A quiet suggestion for the American people as they contemplate their crisis, but the North Korean model is worth a squint. Last week in Pyongyang they installed a president in perpetuity. Dangerous idea, except that the incumbent, Comrade Generalissimo Kim Il-sung, founder of the Stalinist regime, has been dead since 1994.

There is a lot to be said for having a dead man as your president, not least for the government working under him and the retinue of private secretaries, lawyers, advisers, and security men charged with the problematical business of keeping him clean. If anything gets any worse (with a North Korean economy that shrank 30% in the 1990s), it is the president's fault. Any allegations over his

sexual improprieties, it can hardly have been him, even after the prurient investigations of a crazed little McCarthyist like Kenneth Starr.

Clinton may not warm initially to the idea, but who is in the more enviable position right now? His sad and furtive cavortings with Monica Lewinsky have been unzipped to the world via the Internet. The late General Kim Il-sung is cur-

rently making his own stab for global attention through the launch of a satellite over the Pacific Ocean to transmit the ''immortal revolutionary hymn'' which

he wrote. It is brilliantly entitled Song

of General Kim Il-sung. This was announced by the official Korean Central News Agency to rebut US officials who claimed that North Korea had test-fired a Taepo Dong 1 ballistic missile.

This is an instructive example of how a dead president lends himself readily to inventive spin doctoring. Old Kim's Taepo Dong must be benign, it is inferred, while the White House is powerless to mitigate the lethal damage Clinton has done to the dignity of office, armed only with a cigar. It is too late to advise him to economise embarrassment by rolling his own. If Clinton cannot bring himself to do the decent thing to resurrect his presid-ency, there are plenty of dead predecessors who could be re-elected in his place.

Neither is there any lack of precedent here. Calvin Coolidge's exemplary probity during the six years of the office he held from 1923-29 is widely attributed to his having died somewhere before the end of the nineteenth century. ''How can you tell?'' reacted Dorothy Parker to the news of Coolidge's official death in 1933. Coolidge was not a sexy man, dead or alive. His espousal of thrift, caution, and honesty appeared to irritate even the First Lady. ''Tell that to the President,'' she is reputed to have snapped on a visit to a chicken farm when the resident rooster's ''dozens of times a day'' was noted.

Coolidge's ludicrous sense of propriety invites an incredulity that rivals Mr

Starr's attempts to shock with Clinton

revelations. The Monica Lewinsky of Coolidge's day was a young woman who negotiated herself a dinner table seat near to the somnolent president. She leaned forward to bet she could get three words of conversation out of him. ''You lose,'' he countered. If there was a spark of humour there, it was the closest Cal got to flirting.

How we all wish now that Clinton could have had the wit to use those same two words to the transparent Lewinsky when she showed the President the thongs of her underwear. Reduced to this kind of detail, anyone's improprieties become horrific.

The irony in what followed, as we read in Mr Starr's ghastly report, is the constant reminder of dead presidents, and the implicit roles that ''Sweetie'' and ''Handsome'' drew for themselves from the leg-acy of their indiscretions in what must now be re-named the Oral Office. The report states that among the incongruous gifts they exchanged, Lewinsky gave Clinton an ''antique'' book, which turns out to be a biography of Roosevelt. Which Roosevelt in antiquity did Starr's team of lawyers imagine this to be when they came to compose their repugnant narrative of these dismal events? Did they suppose it was a biography of Roosevelt written at least a century before his presidency, another man dead long before his election? Or was it simply a biography rebound in antique-style boards? This is not the only instance where the zeal of the investigators of the special prosecutor, ostensibly examining

the legality of an Arkansas land deal, leads them to betray the Black Letter literalism of their inquisition. If they had possessed an imagination between them they would not have undermined their own cause with so much detail to achieve ultimate pathos rather than the disgust they intended.

Lewinsky's choice of the Roosevelt biography was calculated to refer to an earlier vintage of White House extra-

marital romance. In truth, she would have made her point safely if she had chosen the biography of any other president, with the exception of Nixon, who was too paranoid to take an interest in philandering, and preferred to lie about bugging operations and cover-ups.

Old Kim, the man North Koreans are still advised to call ''the Great Leader'' if they value their liberty, was different. He bored audiences senseless with three-hour speeches, and standing ovations of 30 minutes were compulsory. In 1994 the dynastic succession passed to his son, Kim Jong-il, who effectively rules the country as chairman of the Defence Committee, but even in Pyongyang there is a breath of scandal hinting young Kim was not his father's boy, but adopted.

Regardless, it is for the dead Kim

Il-sung that the title of president is to

be held. Last week North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly listened to his address, from a 1990 recording, before casting their votes to keep him in office. Fully subscribed members of a collective delusion, from which the world may draw its lesson, they chanted: ''Long live the great leader.'' Clinton could use some of that right now.