Facts of life: What Bill Clinton doesn't know about sex.

• Author: Castellanos, Alejandro

Will Bill Clinton redeem himself? If anyone can, it is this president. No political figure has reinvented himself with such regularity or bounced back from more profound depths. He is the candidate of the perpetual second chance.

True, this would be the mother of all comebacks. In the waning days of a lame-duck term, undone by his own undisciplined appetites and relentless mendacity, Clinton is trusted less - well, less than even he has ever been trusted. Yet to rescue himself from historical disgrace, the poor man must attempt what he has never been trusted to do: He must lead America. That is something new for a president who has instead been led by public opinion surveys - surveys where he has found the teeny, mosquito-like ideas that have buzzed from his White House in swarms to nip unsuspecting Americans.

School uniforms. More police. Patching leaky school roofs. Bill Clinton has found small ideas just his size. When this smallest of presidents told us "the era of big government is over," he was not abandoning statism. He was only declaring his own impotence. Clinton was acknowledging that, try as he might, he just wasn't powerful enough to impose a really big government power grab, such as nationalized health care, on the country.

So our micro-president did the next best thing: He kicked big government over, shattering it into thousands of tiny shards. Watch your step; Clinton's micro-government proposals are everywhere. Who but Bill Clinton could simultaneously make government smaller and give us a lot more of it?

Even as we speak, the Clinton-Gore team is on its way to a neighborhood near you, with urban planners and traffic management bureaucrats. They have a plan for your car. A plan for your house. A plan to fix your suburbs. They are guaranteeing you more time with your children. A grassy green park to go to. Protection from suburban sprawl.

And now Clinton has found new accomplices to help him expand the power of the state. Driven to get something, anything, done, Clinton is moving to get things done with the Republican Congress. Embarrassed by the impeachment imbroglio, they also are determined to show voters what they can accomplish.

This is a time for all good Americans to tremble. How can we gain the president's attention? Perhaps we should present our case against ever-expanding government in a way Clinton and his advisers can understand.

Let's talk about sex.

Hell of a mess, isn't it? Risky and inefficient. The eternal...