Saint Sam: Senator Brownback of Kansas is one of the country's leading virtuecrats.(POLITICS)

ABOUT five years ago, at a weekly prayer meeting of senators, Sam Brownback came as close as he ever had to confessing to a hate crime. "I was scheduled to be the speaker that morning," recalls Brownback, a Kansas Republican. "As I was preparing for it, I had seen hate in myself for the Clintons. I felt righteous. That's not a Christian virtue."

Brownback says his antipathy for the Clintons grew out of the government shutdowns of the mid-1990s, when he was a freshman member of the House. "We were trying to balance the budget, and President Clinton backed away from an…