It’s Clinton’s Turn to Awe and Lead Us : Presidency: Yes, wrestling with the economy is important, but so is maintaining the spell the office casts.

L.B.J. used to say that “the hardest thing about being President is not doing what’s right, but knowing what’s right.” Bill Clinton will soon come to accept the rigidity of that truth. And even when a President is right, his vindication is in the details, which is why the new President will face a collision of contrary desires.

The issues before the new President are quite unlike any that confronted chief executives in the last 50 years. No more huge enemy looming across the ocean seas, with the power to intimidate us, to incinerate us. After a 74-year run, communism is dead. Foreign policy, though still squirming with inhospitable confusions, has lost its heat. Instead, the new President enters a domestic thicket of fiscal threads that snake in and out and about urban centers, suburbs and rural communities alike. Welcome home, Mr. President.

As has every President before him in this modern age, he will discover, within 48 hours of his inauguration, that the press will give him a colossal pain in the backside. The pundits and savants and the priestly arbiters of the public conscience who preside over the babble of TV talk shows will become his hair shirt. Even Socks the cat will have no place to hide.

But Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary appear to relish challenging the twitchy complexities of federal deficits, national debt, health care, infrastructure, taxes, investment incentives, plant closings, job-building. Most presidents find this kind of labor most uncongenial. Clinton surely seems to be tutored in the entrails of these problems, the first President since Lyndon Johnson to be both buoyant and knowledgeable about unwholesome domestic alternatives. Never mind that the solutions, still blurred, are all tangled up in indecipherable fiscal arithmetic.

Clinton understands the claim on him by the nation’s lament. He knows that to lead he must not only persuade a new kind of Congress, but also inspire citizens who have grown vexed and frustrated. The only way to do that is to present himself on TV to explain complex issues, to soothe irksome feelings, indeed to create a heroic mood in the country so that when he asks the people to follow him to the mountaintop they will do just that. But it will be hard, mighty hard. Unlike the era of F.D.R. and Truman, there is no sublime cause to support. Unlike the time of J.F.K., the country has wearied of eloquent calls to idealistic arms. Unlike the years of Ronald Reagan, the bubble of endless prosperity has burst.

Bill Clinton may have a rendezvous with a new destiny, to test whether in the daily moral grind, amid an untidy, insufficient economic landscape, a leader can speak so honestly, clearly and believably that the people respond, enticing a skeptical Congress to join in, and inch by painful inch we begin ascending the hill toward home. Few public men seem to have prepared themselves for national leadership with the zeal and persistence of Bill Clinton, and even fewer have had a wife whose professional skills are on a par with her husband’s.

But neither Clinton nor his wife nor his staff should ever misjudge the worth of the White House as the most valued icon of American society. Every President except Washington has lived in that House. It is the holiest place in this free and loving land, full of mystery, magic and lore.

If ever a President tries to be “one of the boys,” as Jimmy Carter did--sweater-attired in television speeches, or carrying his own luggage--the magic is diminished. This does not mean imperial, royal or isolated, but it means a sensitive, humble appreciation of the spell the White House casts over the country. The President should acknowledge and understand that he is the custodian of the country’s romantic spirit, the steward of its civic heritage and the keeper of its national integrity. He must never forget that. Ever.