For example, some see no contradiction in the first place. Clinton, they say, is just a man with large appetites. His desire to seduce women and his desire to seduce voters are related. (This was the view of the book and movie Primary Colors.) This view seems deficient in a couple of ways.

First, it is suspiciously dependent on semantic looseness--on two separate meanings of the word "seduce" and a broad definition of "appetites." With this much flexibility, you can reconcile just about any two aspects of Clinton's behavior. If he subordinated crowd pleasing to foreign policy rather than the other way around, we could reconcile this with his skirt chasing by saying that he was trying to "seduce" the liberal foreign policy intelligentsia and that he had an "appetite" for saving the world.

Second, this resolution of the paradox, by linking Clinton's sexual infidelity to his thirst for public approval, is eerily reminiscent of naive pop psych views of male sexuality. According to these views, sex hounds such as Clinton are driven by "low self-esteem," or they need "affirmation." After all, he did have a rough childhood, remember? And there's nothing that heals the scars of a broken home quite like fondling an intern.

In truth, the only valid connection between Clinton's undeniably extreme need to be liked and his sexual affair with Lewinsky is the way he dressed up the sex in the trappings of romance. The Walt Whitman poetry, the various knickknacks--these were superfluous, and most men in Clinton's position wouldn't have been nearly as lavish in feigning a deep personal interest in Lewinsky. But Clinton, characteristically, wanted to be liked, not just serviced. It is the style of Clinton's sexual seduction, not the seduction itself, that has a valid link to his overall thirst for approval.