No-one can deny that under President Clinton the country has enjoyed greater prosperity than any other time in its history. How much of the credit is due to him is arguable
One year ago President Bill Clinton had been impeached for perjury and was facing trial by the US Senate. Now as he begins his last year in office he has put that humiliation behind him and ponders his legacy.
But as the new century begins, America is more concerned about what the post-Clinton era holds than for what a lame-duck President can get into the history books. The year ahead will be dominated by the Presidential and Congressional elections which will shape the American political landscape at least until 2005.
The Republicans will seek to win back the White House after eight years of the Clinton era. The Democrats will go all out to win back control of the House of Representatives after six years of Republican domination which thwarted many of the Clinton plans for leading America into the 21st century.
Hillary Clinton will strive to be the first First Lady to win elected office from the White House as she campaigns to become a US senator representing New York. Her campaign against Mayor Rudy Giuliani may be as exciting a political battle as the country has seen in this century.
Mrs Clinton's striving for elected office is seen by commentators, perhaps melodramatically, as "seeking redemption" after the trauma of the Monica Lewinsky saga and its shabby compromises. And it could yet turn out to be Hillary Clinton's first step towards her own term as the first woman President in the White House.
No-one can deny that under President Clinton the country has enjoyed greater prosperity than any other time in its history. How much of the credit is due to him is arguable. He did take steps in his first year to correct the budget deficits which soared under Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, and Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, kept inflation down as economic growth and the Dow Jones index took off.
To Clinton's chagrin, he gets little credit for the economic good times while of course he would have been blamed if the country had gone into recession. In his last year in office, he will find it almost impossible to persuade the Republican-controlled Congress to legislate for his pet projects such as stricter gun control, a hate crimes law, a patients' bill of rights and an increase in the minimum wage.
Increasingly, the President looks to foreign policy for his legacy. In the past year he has chalked up Kosovo and Northern Ireland as achievements.
As the year drew to a close he could point to bringing Israel and Syria back to the negotiating table and the hope of a final settlement in the Middle East by September 2000.
The US trade deal with China in November to prepare its way for membership of the World Trade Organisation was overshadowed by the debacle of Seattle when WTO ministers were besieged by protesters and went home without agreeing an agenda for a future trade round. But Clinton must now try to get Congressional approval for normalising US trade relations with China before he leaves office.
This is an essential part of his policy of a "strategic partnership" with China while treading lightly on the human rights aspect to which he gave much more emphasis when campaigning for the White House.
A Republican President such as George Bush jnr would take a tougher line on the export of sophisticated American equipment to China which could be used to strengthen its military capacity. Mr Bush would probably push ahead with a version of Star Wars, a satellite-based, anti-ballistic missile system which President Reagan brandished over Mikhail Gorbachev and helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The danger of a nuclear strike against the US is now seen as coming from rogue states, such as North Korea or Iran, rather than an economically weakened Russia. President Clinton gave the go-ahead for developing an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system but is reluctant to move to the deployment stage. A Bush administration would not have the same qualms about upping the nuclear ante, a possibility which is already causing alarm among European allies.
The US-Europe relationship is facing a difficult period. On the trade side there are the unresolved issues of the EU ban on American hormone-treated meat and on genetically modified foodstuffs. The US for its part is determined to do away with the EU's "trade distorting" agricultural export subsidies.
But even greater strains can arise on the security side. The EU's attempts to organise its own intervention force independently of NATO, worries Washington. Officially US policy is to encourage the so-called European Pillar of NATO but the Pentagon is uneasy at a development which lessens US influence - not to say, domination - of the Atlantic Alliance.
The Europeans worry that even a partial American ABM system disturbs the nuclear balance, leaves Europe vulnerable to rogue nations with nuclear weapons and deprives the continent of the guarantee of the American nuclear deterrent.
These are serious issues which have yet to be thrashed out by the Presidential candidates. President Clinton is finding it hard to stay on the sidelines while America chooses his successor.
He has tried to turn his humiliation over the Lewinsky affair and impeachment into a defence of the Constitution. He has said that history will record that "I made a bad personal mistake, I paid a serious price for it, but that I was right to stand and fight for my country and my Constitution and its principles and that the American people were very good to stand with me."
The Republicans scoff at this attempt to turn a humiliation into a defence of the Constitution and promise "to restore integrity" to the White House. How the American public see the convulsions of the past year could decide whether Vice-President Al Gore or his Democratic rival, Bill Bradley, succeeds Clinton or whether the electorate will want a Republican, such as George Bush jnr, free of the baggage of the Lewinsky affair.
Joe Carroll can be contacted at jcarroll@irish-times.ie