On Saturday, Bill Clinton relinquishes office as US President. Were his two terms at the head of the world's most powerful country a success or a failure?
Clinton, in the best of all times, did not succeed in saving social security or Medicare from the prospect of bankruptcy. He regrets those failures. They would have been grand achievements approaching the scale of Franklin Roosevelt's.
He did not manage to be Woodrow Wilson either. He did some good deeds, notably a helping hand for the British Labour government's peace initiative in Ireland, but he did not articulate a coherent and consistent policy for the use of American military power in humanitarian intervention. Kosovo was saved, but a million were left to die in Rwanda. He begrudged the military what it needed.
On the other hand, he has an understanding of the interdependence of sovereign nations in a global economy. The North American Free Trade Area, the admittance of China to the World Trade Organisation, and 360 other trade agreements, are his monuments.
He is proud of the effectiveness of the network of like-minded leaders he has cultivated, Tony Blair first among them. Clinton has never forgotten how Blair stood by him in the depths of the Lewinsky scandal.
Yet for all his vision, he has not fought hard enough against the polluters who threaten the planet because the press in America, fat, dumb and happy, has failed to make it an issue.
So what has he achieved? He has moved the Democratic party to the dynamic centre and much of the country has gone along. It is a more tolerant, more liberal America than it was in the 1980s.
He has reduced racial resentments by dissociating welfare from race. Mainly, he has been successful at home in connecting a lot of dots, good initiatives that make a fine picture but not an original work of art.
Still, the dots are significant. He is the best president as CEO America has ever had. On his watch, the US entered its 107th consecutive month of economic expansion. It has moved from a record deficit of $290 billion in 1992 to the largest surplus on record - $167 billion in 2000.
More jobs have been created than by any previous administration, an average of 248,000 a month, more than in the whole 10 years preceding. More people than ever own their own homes. Government is taking less of the national wealth than any time since 1974. Inflation at 1.9 per cent in 1999 was at the lowest since 1965. Workers have seen real wages rise for five consecutive years.
He has helped seven million Americans out of poverty, surpassing the record of Lyndon Johnson. For their part, the Republicans have been trying to say the boom flowed from Reagan's tax cuts. It is true they helped to end the Carter recession, but if Clinton had not come along and ended the long run of deficits, the boom would not have been the sensation it has become. It took brains and courage to achieve that.
The treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, told me that in all his years in Wall Street, he had never come across anyone as sharp and quick as Clinton in grasping the intricacies of financial papers and understanding the correlations between trade and money.
Clinton lost the public trust as a person but earned it as a President. People appreciated they had a brainy President who was always doing his best, for the most part candidly and openly.
He, for his part, genuinely cares for the common man. He is an emperor of empathy. He does not patronise. The American people may not revere Clinton as they revered Reagan, and they do not idolise him as they did Kennedy, but they are very sorry to see that the Clinton era is over. He himself says it is right he should leave now.
"I love this job," he said recently, "but on balance the arguments for executive term limits are pretty compelling." Then the master politician had a second thought about the 22nd Amendment. "Maybe Congress should put `consecutive' in there . . . "
Here's a thought: Clinton, the youngest ex-president since Theodore Roosevelt, would be only 58 at the end of a George W. Bush problematical first term. On January 20th, it may not be goodbye, only au revoir.
Harold Evans is author of The American Century