Would it matter much if Clinton preferred boxer shorts instead? Absolutely. The semiotics of underwear can go a long way toward defining the modern presidency. Underwear can be a badge of power; Lyndon Johnson showed who was in charge by presiding over conferences on the toilet with his drawers around his ankles. But when Jimmy Carter donned a symbolic hair shirt for his “malaise in America!’ speech, the nation felt a collective itch for change, and voted in the silk-lined Reagan era. George Bush, that prototypic Yale man, almost certainly wears boxer shorts. The quintessential Ivy League haberdasher J. Press doesn’t even sell briefs. Where would you put the monogram?

By coming out for briefs, Clinton was emphasizing his populist roots in Arkansas, a state with no branches of J. Press but a great many Wal-Marts. Nationally, briefs outsell boxers approximately 5 to 1 (400 million pairs a year to 80 million, with bikini drawers a distant third), according to the NPD Group, a New York market-research firm. But the margin is widest in the low-and moderate-income groups and narrows conspicuously among men who make more than $60,000 a year. And in Arkansas, it’s not even close. As one young White House press aide confided last week, “No one I know in Arkansas wears boxers.”

Of course, Clinton is too good a politician to write off the boxer-short vote, and so he refused to commit himself unequivocally to briefs. Perhaps he remembered that his under-wear is actually a matter of public record, since he gives it away to charities after he’s done with it and deducts its value from his income tax. In 1986, for instance, he donated three pairs of used underwear, valued at $2 a pair, to the Salvation Army. His tax return didn’t specify what kind of underwear this was, but two years later he claimed a deduction of $15 for a pair of used longjohns. If it were to turnout now that the longjohns had never been worn-that he had been given them as a gift, maybe, and neglected to report the gift as income-it would be another embarrassment atop the already seamy Whitewater scandal. In that light, it probably made sense to answer that he “usually” wears briefs-even at the cost of a gibe from Jay Leno about how Clinton has to “waffle on everything.”

There’s always the danger of reading too much into this. Last year George D. Goldman, a psychology professor at Adelphi University, said he was troubled by Clinton’s donating his underwear: “I voted for him,” he told The Washington Post, “but there’s something grandise, both too personal and a bit inappropriately intimate, to give your underwear away … and then to think that your underwear is worth giving this sort of a valuation to.” Asked about Clinton’s remarks last week, though, Goldman didn’t see much significance in the difference between briefs and boxers. “Maybe he needs a lot of support,” he said. “Or he thinks he does.” William Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, worried that by answering the question Clinton was debasing the sacred aura of the presidency and compromising his ability to lead the country in foreign policy. It is an old debater’s trick, when faced with a formidable adversary, to imagine him in his underwear. By giving specificity to the image, Clinton runs the danger that Kim Il Sung or Saddam Hussein may hold a crucial psychological edge over him in some future showdown. But that’s just a risk we’ll have to run; history shows that each increment of public disclosure by a president establishes the floor for the next guy. Clinton himself told a fund-raiser last week that he had carefully vetted a field of Supreme Court nominees only to have to go back and ask each one, “Boxers or briefs?” Could Ruth Ginsburg have passed this test?

As for Clinton, now that we know what kind of drawers he wears, how long before we demand to know his size? Perhaps anticipating the question, he referred later to “the indignities you have to endure if you’re president these days.” On the whole, though, it’s probably better to have a president who endures indignities than one, like Johnson, who inflicts them. And even the Los Angeles Times conceded that Clinton’s accessibility is “part of his charm.” As for the aura of mystery that is said to surround powerful men … well, one can always find a residue of enigma in any personality. But after last week, no one can say that Clinton is an enigma at bottom.