to take that dictum too literally. The truth is that most Americans simply want to be nice. The trouble with hell-and-damnation style preachers like Pat Robertson, one of them told me, is that they all too often are mean.

I was at first taken aback by the widespread rejection of religious absolutism I discovered. After all, I reasoned, groups like the Christian Coalition can afford to pay for high-priced research, and no doubt they must have discovered that the old-time religion was still alive in America. But the more I listened, the more I gained confidence in my findings. After all, we know that Americans love God and hate politics. So why, I asked myself, would they want the one confused with the other? I knew that many leftist intellectuals had ignored public sentiment on such touchy issues as crime or welfare. Surely it was possible that right-wing intellectuals could make the same mistake in reverse, assuming, almost as a matter of course, that what they believe has to be what everyone believes — or at least ought to believe. Many Americans consider themselves conservative and many more consider themselves Christian, but none of that translates into automatic support for organizations promoting a program they describe as conservative Christian.

- – - – - – - – - -

Four years ago the religious right was poised to take over one of America’s political parties — not an insignificant feat considering that we only have two. Now, thanks to its misreading of the public mood, including the mood of large numbers of its own followers, it may have lost its chance for good. Politically mobilized conservative Christians have been looking for an issue that would win them popular support. For a time they thought they had one: “partial-birth abortion,” a particularly gruesome way of terminating the life of a fetus and one they hoped would open the door to greater restrictions on a woman’s right to choose. But the Republicans’ proposed ban on partial birth abortion never garnered enough votes in Congress to prevent a presidential veto.

Faced with an impasse on this moral issue, the religious right started to look for another one. And, not completely to its surprise, one fell right into its lap. The president of the United States turned out to be a nefarious Lothario, one who shamelessly practiced weird sex in the Oval Office with a woman not his wife — and then, to top it off, brazenly lied to the American people when questioned about his behavior. Here was America’s moral decline proclaimed in billboard-size capital letters. Everything that agitated the Christian right — loose morality, the collapse of absolute standards of right and wrong, the insouciance of youth — became the stuff of daily headlines. With Professor Romeo in power, who needed partial birth abortion? The president’s conduct gave the religious right just want it wanted: a symbolic crusade around morality that they could ride right into national power.

And so conservative Republicans, led by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, transformed the 1998 election into a referendum on morality. Helping them in their cause was supposedly nonpartisan special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who, with impeccable timing, released to the American public documents and videotapes demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt how deeply immorality had seeped into the highest rungs of power in America. True, there was something a little odd in the fact that moral conservatives were ensuring that the eyes of the American people were never taken off the pornographic material that was filling the airwaves, but it has always been the case that those who most strenuously denounce sex are also obsessed by it.

As recently as mid-September, Republican conservatives could barely contain their glee. Despite polls showing that Americans had had enough of the whole business, the Republican Party never retreated from its bet that Clinton’s troubles could give them a way of promoting their interpretation of America’s moral decline. As far as they were concerned, the only question to be answered in the elections of November 1998 were how large their gains would be.

Those gains, it turned out, were small — and they went to their opponents. For the first time since the Civil War, the political party of a sitting president gained seats in Congress in the sixth year of his presidency. And the election is just the tip of the iceberg, for we have yet to grasp fully how significant is the transformed moral atmosphere in the United States. It is not that Americans are prepared to elect Barney Frank as their president — although his savaging of Starr on the witness stand last week seemed a measure of the nation’s recent political turnaround and the right’s declining fortunes. But at the same time the results have buried for the time being what once was a very effective political tactic associated with the right: efforts to focus attention away from its economic program, which tends to favor the wealthy, by concentrating on symbolic moral issues that seemingly had great popular appeal.

Some have suggested the election results were merely due to the booming economy. But that’s hard to believe, if for no other reason than in the month before the election, the stock market was careening wildly and financial analysts were worrying publicly that Asia’s economic crisis might be coming to our shores. Nor can it be true that the public was thrilling to Democratic messages on education or Social Security, for whatever was being said on those subjects could barely be heard in the Tripp-Goldberg-Lewinsky din.

It seems far more reasonable to believe that the 1998 election was a referendum on morality after all. Americans were presented with two sharply contrasting theories about the role morality should play in politics. One held fast to the idea that private morality is public business, and that government has a role to play in ensuring that we live by agreed-upon moral standards. According to this view, people who violate what is considered proper morality should be held up to public exposure, ridiculed and, in extreme cases, punished. The other theory argued both that private conduct is beyond the reach of the state and that scrutiny by intrusive public officials armed with potentially coercive power into private conduct is itself immoral.

In all likelihood, most Americans would rather not choose between these theories, finding some element of truth in both of them. But the Republicans would not let them avoid a choice, insisting, as they did, that the future of the republic hinged on which path Americans wanted to follow. That was surely their biggest political mistake. For, it turned out, there is no single group of Americans out there so convinced that we are going to moral hell in a handbasket that we had better turn over our affairs to Newt Gingrich. People who tend to be laissez-faire in their economic views are also generally laissez-faire in their moral views.

Others with serious reservations about the state of morality in America do not believe that we can find the cure for sick souls by attacking the president for his adulteries. Still others feel that no one, however sinful his acts, should be exposed to demeaning rituals of a prying special prosecutor, especially after he confesses his sins. The America we live in, as opposed to the America of the Christian Coalition, believes in forgiveness and tolerance just as strongly as it believes in God, country and family.

Where will the religious right go next? Already Ralph Reed, who is now a Republican political consultant, has been saying that he warned the party to avoid the issue of the president’s conduct. But if Christian conservatives cannot illustrate their views of moral decline by pointing to someone as visible as the president, they may not be able to illustrate them all. If they drop the theme, however, they drop their raison d’être. Since no organization can do that, one assumes that the Christian right will persevere much the way many on the left persevered under Ronald Reagan: marginalized, shrill, but patiently hoping that their day will come again.

President Clinton will clearly survive his troubles, as Republicans will look for a safe way to escape from the impeachment process they launched. Starr’s appearance last week didn’t change the minds of House Judiciary Committee members. But the reaction from the viewing public — and the wider Congress — seems to be: Enough.

But the far more important consequence of this election has little to do with the last two years of Clinton’s presidency, and even less to do with the prospects for his successor. 1998 will be remembered as a watershed election. For what Americans said in the course of voting was that morality was something deeper than “inappropriate” sex. True morality lies in our efforts to find the right way to balance agreement on common values with respect for individual freedom.

Convinced that privacy and individual freedom are antagonistic to, rather than crucial ingredients of, morality in the modern world, Republican conservatives violated the sanctity of America’s implicit moral rules by politicizing morality on the one hand and trivializing it on the other. As a consequence of 1998, we are unlikely to be witnessing anytime soon a return to the conservative Christian agenda that seemed so promising to its advocates, and so ominous to its opponents, just four years ago.