KINDER'S COMMENTARY: DON'T READ TOO MUCH INTO HIGH RATING: REMEMBER NIXON IN '73?

Tailgate continues inexorably on, and after a boffo State-of-the-Union performance Tuesday night, we are told that nearly 70 percent of the American people approve of the job President Clinton is doing. Maybe. Clintonoids taking refuge in that number may just want to check the overwhelming buoyancy of the Nixon presidency exactly 25 years ago this winter. Richard Nixon was coming off a historic, 49-state landslide re-election victory, followed by his forcing the North Vietnamese to the peace table and the impending release of our POWs from enemy prison camps. He too was at stratospheric heights. Short months later, it was Republicans more than Democrats who wanted him out.

A presidency doesn't unravel overnight. It takes time for a dizzying pattern of lies and coverups to build up to levels so disgusting that even your own partisans want you gone. From this point in '73 to the August resignation in '74 was a span of more than 18 awful months for the country. Still, far-sighted veterans such as Tip O'Neill could and did, as soon as winter 1973, foresee and predict the early demise of that presidency.

Nixon's fate could yet be Mr. Clinton's. For what we have in Tailgate is the tiniest tip of the iceberg in a pattern of Clintonoid lies, corruptions and coverups unseen in the nation's capital since the Nixon administration.

Audacity is undoubtedly an underappreciated political asset. You have to admire the audacity of Clintons and all their hangers-on. Most laughable of all was Hillary's trotting out this week on the morning shows to declare that the administration's problems arise out of "a vast, right-wing conspiracy." If so, this would be the first right-wing conspiracy to include august mainstream media organs such as The New York Times, the Washington Post and Newsweek, the Post-owned weekly newsmagazine. (Watergate aficionados will recall the Post's lead role in gleefully toppling Nixon.) There, there, Mrs. Clinton. While it's true that even paranoids have enemies, you were wide of the mark with that one.

Speaking of the New York Times, their top-of-page-one headline Jan. 29 had to send chills through the West Wing. It trumpets an exclusive, with ominous echoes of more to come: "Ex-intern Said to Describe Clinton Advice on Evasion/She Was to Say Visits Were to Secretary." Readers of the story are informed about Miss Lewinsky's previously undisclosed visit to the president at the White House, on Sunday evening, Dec. 28, barely a month ago. That would be 11 days after the job-hunting Lewinsky received the subpoena to testify in the Paula Jones trial. We also learn that the Times had at least three sources corroborating that report.

Meanwhile, amid all the misleading media focus on sex, not nearly enough attention has been paid to the really serious stuff. What really has to interest Ken Starr, and any other prosecutor, is the legal memo Lewinsky handed to her friend Linda Tripp, detailing a sophisticated legal strategy on how to commit perjury and encourage others to do so, and still get away with it. A prosecutor who learns of the existence of such a memo not only has a right, but a sworn duty, to investigate it. Forget the sex, for now. That memo, and which Clinton aide or lawyer wrote it, is key to the highly possible unraveling of a twice-elected administration.

Also Thursday, from Clinton defender and columnist Al Hunt came this telling morsel: "The staff in a leading Capitol Hill Democratic office was watching him [Clinton] on television Monday morning when he adamantly denied having `sexual relations' with Miss Lewinsky; the reaction was dismissive laughter."

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.