American tragedyEditorial"What are we telling the next generation of women?" asks playwright Wendy Wasserstein, in the wake of President Bill Clinton's minimalist apologia and Hillary Rodham Clinton's stoic resolve.Wasserstein, who regaled an audience in Phoenix not long ago with stories of her New York Jewish upbringing, draws heavily on her background in crafting telling social commentaries for Broadway audiences. Indeed, what are we telling our daughters His oblique admission of guilt surely did little to assuage the hurt of those who love him, or to temper growing disappointment and anger of those who have believed in him. No longer can he expect us to look the other way, to excuse his indiscretions with a wink and a grin. This protean political genius and prodigious charmer has been caught. His preternatural ability to outtalk, outcharm and outsmart his detractors has failed him. His personal wrongdoing at last has done him in. Yet as Clinton's phalanx of lawyers negotiate the minefield of Kenneth Starr's $40 million investigation, and as the federal grand jury ponders the astounding revelations of this week's testimony, it becomes clear that the sordid affair has less to do with the weakness of one man than it has to do with the weakness of a nation, less to do with his legacy than with ours. The national spectacle raises the disturbing specter of an ascending scale of deceit and deception tied to power and influence, and of an increasing propensity by the American public to accept dishonesty as an inevitable characteristic of those to whom we entrust our nation's most highest work. What are we telling our children when truth telling is reduced to a game and our elected officials operate on a relative spectrum of right and wrong? The unfolding drama has all the elements of an American tragedy. 
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