WASHINGTON -- There may be sound reasons for not removing President Clinton, but Sen. Pat Moynihan's reason is not among them. Indeed, Mr. Moynihan's enunciation of it becomes a reason for removing Mr. Clinton. Otherwise, retaining Mr. Clinton may seem to ratify Mr. Moynihan's reasoning, which is unjust to the nation.

Identifying Mr. Moynihan as the Senate's pre-eminent intellectual akin to identifying Iowa's tallest mountain -- faint praise for the finest senator of his generation.

When Mr. Moynihan leaves the Senate in 2000, public life will lose (in the words of Michael Barone, author of "The Almanac of American Politics") "the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and the best politician among thinkers since Jefferson." That encomium is, if anything, too tepid for the 71-year-old legislator whose cherubic face should be the sixth painted on the wall of the Senate reception room, next to portraits of Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Robert La Follette and William Taft.

Still, Homer nods and so, occasionally, does Mr. Moynihan. He did last week, with brio, when he said that the removal of Mr. Clinton might "destabilize" the presidency and that risk is intolerable because America is an "indispensable nation."

That analysis, by a remarkably gifted social scientist, is notably unempirical regarding America's political stability. And linking Mr. Clinton's fate to America's world role may not be a kindness to Mr. Clinton.

It is odd to assert that the health of the presidential office is served by Mr. Clinton's continuation in it. The assertion's unspoken postulate is that the office is so brittle that it might be gravely damaged by severing Mr. Clinton from it.

Mr. Moynihan is correct about America's indispensability. That is demonstrated, powerfully if negatively, by the collapse of Clinton statecraft, from Iraq to North Korea. Yet Mr. Moynihan links his "indispensability" and "instability" points:

"There has to be a commander in chief. You could very readily destabilize the presidency, move to a randomness. That's an institution that has to be stable, not in dispute."

Well, yes, but the commander in chief was removed during the depth of the Cold War, with Soviet power waxing and U.S. forces engaged in Southeast Asia. The result was not randomness but the Ford presidency. Mr. Moynihan's argument implies that for the duration of America's indispensability, the Constitution's impeachment clause is a dead letter, too dangerous to act on.

In a Sunday morning TV interview, Mr. Moynihan said "it would be hard to imagine, but stranger things in the world have occurred, where a congressional majority began routinely removing presidents, speakers become president, no one knows who is the commander in chief, who is the chief executive officer, and the whole stability of this nation, on which the stability of the world rests, could be seriously and grievously undermined." He also said, "We could so easily" -- so easily? or is it "hard to imagine"? -- "mutate into a president of the month."

Gracious. Can we please deal with Mr. Clinton without indicting the public? Conservatives denounce the public as strangely anesthetized; Mr. Moynihan suggests the public is on the verge of tolerating wild political volatility. A plea to the political class: Keep Mr. Clinton or spare him, but spare the rest of us these theories that make us the problem.

In a sense, instability in the presidency is, by now, old hat, and hardly unnerving to this republic in its maturity. Six of the seven presidencies immediately prior to Mr. Clinton's were truncated -- by assassination (Kennedy), intra-party strife (Johnson), scandal (Nixon), or disgruntled voters (Ford, Carter, Bush). Then came Mr. Clinton, whose sorrows are the result not of "randomness" engulfing the presidential office, but of his lubriciousness making him ridiculous and felonious.

The great datum of the moment -- like the purloined letter, it is in plain view and for that reason is unnoticed -- is the disconnection between presidential instability and national stability. A New York Times headline -- Page 1, column six, no less -- records astonishment: "Politics No Distraction." That is the Times' bulletin about what the headline calls the December "surge of shopping." (Now, there is news.) A Wall Street Journal headline -- Page 1, column six -- expresses similar amazement: "Despite Everything, America Still Embraces a Culture of Optimism."

Despite "everything"? No, despite just one thing, the president's pratfalls. And presidents are rarely -- very rarely -- indispensable. Charles de Gaulle was right: Graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Political journalists believe that political news, and hence political journalists, are central to the nation's neurological health. That is news to other Americans, or would be if they were paying attention, which they are too wholesomely busy to do.

George F. Will is a syndicated columnist.

Pub Date: 12/30/98