They called Ronald Reagan the Teflon President because nothing stuck to him, no allegation of wrongdoing could hurt him. Well, next to Bill Clinton, Reagan is Velcro.Who’d a thunk it? Two weeks ago, rumor had it that Clinton was about to tender his resignation in the face of public umbrage. Yet there he was in a picture taken last week, reaching out to a public that clearly adored him.In the face of the most damaging accusations any president has suffered in a quarter century, Bill Clinton’s popularity is actually upsurging, according to the polls. This president about whom we were said to be ambivalent at best has seen the public come riding to his rescue like the U.S. Cavalry.And all the pundits in Pundit-town, all the gray eminences whose job it is to dispense wisdom from on high, are scratching their domes in confusion and muttering a collective … ‘Huh?’ Why, they wonder, aren’t people outraged? Don’t they understand that this is a scandal of the first magnitude? The president stands accused of a sexual dalliance with a White House intern young enough to be his daughter. And if that’s not enough to get your dander up, there’s still the corollary accusation: that he counseled the young woman to lie about it under oath.Granted, the credibility of Clinton’s accusers seems shakier every day. Friends, co-workers, and now, even her lawyer, all describe the intern, Monica Lewinsky, as prone to exaggeration and less than a paragon of truth. Yet the fact that these allegations don’t have voters outraged still leaves many observers stunned. They wonder what – or if – the people are thinking.Me, I suspect what the people are thinking is this: Does anybody in Washington have a real job? Does anyone there make anything for a living? Besides attacks, that is.In hindsight, you could have seen this impasse coming. For the six years of the Clinton presidency, we’ve been beset by scandal and rumor of scandal. From the Vince Foster suicide to Paula Jones, to Gennifer Flowers, to lost files, to fund-raising coffees to Lincoln bedroom sleepovers to travel office firings to cattle futures to Whitewater, Clinton critics have screamed bloody murder and postured in outrage while radio talk-show hosts promulgated outlandish conspiracy theories that did everything but place the president on the grassy knoll in Dallas.They have been shrill, they have been strident, they have been everything but convincing – as evidenced by the fact that voters returned Clinton to office two years ago. It’s as if the charges against him – the trifling ones, the crazy ones, even the serious ones all amount to just so much white noise.Which means that either we the people are amoral dupes, or else we’ve decided that Washington doesn’t matter because it’s Disneyland for politicians – a land of unreality not worth taking seriously. Politics is a chess game and we’re the pawns, our needs subordinate to the needs of politicians eager to bring each other down. So they spend their days attacking. They attack by reflex, attack over trifles, attack with studied indignation as if posing for pedestals. It’s a wonder any work gets done.I’m reminded of Newt Gingrich shutting down the federal government because he didn’t like his seat on an airplane and it occurs to me that the surprising thing isn’t that we listen to Washington so little, but that we still listen to Washington at all. The capital is not unlike the shepherd boy who cried wolf one time too many.Similarly, the gray eminences have cried, ‘Scandal! Scandal! Scandal!’ so much that most people have come to ignore it.Trouble is, what faces us now isn’t some trifling technicality over which phone the vice president used to solicit money, nor some incomprehensible land deal nobody cares about or understands, but a stark and troubling question: Did the president of the United States ask a young woman to lie?If the wolf truly has come to call, nobody’s listening. And like the boy in the parable, Washington has only itself to blame. Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald