By Patrick H. Caddell, who served as a pollster and strategist in the presidential campaigns of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart and Walter Mondale; and Marc Cooper, a contributing editor of The Nation.

Democrats in Congress have a point when they accuse President Clinton's critics of politicizing the law. Republicans cross the limits of credibility when they inflate the seriousness of Mr. Clinton's transgressions into the equivalent of Watergate or Iran-contra. But we expect our Republican adversaries to act that way. What discourages us more has been the behavior of our friends, Mr. Clinton's defenders on the left.

We can only hope that when they stood vigil for Mr. Clinton last week on Capitol Hill, led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, they said a prayer for Rickey Ray Rector. For Rector's story symbolizes how liberals have sheared off their principles in order to squeeze into that little black box that is Mr. Clinton's moral universe.

In early 1992, as then-Gov. Clinton struggled to salvage his presidential candidacy in the face of the Gennifer Flowers scandal, convicted murderer Rector sat on Arkansas's death row. When his time came for execution, Mr. Clinton flew home from New Hampshire just in time to deny Rector a stay of execution. Rector, an African-American, had turned his gun on himself after killing a police officer at his mother's house. He blew his brains out, but he survived--condemned to function with the mind of a five-year-old. As he was put on his feet to walk to the death chamber, and with no trace of irony, Rector asked his guards to say hello to Gov. Clinton, whom he had just seen on television, and to save Rector his slice of pecan pie, which he planned to eat when he returned.

It mattered not to Gov. Clinton that the law prohibited the execution of someone not competent to understand his crime or his punishment. Rector's life was an insignificant price for candidate Clinton to pay to demonstrate his tough "New Democrat" credentials. In the days following the execution, as Mr. Clinton campaigned in the South, he proudly pointed to his willingness to enforce the death penalty.

Where were the liberals? No Hollywood celebrities--no Rob Reiner, no Barbra Streisand--lobbied to spare Rector's life. There were no NYU emergency speak-outs organized by Sean Wilentz and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on Rector's behalf. No panels of Ivy League law professors with Alan Dershowitz screaming for due process. Rep. Maxine Waters was too wrapped up co-chairing Mr. Clinton's California campaign to invoke her--and Rector's--"slave ancestors" in a cry for justice as she would six years later on the House floor on behalf of her president. The blatantly pro-Clinton reporters who covered the 1992 campaign--Sidney Blumenthal, Eleanor Clift, Strobe Talbott, Joe Klein--barely found time to hiccup over the outrageous execution of Rickey Ray Rector.

A year later when Marshall Frady in The New Yorker wrote a chilling deconstruction of Clinton's political decision to execute Rector, one of us asked a number of Clinton supporters if they believed Mr. Clinton would have executed Rector if he had not been campaigning for president. To a person, their answer was a sheepish no. But they had chosen to remain silent. Such complicity, they argued, was for the greater good--the greater good of finally having a Democrat in the White House. Bill Clinton might not exactly be a new FDR but he was, after all, "electable."

In the past six years, liberals have continued their defense of the Clinton presidency, paying a staggering price: unconditional surrender of their ideals.

Where was the Democratic outrage when in the first months of the Clinton administration 83 men, women and children were immolated by federal agents at Waco? The same Democrats now bleating about the violation of Mr. Clinton's rights were eerily silent when, as the 1996 re-election campaign was beginning, the president signed the Effective Death Penalty Act--a dastardly law that quashes nearly all legal appeals from death row.

Democrats denounce the violation of the president's right to privacy. But they have nothing to say when his administration proposes to legalize "roving" wiretaps. They are equally mum on the immigration bill signed by Mr. Clinton that virtually abolished due process and this year alone has resulted in more than 30,000 summary deportations, in many cases of long-term legal residents. And when Mr. Clinton signed the 1996 welfare bill, which requires unwed mothers to name their children's fathers on pain of prosecution, it was left to Jesse Jackson to snuff out the moral fires. When liberals pondered their options of protest at the 1996 Democratic Convention, Mr. Jackson loudly barked the stray dissenters back into the fold.

Likewise, in the current Monicagate fiasco, mainstream feminist organizations have shredded two decades of hard-earned gains in sexual harassment law. True, Paula Jones's case was exploited by Clinton haters. But that's no excuse for the White House to attack her as "trailer trash" or for Mr. Clinton, as a defendant in a sexual harassment case, to lie under oath. Since when is it the task of liberal feminists to intentionally confuse this repugnant act of perjury with what they disingenuously call "just lying about sex"?

But the most disturbing consequence of the surrender to Clinton has been the self-strangulation of the Democratic peace constituency. In August Mr. Clinton ordered missile attacks in Afghanistan and Sudan within days of his disastrous speech about Monicagate. When credible news reports surfaced that the plant demolished by U.S. rockets in the Sudan was a benign pharmaceuticals factory, former President Carter courageously called for an investigation. But Democratic officeholders ignored Mr. Carter's call.

The refusal to speak out on the possible Sudan deception led us directly to last week's tragedy of Operation Desert Fox. As the missiles exploded in Iraq, Democrats cheered. House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt and Minority Whip David Bonior--both of whom voted against the 1991 Gulf War and argued for the right to publicly challenge the wisdom of George Bush's decision--this time pontificated shamelessly about threats to national security. The low point came when Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D., R.I.) on the House floor resurrected--nearly word for word-- the scurrilous language LBJ White House's used in 1966 when it questioned the patriotism of his uncle, Robert F. Kennedy, who had begun to speak out against the Vietnam War. Rep. Kennedy even suggested that Congress should ask the CIA for permission to go ahead with the impeachment debate.

As last week came to close, American liberals staged a bizarre televised pageant of moral suicide. On one channel you could view a third wave of a suspiciously timed American air attack rain down on Baghdad, cruise missiles exploding at a million dollars a pop. On another channel, at the same moment, there were the Rev. Mr. Jackson and the cream of liberalism rallying on the Capitol steps, joining hands and intoning "We Shall Overcome"--praying not for the victims of our ordnance, but for the prevaricating president who signed their death warrant.

The Iraqi people pay their own special price for Monicagate. But we all suffer the collateral damage of this crisis. For their partisan zeal, their failure to distinguish between adultery and crimes of the state, and their bulldozer congressional tactics, the Republicans earned last month's electoral defeat and are now saddled with a couple of high-profile corpses named Gingrich and Livingston. But Democrats and liberals, with their loftier ideals, have fallen further. Many Congressional Democrats privately scorn Mr. Clinton, for his policies and his behavior, with an intensity that rivals the open hatred of GOP Rep. Bob Barr. But for narrow partisan political ends, they are willing to hollow out their consciences and close ranks.

We don't think the Senate should remove Mr. Clinton from office for the crimes the Republicans have charged him with. But if he is eventually hoisted on his own petard of the politicization of the rule of law, our sorrow for him will be tempered with the knowledge that--unlike Rickey Ray Rector, whose ghost now hunches anxiously over our shoulders--Bill Clinton will physically survive his political sacrifice. The last supper of his presidency is being paid for with the bankrupting of the liberal moral treasury. Unlike Rector, Mr. Clinton will be able to enjoy his dessert. His historical disgrace, however, will be his just deserts.