Clinton's Worst Legacy: A Thin Record

This is Bill Clinton week, as the former President and CBS launch his $10 million memoirs. Though some people seem eager to refight the ethics wars of the 1990s, it strikes us that the news is how much smaller his Presidency looms in historical terms a mere three years after it ended.

The early reviewers report that the bulk of Mr. Clinton's 957-page tome is personal, and perhaps that's of necessity. Even during the 1990s, questions about his personal and public character dwarfed debates over policy, and time has only accentuated this disparity. Compared to the achievements of Ronald Reagan that we have just celebrated -- ending the Cold War in victory, breaking inflation and slowing the growth of government -- Mr. Clinton's Presidency seems far less consequential.

Future historians may well find his eight years in office to have been a parenthesis between two greater political eras. After his attempts to expand the government were rebuffed by voters in 1994, Mr. Clinton settled for consolidating the political gains of the Reagan years. His greatest achievement -- welfare reform -- had been percolating on the political right for a generation. Certainly he deserves credit for pushing that, as well as Nafta, despite opposition from his fellow Democrats.

The years have not been as kind to some of Mr. Clinton's other claims to posterity. The economic boom of the 1990s proved to be partly a financial bubble that we now know began to burst with the stock market break in April 2000. The growth that was real resulted less from any specific policy than from the gridlock between Mr. Clinton and the GOP Congress that kept government from doing much at all after 1994. No period since the 1920s was as free of new federal intrusion.

We now know that the relative peace of the 1990s was also part illusion. The rapid decline in defense spending after the end of the Cold War helped balance the federal budget. But as we learned on 9/11, the 1990s were years in which we stored up foreign-policy trouble.

Mr. Clinton says in his book that he warned the new President Bush that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were our gravest national threat. But even if we take him at his word, that leaves the question of why he did so little to counter that threat as it was gathering. The entire political class shares the blame here, but Mr. Clinton manifestly did not use his Presidential platform to educate or warn the public about the rising dangers. Bin Laden was barely mentioned during the election campaign of 2000, and today's resurgent deficits result in part from the need to make up for money that wasn't spent on defense during our holiday from history in the 1990s.

Historians will no doubt ask why a man of such prodigious, indeed prodigal, talents would end up with such a thin record. This is where the question of character will intrude. Any Presidency has only so much energy and capital to spend, and Mr. Clinton's ethical travails frittered away much of his....