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Robert H. Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah (Regan Books/HarperCollins, 382 pages, $ 25) has an air of authority that borders on the magisterial. The legal scholar, former appealscourt judge, and defeated nominee for the United States Supreme Court has written a work of intellectual history and social criticism that, in fewer than 350 pages, means to offer a comprehensive account of the failure of modern liberalism (the book’s subtitle is Modern Liberalism and American Decline). It is easy to imagine such an ambitious project ending in superficiality, eccentricity, or triviality. Slouching Towards Gomorrah does not.

On the contrary, the book is steeped in serious thought about Modern Times. The prose is engaging. But the manner is that of the serious if not fusty law professor scouring casebooks for illuminating precedents — in this case meticulously selecting source material on the basis of the quality and clarity of the analysis that has gone before.

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HERE WE HAVE A FELLOW who has made $ 6 million since January off his first novel — a novel that won nearly unanimous critical acclaim and sold more than one million copies, with another 1.5 million coming out in paperback. His book turned into a pop culture obsession on the order of “Who shot J. R.?” and its movie adaptation is being directed by Mike Nichols, starring Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson, and Jack Nicholson. That it should now be necessary to put in a good word for such a lucky, talented guy as this author, because he is under relentless attack, is astonishing. But here we are.

The author is Newsweek columnist Joe Klein — formerly known as ” Anonymous,” the author of Primary Colors, the stunning portrait of the Clinton-like presidential primary campaign of Jack Stanton, philandering southern governor. The attack is coming from his fellow journalists and it would seem to be a shot aimed at the heart: Klein’s very integrity and credibility as a journalist are in the dock, and he is being found wanting, wanting, wanting.

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A FLURRY OF PUBLICITY about the supposed revelations in Roger Morris’s Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America has obscured what the book really is. To be sure, Morris gives us some anonymous ex-spooks who claim young Bill Clinton was passing information to the CIA during his notorious trip to Moscow, and still more people who anonymously confirm that Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster were long-time lovers, and others who are certain Gov. Clinton was up to his nostrils in cocaine, as well as in the drug-smuggling and gun-running out of Mena airport in rural Arkansas. But Partners in Power (Holt, 526 pages, $ 27.50) is chiefly and simply a viciously doctrinaire attack on Bill and Hillary Clinton — and the American political system Morris portrays them as exemplifying — from the farther-out provinces of the ideological Left.

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THE METHODICAL WORK OF A Little Rock jury has put an end once and for all to the proposition, advanced tirelessly by the defenders of Bill Clinton, that nothing really wrong was going on at the intersection of politics and money down in Arkansas during the 1980s.

Maybe they were all too cozy down there, the defenders said, and maybe there were some sleazy deals, but given the nature of the problems facing the nation in this last decade of the millennium, so what? And besides, it was all so complicated. Who in Washington had the time or stamina to wade through hundreds of pages of still-incomplete documentation in order to try to figure out the details of ten-year-old loans? Such obsessive activity would almost have to be partisan in inspiration, wouldn’t it?

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Even the venue Sen. Alfonse D’Amato picked for the opening salvo of an internecine war against the conservatives of his own party was perfect — Don Imus’s shock-jock, politician-larded radio show. D’Amato went off on a tear against the conservative wing of his party, one that he would still be embellishing upon weeks later despite a ferocious counterattack from the conservative wing and a plea from the party chairman for everyone please to shut up.

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THE REACTION TO NEWS that Bill Clinton’s lawyers had just received a check for $ 891,000 from an insurance company to pay the president’s defense bills in the sexual harassment suit brought against him by Paula Corbin Jones was entirely typical. It was party time on talk radioshosts and callers whooping it up about the studly ne’er-do-well and his “bimbo insurance.” In the establishment press, meanwhile, the story was something of a yawn within 24 hours of the Wall Street Journal’s breaking it, as if million-dollar payouts (the tab is still running) to sitting presidents weren’t worth a second thought.

In the era of Clintonian exceptionalism, this was yet another first. The first president to claim he is temporarily immune from civil suits for personal conduct; the first president to set up a legal defense fund; the first president whose wife is hauled off to the grand jury; and now, the first president collecting on umbrella coverage for personal liability.

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What was once an almost indecipherable set of wrid financial shenanigans involving the tiny elite of a small Southern state is now afull- blown White House story involving, most recent- ly, long-issing billing records suddenly found in a drawer in the First Lady’s offices. Those bills completed Whitewater’s journey north from the Ozarks to Washington, its transition from an impossible-to-follow land deal to an inside-the-Beltway scandal. And this is extremely bad news for Mr. and Mrs. Clinton. After all, the very Arkansasness of Whitewater has been of immense help to them. The Gordian knot of financial transactions involving a large cast of characters and an array of institutions centering around Little Rock during the Decade of Greed has proved as complicated as the plot of the movie Chinatown, and almost as hard to follow. And just like the friendly cop at the climax who tells the morally shattered Jack Nicholson to ignore the depravity he sees around him with the words “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown,” so the sophisticated, pragmatic political view around Washington has been to say “Forget it, Jake, it’s Arkansas” whenever the word “Whitewater” is mentioned.

That view can be summed up as follows: Maybe the Clintons were in some proximity to some sleazy business practices. Who cares? Grow up, this is politics. And, for God’s sake, what does any of this admittedly regrettable stuff, much of it dating back 15years, have to do with Washington? Those who are harping on this ancient history are transparently doing so for partisan political reasons. Sure, we can fault the First Couple for their lack of total candor and lapses of judgment, but let us just say “mistakes were made” — – and leave it at that. As with many other self-consciously moderate, worldly assessments that exude a distinct air of self-congratulation, however, this one seems to tilt not toward the worldly middle, but distinctly toward the Clintons. White House counsel Mark Fabiani, the spin doctor on the Clinton scandals, loves it, since it assumes his conclusion about Whitewater: There’s no there there.

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THE TAX CUTS MAY BE IN PERIL, the line-item veto languishing, welfare reform at a stalemate, and the unzeroed-out National Endowment for the Arts busily preparing for its next foray into the bowels of our culture. But say this for the 104th Congress: You can drive faster.

More precisely, Washington decided to butt out of the business of setting speed limits on the nation’s highways. They’re gunning their engines outside of Butte, Montana, just like in the good old days before Arab oil embargoes, disco, national malaise, and the other political and cultural catastrophes of the 1970s. There is not much of anything in Montana — even Montanans concede this — and what’s there is far from everything else. Now another thing that isn’t there is a speed limit, at least not during the day.

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