The carefully contrived picture of the '60s generation president whose brilliance canceled out his innocent misdeeds while a working wife too good to be true stood by him is dimming as the Clinton presidency retreats to lower ground.
President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, it's increasingly clear, are about like everybody else - even like everybody else - in what the president himself has portrayed as the shameful, greed-driven 1980s.As the president suggested at his Whitewater press conference, he and his wife aren't and never were so divinely touched by ethics and political purity as they were made out to be.
In effect, said Clinton, he and his wife - revolted as they are to look back now on the self-centered greed and easy political morality of several years ago - were pals then with local sharks of politics and finance and cut a few deals for themselves.
"These kinds of things happen when you have married couples who have professions," said the president of the financial wheeling and dealing which began - precisely - as Clinton rose to political prominence and high office in Arkansas.
And, as Clinton suggested, it's what everybody was doing.
The acknowledgement, a sort of confession that Clinton, right from the beginning of his career as a political candidate, accepted friendships with strings attached from business and political operators who would need something, has done further harm to an already damaged White House.
The subsequent release of the Clintons' income tax returns for the years 1977 through 1979 also helped explain what appeared to be Clinton's foolish reluctance to more thoroughly disclose his finances, back before Whitewater bal-looned into a scandal.
Whitewater, for all the Clintons' embarrassment over a soured investment in a real estate deal with a longtime friend, is - or was at the beginning - not so much a Clinton ethical issue as it was a lost gamble.
But the tax returns for the late 1970s opened more serious questions of ethics.
What, for example, do a young and poorly paid politician and his lawyer wife owe to a dear friend who steered them to a $100,000 profit in less than a year of speculating on the commodities market?
And, if something's owed the dear friend, how can Clinton, as governor, and his wife, by then a partner in an influential law firm, repay him?
The questions become more complicated - or, perhaps, less complicated - when more is known of the friend who proved so dear in offering Hillary Clinton his expertise in cattle futures, advice coming in 1978 only weeks after Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas.
James B. Blair, the Arkansas friend, happened to be not only a commodities wizard available to Hillary Clinton but the chief lawyer for a powerful Arkansas corporation that happened to be one of the major polluters in the state.
And, as it also happened, the firm needed frequent regulatory relief from the Arkansas state government - relief of the exact kind that was asked for and granted during Clinton's long tenure as governor.
In what's now the Whitewater maze, there's still no proof of any criminality whatever either by the Clintons or on their behalf.
What's plainly there, though, is a web of suspicious relationships, even sleazy relationships, that reveal Clinton and his wife as just ordinary political operators, maybe no worse but a shade more hypocritical than everybody else.