The trouble with much political coverage in the US, and in Ireland too, is that it's all played at the same volume - high. So Ms Linda Chavez's helping hand for a Guatemalan refugee is pitched at the public the same way we hear about the great Florida voting scandal.
Breathless reporting, pages of type, hours of TV talking heads all swamp the few voices who want to say that in the greater scheme of things Ms Chavez's indiscretions don't amount to a hill of beans.
Ordinary people know they don't. Just as they knew that Mr Clinton's lies about Monica Lewinsky were not on a par with the lies, say, of a politician who took bribes.
The polls show they have already judged him and his legacy more kindly, and realistically, than the pundits who are lining up here to say that the man will not have left a single positive mark on his country or the world in his eight years in office. Indeed, Mr Clinton's approval rating peaked at 66 per cent in December 1998 when the House voted for his impeachment. Today it is still at 62 per cent.
George Will, a right-wing columnist, writing in the Washington Post on Thursday, reflects the political venom with which Republican commentators are determined to tear down every vestige of reputation: "Clinton," he concludes, "is not the worst president the republic has had, but he is the worst person ever to have been president."
There is more, much more, in a similar vein. There is a visceral rage that blinds the Republicans' ideologues, an erstwhile supporter who knows them well, David Brock, writes in the magazine Talk. He it was who in his previous incarnation brought the name Paula Jones to the world in the pages of the American Spectator.
"In the aftermath of the election it is clear," he argues, "that fury - if not blind fury - will be shaping discourse in Washington for some time to come, whether George Bush shares in the Republican hyperthyroidism or not."
The 1990 genie of Mr Rich Bond, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, is out of the bottle again. He who told the party convention of the Clintons that year that "We are America. Those other people are not."
Even in the ranks of Irish-American Republicans, who are prepared to acknowledge his contribution to the North, there was a guffaw of mirth at a suggestion that Mr Clinton might be sent back as a special envoy by the Bush administration.
Yet, like him or not - and many on the left resent him just as fiercely - the personally flawed Mr Clinton cannot be reduced to political insignificance. This is the man who transformed the Democratic Party into a viable presidential election force, was the first Democratic President to win a second term since FDR, and only the third to serve two terms this century.
He did so by leading a redefinition of the fundamental paradigms of the centre left for the age of globalisation, laying the basis for its transatlantic revival, the counter-revolution to the years of Thatcherism and Reaganism.
While it may be wrong to attribute the longest economic expansion in US history entirely to his credit, there is no doubt that Mr Clinton's 1993 economic compact with Fed Chairman Mr Alan Greenspan laid its basis.
In the words of the political scientist Tom Mann, "it will be seen as a critical step and one that entailed substantial political risks".
Mr Clinton accepted the painful Greenspan premise that the fundamental priority of economic policy must be to reduce the colossal US deficit. In doing so, as European policy makers were also to find, the economy could enter a virtuous circle of falling interest rates and rising output. A $293 billion deficit in 1992 was turned into a $230 billion surplus in 2000.
Feed into that the technological revolution that would cut the real cost of computing power by 80 per cent in 10 years and raise US productivity by 3 per cent a year in the latter half of the decade and you had a recipe for boom.
Mr Clinton's embrace of free trade against the instincts of his party, enabling the signature of both WTO and NAFTA agreements, and his bail-out of the Mexican economy ensured that the benefits of US growth were spread and the effects of the Asian collapse curtailed.
Although he failed to reform the creaking health and pensions systems, Mr Clinton transformed welfare policy from the passive provision of a safety net for the unemployed and poor, into, his supporters on right and left say, an engine for re-engaging the unemployed with the world of work.
Welfare rolls were slashed from 14 million to six million, cutting poverty rates significantly, though many fear such changes could go into sharp reverse with a downturn in the economy.
Such changes were the precursor to similar changes in Europe, led by leaders such as the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, and the German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder under the banner of the "Third Way".
By seizing the political ground of traditional conservatives in welfare, crime policy and education, Mr Clinton and Blair drove the right into ideological bunkers from which they could not hope to be re-elected without their own political counter-revolutions.
In foreign policy Mr Clinton is much criticised for being simply reactive and having failed to create a new doctrine for the US role in the the post-Cold War age.
Early attempts by him to talk up the idea of a new era of collective security through an enhanced and reformed UN foundered in the domestic backlash from the fiasco of Somalia where 18 US soldiers died.
The result was to be the abandonment of Rwanda to its fate and a dithering in Bosnia that allowed full-scale war to escalate before eventually the Serbs were bombed into submission.
By the time of Kosovo, Mr Clinton's confidence in his ability to bring Congress with him in supporting foreign engagement was still not restored fully and he made what many see as the colossal mistake - though perhaps politically inevitable - of pledging not to send in ground troops.
But if Mr Clinton created no doctrine he created facts on the ground, drawing the US gradually back into a global peacemaking role that Republicans are now trying to undo.
In European terms he played an important role in both the reinvigoration of NATO through its eastward expansion and in encouraging the emergence of an autonomous military capacity in the EU.
In the Middle East his peacemaking efforts have had only partial success and stalemate in Iraq. He has made the first steps to bringing China into the WTO and in different ways restoring relations with Russia, North Korea and Vietnam. In Northern Ireland, breaking from traditional US unquestioning support for Britain, he made an important contribution.
And yet the real question is, what might have been had Mr Clinton not been distracted by the flaws in his personality that were the strange counterpart to his instinctive political genius. Intellectually streets ahead of his predecessors and successor, empathetic, a brilliant speaker, he was drawn like a figure of Greek tragedy irrestibly to his own self-destruction in impeachment (and then the acquittal by the Senate which will be forgotten by posterity).
But don't be fooled. Mr Clinton is despised by the Republican right not because of the Lewinsky shambles, and his legacy is dismissed not because it really is insignificant. On the contrary. Mr Clinton is hated because he was able to show, however imperfectly, that history is not over and that there are still questions to which they do not have all the answers.
psmyth@irish-times.ie
