THE IMPACT OF A YEAR OF TURMOIL ON AMERICA AND ITS PEOPLE

WASHINGTON —  The Senate’s decision Friday to acquit President Clinton of perjury and obstruction of justice answered the easy question: Who will be president for the next two years?

Now come the hard ones: What will the yearlong scandal mean for Congress? The presidency? National politics? The law? The media?

Potentially most important, what will it mean for ordinary people going about the ordinary business of doing their jobs, raising their children, dealing with their neighbors and in a thousand other ways shaping the character of the nation?

“All of the value questions of the end of the century are right here in microcosm: the relationships of men to women, the relationship of man with government, what constitutes ‘character’ and what we expect out of a leader,” said Sister Joan Chittister, a former Benedictine prioress who now studies the relationship between spiritual values and society.

In the public sphere, the impeachment fight--ostensibly waged over the “rule of law”--is expected to leave a deep bruise on the legal system. First, the feeling that independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr abused his vast power and tainted his investigation with politics is so widespread that the law he operated under, which expires this summer, is not expected to be renewed.

Second, some experts believe that the stain will spread to prosecutors at all levels. State and local as well as federal prosecutors now may face public suspicion of showing excessive zeal or allowing politics to place its thumb on the scales of justice.

The scandal that hypnotized the capital and tried the patience of the country will also leave the office of the presidency at least temporarily diminished. Historically, the White House has shown itself remarkably resilient; Americans want to admire their presidents and hope they will do well. But even if Clinton recovers his balance in his last two years in office, both he and his successor in the next century will be operating with precious little margin of error.

The Senate’s acquittal will not erase the belief--deeply felt even by those who thought Clinton’s offenses did not meet the Constitution’s test of “high crimes and misdemeanors”--that the president lied under oath and escaped the consequences because of his high position. Cynicism about government, already great, is expected to grow.

As a result, the scandal will further reduce the stature of politicians and of politics as an honorable calling. One possible near-term impact: Voters will show their disgust with both parties in the 2000 election by putting a Republican in the White House and giving the Democrats control of Congress.

The American media have been indelibly changed as well. New outlets, mainly on cable television and the Internet, have feasted on the scandal and led to a new breed of journalism that has little patience for fact-based reporting and the traditional boundaries of privacy.

The most long-lasting impact of the Clinton scandal, however, may be in an area little touched by Watergate and other national political scandals: the attitudes and values of Americans in their personal and communal lives.

That impact will be no less significant because it may come in bits and pieces at first, showing its full dimensions only with the passage of time.

“The only thing that’s ended is the Senate trial,” said David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, a nonprofit think tank focusing on issues of family and civil society. “This debate will be with us for years to come because we are divided about it as a society.”

Watergate, the only presidential scandal in this century even remotely comparable to this one, was far easier to parse. It was an “official” scandal: President Nixon’s reelection campaign bugged Democratic Party headquarters, and the president’s direction of the subsequent cover-up was captured on White House tape recorders.

The public’s reaction was unequivocal. Voters turned Republicans out of office in droves. Heavily Democratic Congresses enacted laws curbing the president’s power to make war, spend money and raise campaign contributions; they also established the independent counsel system. In 1976, voters elected a president who promised: “I will never lie to you.”

For a great many people, it seems, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal is a horse of another color--far more personal than the “public” scandals of the past.

It involves two deeply fraught areas in which people’s views have been changing profoundly over the last 30 years: the private and public morality of sex and lying.

Most Americans want to judge their leaders according to their fitness for public office, not their private behavior, says Laura Nash, director of the Institute for Values-Centered Leadership at the Harvard Divinity School.

“But we’re not allowed to turn a blind eye,” she said. Prosecutors, political enemies, the media--all these and more have seen to it that even the most secret aspects of our public figures’ behavior are private no longer.

And just as the scandal embraced private as well as public conduct, so will its effects be felt by private citizens as well as elected officials. In the workplace, in families, in the way parents try to teach their children, in all the nooks and crannies of the relationship between men and women, the Clinton scandal will exert an influence for many years to come.