Part of what I believe with all my heart,” Hillary Rodham Clinton said in her famous 60 Minutes appearance with her husband on Jan. 26, 1992, ”is that the voters are tired of people who lie to them.”

That sounded right at the time. After all, the Nixonian cover-up of the third-rate burglary at the Watergate in 1972 had reshaped American politics. And the lies and alleged lies by Presidents Reagan and Bush and many of their appointees were a source of constant, carping commentary.

But recent events–including the public’s weary reaction to another 60 Minutes interview, on Sunday, with Kathleen Willey–have cast doubt on whether most voters really do care much about lying by politicians.

Nor does political lying, or even lying under oath, appear to outrage most Washington journalists and other inside- the-Beltway deep thinkers (not to mention the cover-up- facilitating lawyers), except when they happen to already dislike the alleged liar for ideological reasons. Indeed, so starkly do the Clinton scandals exemplify the tolerance of lying that pervades our politics that the denouement will be of immense and lasting cultural import.

This tolerance of lying is reflected in the persistent characterization in the press as a ”sex scandal” of legal proceedings that in fact center on powerful evidence–including the sworn testimony of more than 10 witnesses–implicating the President of the United States in dozens of perjuries, efforts to obstruct justice and cover up not only sexual advances to various women (two of whom accuse him of sexual assault), but also his Whitewater financial dealings.

Consider the aftermath of Willey’s r iveting account on 60 Minutes: Polls suggest that most voters believe most or all of her story that on Nov. 29, 1993, when she went to the Oval Office and told the President she needed a full-time job to contend with the desperate financial straits threatening her and her husband (a political supporter whom Clinton knew), Clinton’s most memorable response was an unexpected and unwelcome groping so crude as to constitute sexual assault.

But the polls also show that most voters are happy to have this man continue as President. Meanwhile, the newspapers are full of White House-orchestrated savagings of Willey’s reputation, based mainly on subsequent conduct suggesting that she may not have been as horrified then as she now says she was.

Suppose she wasn’t. It would still be clear that unless Willey made up the whole thing, the President perjured himself about Willey during his Jan. 17 sworn deposition in the Paula Jones case. Not to mention possible perjury about Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Dolly Kyle Browning, Betty Currie, and Arkansas state troopers Roger Perry, Larry Patterson, L.D. Brown and Danny Lee Ferguson.

Clinton contradicted Willey’s sworn allegations that he had tried to kiss her on the lips, had grabbed her breast, and had firmly placed her hand on his genitals: ”I emphatically deny it. It did not happen. . . . She was clearly upset. . . . I put my arms around her, I may even have kissed her on the forehead. There was nothing sexual about it.”

Does anybody really believe that? Robert Bennett, Clinton’s battle-scarred sexual harassment counselor, seemed to be studying a speck on his shoes, and perhaps suffering from severe indigestion, when he said on 60 Minutes: ”I believe the President, OK?”

The Clinton scandals thus raise fundamental questions: Should we care whether politicians tell us the truth? Should we condemn lies about official matters (if we still do), but not about ”personal matters”–such as Clinton’s alleged draft- dodging and pot-smoking, and his and Newt Gingrich’s tangled finances?

Do we disapprove of lies under oath by Supreme Court nominees seeking confirmation, but not lies by a President seeking to hold onto an office in which he has sworn to ”take care that the laws be faithfully executed”? Is it OK to repeat in sworn testimony a lie that could be shrugged off as ”spin” when uttered on the campaign trail?

Are sex lies in a special category, with a right to commit perjury inferable from the Constitution and its various emanations and penumbrae? If lies to conceal consensual adultery are OK, what about lies to conceal sexual harassment? Sexual assault? Rape?

Is there a line somewhere? Or is it OK to commit any perjury, any subornation, any obstruction of justice, any bribe, any threat, any other act of witness-intimidation, so long as the matter being covered up has something to do with sex?

And if so, why were we so priggish about Nixon’s cover-up of one little burglary by a bunch of hapless dirty-tricksters?

Six days after the Clintons’ joint appearance on 60 Minutes–back when Gennifer Flowers was as fresh as the new- fallen snow, Clarence Thomas was newly installed on the Supreme Court and Anita Hill was the new feminist icon–I wrestled with some of these questions in a pro-Clinton, anti-Thomas column headlined ”Lies, Damn Lies and Sex Lies.” Portions are recycled here: ”In a political culture increasingly polluted by mendacity of all kinds, it’s tempting to call for a zero-tolerance attitude toward political lying. But recent experience suggests an exception: We should not judge too harshly those who lie (or whom we suspect of lying) to deflect the ever-more-shameless intrusions by news media into deeply private matters.

”The issues are framed by the Clinton and Thomas cases. . . . Suppose we had conclusive evidence that they lied? Would that alone demonstrate unfitness for high office? The answer, I submit, should be yes in Thomas’s case and no in Clinton’s. . . . Thomas was seeking life tenure on a tribunal that derives its authority from public trust in its integrity. . . . If we can rationalize lying (under oath) under such circumstances, where’s the stopping point?

”Experience suggests, on the other hand, that we cannot be as fastidious about truthfulness in assessing a presidential aspirant’s statements on the campaign trail. . . . Those seeking the presidency must run a grueling gantlet in which complete candor about everything would be a crippling liability. . . .

”Clinton’s alleged lie (in denying any affair with Flowers) is less troubling than Thomas’s (alleged) dissembling because (Clinton’s) purpose was to deflect a barrage of questions that are none of the public’s business and that nobody should have to answer. . . . If the worst that can be said of Clinton is that he may have dissembled to deflect a mob assault on his family’s privacy, should that be enough to disqualify him?

”Not in a world in which nobody who always practices what Jimmy Carter preached–‘I’ll never lie to you’–will ever be elected President.”

I still believe all that (na f that I am). But there’s been some water under the bridge since I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992.

For one thing, the case that Clarence Thomas committed perjury about Anita Hill seems less compelling now than it did then–partly because of my growing awareness of evidence suggesting that Hill may have lied about her dealings with Thomas, and partly because a growing number of people, including many of Thomas’s most fervent detractors, now doubt that lying under oath about intimate (consensual) relationships is perjury at all. For another thing, much new light has been shed on the question that neoliberal guru Charlie Peters, the editor of The Washington Monthly, posed about Bill Clinton in 1992: ”Does he lie too much?”

As Charles Krauthammer wrote a few weeks ago, Clinton will–or should–finally be plunged into disgrace by the evidence that he has lied about Monica Lewinsky, ”because it represents a vast inverted pyramid of corruption, narrowed down to a single, sorry point. That pyramid has been building for six years, as the Clintons have piled one deception on top of another.” The pile is now deep enough to raise the question of whether Bill or Hillary Clinton ever tells the truth when a lie would be more convenient.

Will voters keep saying that this is just fine, as long as the economy is humming and the President looks sexy on TV? Will it really be their considered view that the President is above the law? Nobody knows. There is no precedent: No other President has been caught lying under oath so brazenly. Clinton has been caught. Some of the smoking guns are already in plain view, unless you want to believe that he is a victim of an incredibly complex conspiracy, requiring independent lying by dozens of former Clinton associates, many bolstered by corroborative details–not only the women, but also the former Clinton bodyguards, the former appointees and political supporters, the former business partner and benefactor, and others.

If, amid this evidence of mendacity and hypocrisy, you think Bill Clinton is an acceptable President, can you still teach your children that honesty is the best policy?