You don't want to join Richard Nixon as the only President to resign your office. Indeed, you have a duty not to resign. This issue is bigger than you, Mr. President. It goes to the heart of our constitutional order.

In resigning you would nullify the results of the 1996 presidential election. At a stroke your resignation would set at naught the separation of powers established by the Framers of the Constitution. The Framers did not want the President to be a prime minister serving at the pleasure of, and deriving his authority from, his parliamentary party. His authority comes directly from the people, who elect him on a separate ballot from the legislature. The Framers wanted the branches to vie to the uttermost to protect their powers -- a constitutional obligation to which Kenneth Starr is blind when he charges you with obstructing justice for fighting subpoenas aimed at weakening the presidency. You owe it to the people, to the electoral process, to the Constitution, and to all future Presidents to stay in office -- unless under imminent threat of impeachment. In that last case principle would yield to personal necessity. The Constitution does not require you to destroy yourself.

What are the prospects of impeachment? Assuming that there are no further revelations, Mr. President, at this point impeachment looks unlikely. Public opinion is still strongly against it. So is political logic. The Republicans don't want to run against President Gore in 2000. It is in their political interest to weaken you, not to drive you from office.

Finally, by resigning you would legitimate for all time the politics of scandal -- using the private lives of public figures to destroy them. This scandal is about sex, Mr. President. Even if you did lie in the Jones deposition, you were lying about sex. Every married man or woman in your shoes would have done the same thing. The legal foreground to the scandal, with its grave-sounding charges about perjury and obstruction of justice, can't mask the sexual background. The public gets this, Mr. President. Everbody lies about illicit sex, and for men to lie about it used to be considered chivalrous. The Starr report reeks of the Special Prosecutor's prurient curiosity. (Starr's father, a fundamentalist minister, once took to the pulpit to remonstrate against immorality after seeing a woman wearing Bermuda shorts.) Starr is a dirty-minded snoop -- and he's our not-so-secret weapon. Culture is your ally against Starr. Since the 1960s, sexual privacy has become a mainstream American value. Many Americans believe that the most shocking thing about the Starr Report is that it exists. Stand firm, Mr. President. Their support will enable you to stay in office.