WASHINGTON - - Bill Clinton's first formal press conference of his second term took place Tuesday and lasted exactly 55 minutes.

But it took Bill Clinton three to four hours to rehearse for it.

You might think you can't rehearse a press conference. You might think that would be impossible because the White House does not know what questions the reporters will ask.

But you would be wrong. In modern politics, everything is rehearsed.

In the formal Roosevelt Room in the West Wing, not far from the Oval Office, Clinton's troops assembled early Tuesday morning: Rahm Emanuel, senior advisor, Doug Sosnik, political director, Don Baer, chief speech writer, Mike McCurry, presidential spokesman, Ann Lewis, former chairman of the Clinton '96 campaign, and Erskine Bowles, chief of staff.

And, of course, Al Gore was there. These days, Al Gore is everywhere.

"The vice president is the single most valuable participant," Mike McCurry told me. "He has a trained ear."

What is the meeting all about?

These people shoot sample questions at the president and listen to his answers.

In other words, these seven people pretend to be reporters and they try to trip up the president with tough questions.

But why? I asked McCurry. I have listened to presidential news conferences for years and there are rarely tough questions asked. The press is there to get information from the president, not to embarrass him.

McCurry shrugged. The view from the White House is slightly different.

The White House believes most of the reporters who assembled in the East Room Tuesday were there to trip up the president, stump the president, and humiliate the president.

But, if they were (and I don't believe it), they failed. In fact, even if they were there to get the president to say something he didn't want to say, they failed.

That is why Bill Clinton rehearses for three to four hours: so he won't say anything he hasn't planned on saying.

To Clinton and his staff, press conferences are just another type of performance, like a presidential speech.

You prepare, you study, you write your words in advance and then you practice, practice, practice, so you say exactly what you want to say.

And then you make it look all off the cuff.

Early Tuesday, Clinton was handed a 30-page briefing book prepared by his staff. It contained sample questions that reporters might ask and sample answers that he might give.

Then Clinton trooped into the Roosevelt Room and faced his staff as they snapped questions at him.

After some hours of this, his foreign policy team came in for about 45 minutes and then his economic team came in for about 45 minutes and then his domestic policy team came in for about 45 minutes and then some White House lawyers came in and briefed him.

Isn't this a huge pain in the rear? I asked McCurry. All this rehearsal?

"No, he likes it," McCurry said. "He always is 100 percent better after these things. We are just sharpening him. He knows the answers. He just sometimes has a tendency to be...discursive."

Which is a nice way of saying Bill Clinton sometimes rattles on and on.

And his staff, knowing that a press conference is really a TV show, doesn't want him to. So they try to get him to be sharp and short and to the point.

"We pose the likely questions to him," McCurry said. "We can usually anticipate about 85 percent of the questions that are asked by the reporters."

But aren't you a little embarrassed asking tough questions? I asked. I mean, the guy is your boss.

McCurry said that since they were playing reporters - - who Clinton likes as much as he likes the mice that run around the White House - - it wasn't embarrassing at all.

"So we ask the tough questions," he said, "and then we listen to the expletive-deleted answers."

McCurry actually said "expletive deleted." But the president does not. He replies in more earthy tones.

Can you give me an example of what Clinton says when he is being earthy? I said.

"No," McCurry said. "Except to say that Clinton gives very humorous responses, sometimes of an unprintable variety."

And I was wondering: Wouldn't it be a nice change of pace if, instead of giving humorous replies to his staff and then the dignified answers to the press, he just gave the humorous replies to the real reporters, too?

And look like a real human being? Instead of a rehearsed actor?

Naw. It would never work. Reality has no place in modern politics.

WASHINGTON - - Ross Perot's Reform Party held an organizing convention in Nashville last weekend and it was marred by walkouts, back-room intrigues, political in-fighting and raucous name-calling.

But at least nobody tried to kidnap Ross Perot. Or disrupt his daughter's wedding. Or send signals to his opponents via secret earphones.

Huh? What's all that about? Perhaps you have forgotten - - or driven it from your mind - - but Ross Perot is more than an ego-driven billionaire seeking to take control of the United States.

He is an ego-driven billionaire seeking to take control of the United States and happens to be loony.

You don't agree? Think he's just a plain-talking guy who likes to hang out with Larry King?

Well, listen up, and we'll be dancin' like Fred and Ginger in no time:

Let us begin at the third presidential debate in 1992, the one between George Bush, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. George Bush was trying to defend his presidency, Bill Clinton was promising a middle class tax cut and Ross Perot was talking about the night his dog rounded up a group of Black Panthers that had been hired by the North Vietnamese to kill him.

"The Vietnamese had sent people into Canada to make arrangements to have me and my family killed," Perot said. "The most significant effort they had one night is five people coming across my front yard with rifles." This attempted hit was taking place in 1969 and the reason the North Vietnamese had hired the Black Panthers to kill Perot is that Perot was trying to get our POWs out of Vietnam.

So it's night on the Perot estate in Dallas and the five Black Panthers come crawling onto the grounds and what does Perot do? Call the police?

No, he does not! Not by a long shot. No, Perot sics his dog on them and the dog chases them away! "He worked them like a sheep dog," Perot said.

But don't think that Perot let the attempted killers off easy. His dog took a chunk out of one of the Panther's behind, Perot says.

And just because Paul McCaghren, chief of police intelligence operations in Dallas in 1969, says this entire incident was a product of Perot's fevered mind - - "It didn't happen. It did not happen," McCaghren told ABC News - - that doesn't mean anything.

Listen to Ross Perot's explanation to reporters as to why he could provide no confirmation on the North Vietnam-Panther-doggie story. "I'm not going to get into that with you because it's none of your business," Perot said. "I'm not going to - - hey, look, I don't have to prove anything to you people to start with."

And he didn't. Nor did he have to give any evidence that there really was a plan by the Republicans to disrupt his daughter's wedding.

In 1992 Perot is running for president and getting something like 26 percent in the polls but on July 16 he pulls out of the race. Had no choice. Later, he goes on "60 Minutes" and says he dropped out because the Republicans were going to publish fake photographs of his daughter to disrupt her wedding.

"I found myself in a situation where I had three reports that the Republican Party intended to publish a false photograph of my daughter," he said in a later speech. The photograph was the kind where they put a "head on another body" and was going to be given to the supermarket tabloids.

"This is one of the most important days of her life," Perot explained, "and I love her too much to have her hurt."

Because Perot had made a serious accusation in the middle of a presidential campaign against the Republican Party and by implication, George Bush, the charge was investigated not only by the media but also by the FBI. Nobody could find a shred of evidence to support the story. And Bush dismissed Perot's accusation as "loony."

Gee, I can't think why.

And then there was the famed NAFTA debate in 1993. Some people might have thought NAFTA was a rather complicated piece of trade legislation, but Perot knew it was far more serious.

Perot said, a "Mafia-like" group had hired six Cuban assassins to kill him in order to get the treaty passed. The treaty did pass, but it wasn't the Mafia that did in Perot, but Al Gore.

In a debate on national TV, Gore soundly beat Perot, making him look like a fool. But Perot knew why he lost: Gore was wearing a secret metallic earphone in his left ear and getting tips from the White House during the debate!

"Watch the debate, and you will see that thing twinkle," Perot said. "They cheated. All I know is that you can see it twinkle. It was right at the bottom of the ear."

Lorraine Voles, Gore's spokeswoman, denied the accusation, saying, "Yeah, then Scotty beamed him up to the Starship Enterprise."

I only wish we could get Perot beamed aboard, too.

WASHINGTON - - It is late afternoon and the West Wing of the White House is virtually deserted except for Rahm Emanuel, who is sitting in his office, taking and making his own phone calls and, as always, looking out his window.

It is, perhaps, the best window in the building. From it he not only can monitor who comes and goes into the West Wing but he also can see who is being interviewed by the TV reporters from their stake-out positions on the North Lawn.

Today, however, there are no visitors and the stake-out positions are empty. The sky is darkening to blue-black and most of Washington is concentrating on a peaceful evening at home. Not Rahm Emanuel.

"No federal funds for Ebonics!" Emanuel says, slapping the small round table in front of him. "But it took me a day a half to put that together." That extra half day still rankles him. Why so long to establish a federal policy?

It turns out that Richard Riley, the Secretary of Education, wanted to make sure the policy was legal, which slowed things down a little. Emanuel needed no such assurances from the lawyers. He knew that the mass of American voters, the voters who had just reelected his boss, Bill Clinton, did not want their tax dollars going to teach kids how to talk poorly. Putting Ebonics in front of Rahm Emanuel was like tossing a poodle to a shark.

For the last four years, the Emanuel trademark has been moderate policy positions followed up by maximum media exposure. School uniforms? The assault weapons ban? Keeping guns out of the hands of spouse abusers? Those were all Emanuel's. And he moved on them quickly.

"Bureaucracies are the enemy," Emanuel, 37, says. "They don't have the initiative. The president has the initiative. We will bubble with initiative! There is no time to rest. I'm impatient. I'm hyper-active. But we need to gain the initiative!"

That was a few weeks ago. Now, Emanuel is in his brand new office, which until recently was occupied by George Stephanopoulos, who has gone off to become a multi-media millionaire. Rahm has lost his good view, but he has gained something else.

"Rahm getting George's office has enormous significance," Mike McCurry, the presidential spokesman, told me. "Sitting in that office means access to the president and that is an enormous and profound responsibility."

Behind the lovely antique desk in Emanuel's new office is a door. And behind that door is the private dining room of the Oval Office. And quite often that door will open and the President of the United States will poke his head around it and say, "Hey, I need you."

As Senior Adviser to the President for Policy and Strategy (Emanuel also got George's title), Emanuel sits in the office closest to the president. And, through an architectural quirk, it is the only place in the entire White House the president can visit from the Oval Office with anyone - - secretaries, aides, or Secret Service - - seeing him.

Why does Emanuel get such a privileged place?

'He get things done," Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles said. "He gets them done on time, and he gets them done right." And if you think those qualities sound a little mundane, you have never worked in the White House.

Emanuel is whippet thin and handsome, with large doe-like brown eyes and dark hair shot through with gray. He swims a mile a day, three days a week and every Saturday and Sunday he takes time out for private ballet lessons. One day in Little Rock in 1992 he came out of class and bumped into the Clintons. "There they are taking Chelsea for her ballet class," Emanuel said, "and out comes their national finance director in his leotard and tights."

Which is how he started out: raising money. And even his enemies agree he was terrific at it. "This is an insult!" he would scream into the phone. "Five thousand is an insult! You are a $25,000 person! I won't take it. It is beneath you! I am sending the check back!" And he would slam the receiver down and wait. And the phone would ring and the person would be begging to give more money.

He did an extraordinary job raising money for Clinton in 1992 and had the survival instinct to leave fund-raising far behind him by the time the scandals of 1996 hit. And today Emanuel is proud of the fact that he has never had to testify before a Congressional investigating committee. (Though he had to give testimony to staff investigators from the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee about Travelgate.)

"Beads on a necklace," is what Emanuel calls his past accomplishments for Clinton, which, like NAFTA, were achieved with bi-partisan support. And Bill Clinton now wants new beads on that necklace and not just with an eye to the history books, but because his second term is the start of Al Gore's presidential campaign for the year 2000. And so Emanuel, whose issue areas during the 1996 campaign included drugs, welfare, crime and immigration, has been asked to add education and health care for the second term.

And with his appointment, the fight within the White House between the left-liberals and the centrists appears to be over. Emanuel is a centrist and Clinton picked him because the center is where Clinton feels the most comfortable.

"George's shoes will never be filled, because they were custom made," Mike McCurry said. "But Rahm is ideologically sympatico with Clinton, even more so than George. The theoretical debate in the White House has been settled. Clinton has defined where he is and where he's going. Now he needs someone to help get him there."

WASHINGTON - - As Bill Clinton took his second oath of office and gave his second inaugural speech, I could not help but think of one person who was not here this day.

It was February, 1992 and so, of course, we were all in New Hampshire watching the petting zoo of candidates they call the presidential primary.

Bill Clinton was running and so was Jerry Brown and Tom Harkin and Bob Kerrey and some of the other usual suspects including one called Paul Tsongas.

Tsongas was hardly unknown in New England - - he had been a senator from Massachusetts - - but he was something new on the national scene: He was a presidential candidate who told people what they did not want to hear.

He told them they would have to sacrifice and that the path ahead would be hard.

"I don't do the middle-class tax cut," he told audiences, which was a reference to what Bill Clinton was promising. "I don't give tax credits for children. That's walking downhill. It is easy. But it's a rut. It's time to walk uphill. It is hard. You sweat. But you get to the top of the mountain."

He was at Daniel Webster College in Nashua, N.H., and there was a good crowd, mostly of young people, who seemed to enjoy someone who did not pander to them.

"Ideas count in America," Tsongas said that day, "and not 30- or 60-second sound bites. In America, if you present a vision, Americans will move to it and embrace it."

And that is when a young student stood up and said she trusted nobody. She had heard politician after politician and candidate after candidate and it just made her more suspicious and more angry.

A look of genuine pain passed across Tsongas' face.

"When I was in college, the farthest I had ever been away from home was to go to Annapolis to swim against Navy," he said. "A few months later, I was in Ethiopia working for the Peace Corps. Why? Because of a president. A president drew me in. And that's the kind of president I want to be. I want to be the kind of president you can trust."

It was John F. Kennedy who drew Paul Tsongas (and thousands of others, including Bill Clinton) into public service. In 1960, Kennedy did not promise good times. He asked for sacrifice; he asked Americans to ask themselves what they could do for their country.

But now it was the 90s and would sacrifice work today? Tsongas thought it would and in his speeches in 1992 he emphasized a word that by 1996 would become very popular.

"Values," Tsongas said. "What are the values we are giving our children? Look at our beer commercials."

The audience members would always laugh, but they would also think. Beer commercials offered pleasure, satisfaction, good times all without effort. All you had to do was pop the top of the right beer.

Tsongas believed America could not survive as a pop top society.

"If you are supporting me you have great courage and no political instinct whatsoever," Tsongas would say. "But I'll take courage!"

He had courage all his life, battling cancer and still running for office. Though his speeches were filled with a certain number of one-liners, he was not a jovial man. He had decided not to sugarcoat reality and so that also made him a lonely man.

He was the man who would not play the game, who would not take the downhill road, who believed the unpleasant truth would, in the end, be more appealing to the voters than the pleasant untruth.

He lost, of course. Bill Clinton beat him.

But Tsongas always asked his supporters to do the same thing after each primary. "I want you to go into a room in your home and sit down in a chair by yourself," he would say. "And I want you to contemplate what you have done. I want you to feel good about yourself. Feel it. Enjoy it. Savor it."

Which is how he experienced his own life: feeling it, enjoying it, savoring it.

Paul Tsongas died Saturday at age 55.

Sunday, Bill Clinton said of him: "Our country is deeply indebted to him for having had the courage to stay active in public life and to battle through his own illness and his own pain and his own disappointment to continue to fight for America's well being."

Pain and disappointment. Maybe that's what you have to expect if you decide to follow the hard path.

But Paul Tsongas wanted it that way.

WASHINGTON - - I know a woman, a grandmother five times over, who lives quietly in a suburb of Pittsburgh, and listens all day long to her police scanner.

She does not listen to police calls on this radio, but rather to her neighbor's telephone calls. She feels listening to these calls are far better than listening to the soaps and I am sure she is right.

As many people know but rarely think about, portable and cellular telephones are really little radios. They broadcast your conversations through the air and anybody with the right kind of radio can intercept these broadcasts.

There are laws against this, but these laws are largely unenforceable. What are the police going to do, raid every suburban home outside Pittsburgh until they find this grandmother that I know? (And just in case they try it, I lied about her living outside Pittsburgh. She really lives outside Toledo.)

The subject of telephone eavesdropping is very much in the news these days. (And just in case you are wondering where the term "eavesdropping" comes from, it dates from Anglo-Saxon days, when wide, overhanging eaves on the thatched cottages of Devon were designed to keep dripping rain away from the house. So if you stood in the sheltered area under the eaves to listen to what was going on inside the house, you were in the "eavesdrip" , later known as the "eavesdrop." So don't say you don't get your money's worth from your daily newspaper.)

A couple in Florida were riding around last month doing some Christmas shopping and listening to their hand-held police scanner when they suddenly heard the voice of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, talking on a cellular phone with high-ranking House Republicans.

Gingrich was devising strategy on how Republicans could respond to House Ethics Committee charges against him. This planning came the same day Gingrich had promised not to engage in such strategy sessions.

So what did the Florida couple do? They tape-recorded the conversation on the portable tape recorder they carry in the car with them.

"I was so excited to think I had actually heard a real politician's voice," Alice Martin said at her press conference on Capitol Hill this week. "We were thrilled."

John Martin, her husband, said they intended to play the tape back to their unborn grandson, Matthew, who is due to be born in about three weeks.

"We just thought it was part of history," John said.

The Martins then took the tape to Washington, where they turned it over to Rep. Jim McDermott, the senior Democrat on the House Ethics Committee. The tape was then leaked to two newspapers, who printed a transcript of Gingrich's conversation.

Let us leave aside the possible law-breaking for a moment (which can be punished by up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000) and concentrate instead just on the Martins, who were clearly delighted to be on TV and holding a press conference.

They presented themselves as just an ordinary, unsophisticated American family as they giggled, smiled and mugged for the cameras. John, 50, is a maintenance man at a middle school and Alice, 48, is a teacher's aide.

And, gosh darn it, when they heard this famous politician's voice, well they just had to grab up their tape recorder and record it off their police scanner.

Right. Tell me another.

First off, who the heck carries a tape recorder around in the car with them? I'm a professional reporter; I own three tape recorders, and I carry none of them in the car with me.

Second, what is all this baloney about recording the conversation "for history" so they could play it for their unborn grandson.

They weren't listening to an inaugural speech or a State of the Union speech or Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. They were clearly listening to a private phone conversation.

I have read the transcript of that conversation and it is darn hard to follow. It is not the kind of thing you would hear and immediately think: "Aha, a moment of history for my unborn grandson!"

And what's with this gosh and gee whiz act from the Martins? What's with all this being so excited to hear an actual politician's voice. To hear them, you'd think they were bumpkins, total political unsophisticates.

Think again. Both have been active in Democratic Party politics. John was treasurer of the Columbia County Democratic Executive Committee and Alice was once the secretary.

They taped that phone conversation to preserve it for their unborn grandson? Baloney. They were making the tape of a private conversation for the purpose of doing in the Republican Speaker of the House.

The Martins say they are prepared to be prosecuted for what they did and they may be. If found guilty, however, I think they should get off with just a warning:

If they ever engage in this kind of sleazy activity again, they will be forced to listen to every speech that Newt Gingrich has ever given.

That ought to scare them straight.

It was a white business-size envelope with a weird "bulk rate" stamp on it, the kind of junk letter you throw out without a second thought.

Which I was about to do, when I stopped to read two lines of type that appeared on the envelope above my address: "A remarkable new book is about to be published - - and you, Roger Simon are in it!"

Then I read the return address on the letter: "The World Book of Simons, c/o 3687 Ira Road, Bath, OH 44210."

Then I looked at the elaborate coat of arms above the return address. It featured a helmet above a shield. The shield had crossed swords on it and something that looked like the symbol the Boy Scouts use. And the whole thing was surrounded by something like ostrich plumes or wilted lettuce leaves. And there was a ribbon beneath it with the name - - you guessed it - Simon.

I was impressed, very impressed. And then I threw it in the garbage.

But then I dug around in the garbage and got it out again and opened it. Why? Why would I fall for so obvious a piece of junk mail as the "The World Book of Simons"?

Because it was so obvious. It was so obvious a piece of junk that it could not fool anybody.

The junk mail I really hate is the kind that comes disguised as government checks or overdue bills or fake "handwritten" personal letters. That kind of junk mail tries to trick you into reading it.

But this was genuine, undisguised, 24-karat junk mail. And I figured the people behind it deserved a reward for that. So I opened it up.

Inside was a letter from someone named "Sharon Taylor", whom I am guessing may not really exist. Ms. Taylor wanted to tell me she had "exciting news" for me, to wit: an "extensive work has been done throughout the world on a project relating to the distinguished Simon name."

The result, was the "WORLD BOOK OF SIMONS" that includes the individual Simons "who immigrated to the New World between the 16th and early 20th centuries."

Then Ms. Taylor really got interesting. "The first Simon we found," she said, "came to Florida in 1565. His name was Vincent. Like thousands of others, he sought a better life for himself in this land of opportunity."

Vincent? Vincent Simon? I can tell your right now there has never been a Vincent, Vinnie, or even a Vin in my family. And in 1565 yet? Didn't people back then all have just one name like "Shakespeare" or "Columbus" or "Galileo"?

And what kind of "land of opportunity" was Florida in 1565? It must have been crawling with snakes to say nothing of the humidity. And the history of Florida's settlement was not all that pleasant: The French established a colony there in 1564, the Spanish arrived in 1565 and massacred the French and the British came in 1586 and burned down the Spanish settlement. Some opportunity. It sounds like Miami today.

So where did Vincent Simon come in? Well, my curiosity could be satisfied by sending Ms. Taylor only $34.50, plus $4.88 postage and handling, Visa, MasterCard and Discover gleefully accepted.

And what would I get for that? Well, I would get "hard to find Simon immigration information...obtained from reference books indexing ships' passenger lists, genealogical registers and other official records" that might help me, Ms. Taylor went on, to "determine if Vincent is the connection your old world roots."

Imagine that. And maybe if I could prove a direct connection between Vincent in 1565 and me in 1997, I could claim all or part of Florida! Maybe I could make myself the Duke of Daytona or the Viceroy of Vero Beach or Emir of the Everglades!

And then I looked carefully at the order form, which informed me that: "No direct genealogical connection to your family or to your ancestry is implied or intended."

It wasn't? So then why was I reading this letter?

Well, Ms. Taylor (who might be related to Elizabeth Taylor, now that I think of it) went on to tell me that even if I wasn't connected to Vincent, the World Book of Simons would provide me "with an international directory of virtually every Simon household - with address."

Ms. Taylor's amazing research has discovered more than 74,001 households "bearing the Simon name worldwide."

Why I would want the names of 74,001 households worldwide bearing the name Simon is another matter. I suppose I could write and ask them for money.

And then it occurred to me they could write and ask me for money.

So I was feeling very depressed until I went on with Ms. Taylor's letter and discovered that the book would also tell me "what the distinguished Simon name means."

She wouldn't give me a hint in the letter. No, I would have to cough up $34.50 plus $4.88 postage and handling to find out.

If I did cough up that money, however, I would know for sure what the Simon name mean.

How about "sucker"?

WASHINGTON - - You don't hear the term "couch potato" much any more. It used to be a funny reference to those people who endlessly sat in front of their TV sets, lacking any energy or will of their own.

But while the term has lost popularity, the concept has not.

The concept has been taken up by the Congress of the United States.

Three pieces of legislation - - two pending and one passed - - perfectly, in my opinion, symbolize the couch potato way of thinking in America.

All three are designed to take decision-making away from us.

All three are designed to make progress "automatic", so that we don't have to exert any energy ourselves.

The successful couch potato legislation was the v-chip.

The v-chip, which now will add to the cost of every new television set, was designed to take parental responsibility out of the hands of parents.

Instead of parents determining what their children watch, now an electronic device will do it.

It is responsibility by robot.

Bill Clinton backed it and Congress went for it in a flash. Who could oppose anything so popular?

An electronic device would keep our kids from watching too much violence and too much sex. And we wouldn't have to do a thing.

Of course, it is not working out quite that way.

The TV industry is having a little bit of trouble determining just what is too much violence and too much sex. And all sorts of shows, including news broadcasts and quasi-news broadcasts, are not covered by the v-chip.

And to be effective, parents will have to replace every single old TV set in the house with a new v-chip TV set. And...well, the lists goes on.

But two other pieces of pending legislation are also based on the same couch potato, no-responsibility thinking.

The first is term limits. People don't like Congress as an institution (though they do like their senators and representatives as individuals.) So the term limits movement was formed to kick out members of congress automatically after a set number of terms.

It wouldn't really kick them out, of course. Representatives would just run for senator and senators would just run for governor and they would still manage to stay in office term after term.

And, in reality, we already have term limits. It is called the vote. If you don't like your elected official, all you have to do is vote against him or her.

But this takes too much thought and too much energy. Wouldn't it be easier to just kick out the lawmakers automatically, whether they are doing a good job or not?

Why would we want to kick out the good lawmakers?

Because it is easier that way. It is automatic. We don't have to think about it.

The last piece of couch potato legislation is the balanced budget amendment.

This amendment, like all amendments, would alter the U.S. Constitution. It would make balanced budgets mandatory.

And if the budget wasn't balanced (let's say there was some huge crisis), the whole matter would be thrown into court, where a judge would decide everything.

This is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind, but the Founding Fathers imagined a country where people would love democracy and want to participate in it.

The Founding Fathers did not know from couch potatoes.

What keeps Congress from balancing the budget now, without an amendment?

Nothing. It could do so any time it wants to. Congress now says it wants to do this and President Clinton now says he wants to, also.

But wouldn't it be easier to have an amendment to do this automatically? Wouldn't it be easier to have a balanced budget without thinking about the implications of a balanced budget?

Wouldn't it be easier to change the Constitution to demand a balanced budget every year, even in those years when a balanced budget would be a very bad idea?

Yes, it would.

It wouldn't be wise. But it would be easier.

Which is what the couch potato movement is all about.

WASHINGTON - - I know that all sorts of things get put on the covers of news magazines these days, including a lot of things we wouldn't normally allow in our living rooms, but Newsweek's cover this week still shocked me.

If features a very intense (if not downright scary) looking Paulaa Jones, who is suing President Clinton for making, she says, lewd advances to her in a hotel room in 1991.

The make-up and lighting used on Jones is so unflattering that I figured the magazine wanted us to hate her. And inside the magazine there is an even worse picture of Jones in a tight, fuzzy sweater with a smoldering look on her face. It looks like something that would have appeared in the Police Gazette of 1930.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I read the Newsweek story and found that the magazine actually likes Paula Jones and believes her and wants us to like and believe her, too.

Jones is suing Clinton for sexual harassment and the case is going before the Supreme Court next week. Clinton's lawyers argue that presidents should not have to deal with civil suits until they leave office or else the Oval Office will become a "magnet for litigation."

Jones says that on May 8, 1991 an Arkansas state trooper asked her to go to Clinton's hotel suite in Little Rock at 2:30 in the afternoon. When she got there, she says, Clinton tried to slip his hand up her legs, and then dropped his pants and demanded a sexual act.

Jones refused, she says, and told other people about the alleged incident. She is now suing Clinton for $700,000. Clinton denies the incident ever took place and says he can't recall ever meeting Jones.

Since filing her suit, Jones has been submitted to the usual double-edged sword of media attention: celebrity status and attack.

She appeared in a No Excuses jeans commercial and got $50,000, made the cover of People Magazine, gets recognized on the street, etc.

On the other hand, a lot of the media have been unkind to her. New York magazine depicted her as "white trash", saying the term was insulting, "But white trash best encapsulates the galloping sleaze that has overrun both rural and urban America."

Evan Thomas, then the Washington Bureau Chief of Newsweek, went on TV and characterized Jones as "some sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer park."

U.S. News and World Report wrote that Jones, as a teenager growing up in Lonoke, Ark, "took to wearing short, tight skirts to school, and more makeup than other girls in Lonoke, eyeliner, shadow, rouge, red lipstick and lip gloss." She also would sometimes lie in her backyard and "sun in a bikini."

Which meant that Jones was a tramp, right?

After reading such moronic press accounts, I wrote a column in defense of Jones two years ago. Her social class, I said, and whether she wore too much eyeliner or sunbathed in her backyard, had nothing whatsoever to do with the truth or falsity of her accusations against Clinton.

Now, the tide has turned. The Newsweek article (written by the same Evan Thomas!) has decided that Jones is a victim of smear and innuendo by the media and by unnamed "Clinton operatives."

Now, the magazine implies, Paula Jones is telling the truth. Michael Isikoff, then a Washington Post and now a Newsweek reporter, talked to Jones shortly after she went public with her accusations, the magazine reports, and, "Jones's story was supported by other friends and family members interviewed by Isikoff."

Not quite. In fact, not at all. What Newsweek really means is that friends and family members say Jones told them the same story she went public with. It doesn't mean they know what happened in that hotel room.

But, Newsweek reports, Isikoff was "unable to catch (Jones) in any lies."

Isikoff has a very good reputation as an investigative reporter, but I was able to catch Paula Jones in a lie and it wasn't tough at all.

Paula Jones held a press conference in October, 1994 and reporters asked her if she had once posed for some nudie pictures that were to appear in Penthouse magazine over her objections.

Jones denied that she had posed for nudie shots. "Just normal pictures," she said. "You know in lingerie and bathing suits, what women have when they have pictures taken like that."

But that wasn't true. The pictures show Jones topless, dressed in at most a g-string. There were not "just normal pictures."

So why did Jones not tell the truth about this? Her lawyer, Joseph Cammarata, later said: "Our best recollection was that there were no nude photos. So apparently she didn't have a perfect recollection. What's the big deal?"

What's the big deal? If her own lawyer admits Paula Jones can't remember whether she dropped her top, how can we trust her to remember whether Bill Clinton dropped his bottoms?

Whether Jones once posed for nudie shots is irrelevant to her current claim against Bill Clinton, just as the sexual past of a rape victim is irrelevant. What is relevant, however, is Jones's ability to remember past events and her history of truth-telling.

Some in the media do not want to consider such issues, however. They want simple, clear stories. They want cartoons: Paula as white trash or Paula as saint.

Which is the trouble with too much of our media today: They are either at your throat or at your feet.

WASHINGTON - - If you think only James Bond has a license to kill, you are dead wrong. There are about 40,000 people in this country who can kill you any time they feel like it and get away scot-free.

Or if they don't feel like killing you, they can rape you or rob you or beat you up, and under U.S. law, they cannot be prosecuted.

They are foreign diplomats. They have something called diplomatic immunity. And they can do whatever they want to you.

I have been writing about this subject for the last 10 years and my file of horror stories is now about four inches thick. Here are some real life cases:

- - The son of Saudi Arabian diplomat was suspected of raping a 16-year-old girl in Alexandria, Va. Our State Department presented evidence to the Saudi embassy, which made "no denial" of the allegation. Because of diplomatic immunity, the diplomat's son was never prosecuted.

- - The ambassador from Papua New Guinea was driving drunk around Washington, D.C. one day when he slammed into three parked cars, critically injuring a 26-year-old American. The ambassador was never prosecuted.

- - Peter Christiansen, a retired New York police detective, testified before a Senate committee that he had tracked down a man suspected of 15 rapes.
Two of the victims identified the man, but he was the son of a military attache from Ghana and had diplomatic immunity. "I was forced to let him go," Christiansen told the senators. "As he left, he snickered and laughed at the crime victims and myself."

- - The son of a Brazilian ambassador once got into a fight into a topless bar in Washington, pulled out two guns and fired several shots, hitting a bar employee in the hand, leg and abdomen. The ambassador's son was sent home to Brazil to sip pina coladas, while the wounded American could not even get his medical bills paid.

- - Shoplifting by diplomats is considered commonplace. They are never prosecuted. There have also been cases of robbery, counterfeiting, weapons smuggling, heroin smuggling, assault and - - I kid you not - - the keeping of slaves on American soil.

Oh, yeah, one other thing: People with diplomatic immunity don't have to pay their parking tickets. Think that's trivial? As of three years ago, Russia owed the United States $3.8 million in parking tickets.

Congress has had held hearings. Lawmakers have made speeches. The TV news shows do a show or two And nothing ever changes.

Which brings us up to the present day:

On Jan. 3 of this year in Washington, a car driven by the second-ranking diplomat from Georgia (the one in the old Soviet Union, not the one down south), sped through a busy traffic circle at high speed and slammed into a car, catapulting it into a third car, killing a 16-year-old girl from Maryland.

Officials say the diplomat was speeding and driving under the influence of alcohol.

The diplomat was taken to a hospital and released. He said he was sorry. He has not been charged with anything: not a felony, not a misdemeanor, not even a traffic violation.

A few days before in New York, police arrested one man who they said had punched a police officer in the face and another who they said was trying to start his car while intoxicated.

But the two men were quickly freed when it was learned they had diplomatic immunity. All charges were dripped. One was first secretary to the Belarus Mission to the United Nations and the other was first secretary to the Russian Mission to the United Nations.

That's right: If you are a diplomat, you can hit a New York cop in the face and go free! And you can drive around drunk and go free, even if it means you might kill somebody.

To his credit, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was outraged by this and has demanded both diplomat be kicked out of this country. Which is the most we can do to them. (For the record, the U.S. State department does not care what the Mayor of New York wants.)

After that 16-year-old girl was killed in Washington, however, public outcry was so great that the State Department has asked Georgia to lift its diplomatic immunity so we can file criminal charges against the diplomat.

Which is just window dressing. Waiving diplomatic immunity is extremely rare. Why should countries do it? It is so much easier just to call the diplomat home and send some other slob in his place.

Why do we tolerate this? Because, our State Department says, if we don't grant diplomatic immunity to foreign diplomats, they won't grant immunity to our diplomats.

Which I think is stupid. If our diplomats rape and assault and kill people in foreign countries, I (ital) want (unital) them to arrested and tried.

Oh, no, our State Department says, we need diplomatic immunity to keep our innocent diplomats from being arrested unfairly.

Oh, yeah? Did diplomatic immunity keep our diplomats safe when they were seized in Iran? Has it protected U.S. diplomats from being shot, kidnapped, and killed in countries all over the world?

It has not. Diplomatic immunity is a one-way street. It is a neat little game:

The foreigners have the immunity and we have to be diplomatic about it.