ill Clinton is in the process of proving that a presidential legacy is like individual happiness or national greatness: something achieved mostly as a byproduct of activities undertaken for other ends, rather than as part of a self-conscious design. His is a negative proof. Never has a president mused as much, or as openly, about his place in history as our Solipsist-in-Chief has. But rarely has it been harder to determine what that place should be.

Part of the difficulty, as liberal columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. has pointed out, is that almost anything one could say about Clinton's presidency is true — and so is its opposite. Did he move the country right or left? Yes. Strengthen the Democrats or weaken them? Both. Was he the perfect president for the times, or a historical accident? A case could be made either way. He was larger than life, and so, so small.

We'll have a better picture of his presidency in a few years' time, after we will have seen what further fruits his policies will bear and how his successor will govern. If, say, China were to nuke Los Angeles next year, the defects of Clinton's foreign and defense policies would presumably get more space in the encyclopedia entry on him. But we can essay some judgments right now.

Clinton's economic record, it has to be said, is pretty good. Not, to be sure, as good as the conventional wisdom would have it: A recovery from the brief recession of the early 1990s was already underway when Clinton was elected, and his tax increase of 1993 was followed by a few years of subpar growth. But Clinton deserves credit for promoting free trade, allowing Alan Greenspan to vanquish inflation, and acceding to Republican demands for a reduction in the capital-gains tax. The combination of these policies more than compensated for the tax hike. Hillary Rodham Clinton should take a bow, too. Her rigidity doomed the administration's health-care plan and thus was a boon for the economy.

Clinton's biggest contribution to the economy was not to do much to screw it up. This is not the faint praise it sounds like: It is a boast that could not be made by most recent presidents, including Republicans Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and George Bush.

Moreover, the positive aspects of Clinton's economic record are likely to endure. The inflationist wing of the Democratic party, strong as recently as a decade ago, hardly exists any more. In the late 1980s, leading Democratic intellectuals wanted the government to direct economic development and to channel subsidies to prominent industries. They were itching for a trade war with our major allies. Nobody serious believes any of that any more. Clinton consolidated a Reaganite consensus on these issues, just as President Eisenhower ratified FDR's New Deal.

Clinton moved right on moral and cultural issues, too, though this truth has sometimes been obscured by his trysts. Previous Democrats had suffered for their liberal attitudes on work and welfare, sex and family, race, crime, and religion. But Clinton declared that abortion should be rare. He decried illegitimacy. He signed a Republican bill ending the federal welfare entitlement. He even funded abstinence-education programs. Michael Dukakis had fairly radiated an aggressive secularism; Clinton's rhetoric was steeped in religion, and sometimes delivered from the pulpits of black churches.

In some respects, the country became more socially conservative under Clinton. Rates of abortion, illegitimacy, divorce, and teen sexual activity all began to decline. But social liberalism comes in bourgeois and antibourgeois varieties, and the former — the liberalism of niceness and tolerance — also made strides. Public acceptance of homosexuality grew, probably helped along by the president's association with gay lobbies. But this is yet another feature of the Clinton years that cannot simply be described as a shift to the left or right. Gays and lesbians have spent the Clinton years trying to join the army, to marry, and to lead Boy Scout troops. They have sought, in other words, to be integrated into society's most conservative institutions; to lead the sort of square lives that most heterosexuals long ago grew tired of. It is because of such shifts that after three decades of culture wars, a measure of peace has broken out. (Granted, conservatives cannot be wholly pleased by the terms of this peace.)

America's racial politics are relatively placid as well. To the extent Clinton deserves credit for the good economy, he also deserves credit for the reduction in both black unemployment and racial tensions that that economy has produced. On the other side of the ledger must be set Clinton's occasional race-baiting, as when he accuses Republicans of having a policy of holding up black and Hispanic judicial nominees. And while it may be argued that Clinton ended divisive political arguments over immigration and racial preferences, his policies may be storing up racial trouble for the future.

Clinton ended, at least temporarily, a final set of battles: those over the role of the federal government, which, it is now clear, will neither expand dramatically nor shrink at all. Welfare reform helped to relegitimize the federal government. Clinton was also shrewd to expand tax credits for the working poor. Previous Democrats ran into trouble by taxing other Democrats; by taking them off the tax rolls, Clinton was able to tax Republicans for the benefit of Democrats. As a result, it's been much harder to cut tax rates.

Blunting the conservative attack on the welfare state was Clinton's greatest achievement for liberalism. In 1996, he said that the era of big government was over. But it may be truer to say that the era of arguing about big government is over, except in the most abstract of terms. Newt Gingrich was the last politician who railed against the "liberal welfare state"; not even conservative writers use such terms any more. Republicans no longer make principled objections to a federal role in education policy.

But liberals paid a steep price for this victory. They had to become more statist as well, buying popularity by abandoning libertarian positions on crime, foreign policy, and civil liberties. They lost their moral authority and, perhaps, some portion of their self-respect by becoming apologists for Clinton's compromises and his abuses. Clinton made the Democrats competitive again in presidential races, but devastated them down the ticket. The Democrats are a minority in Congress and the states, and they are more dependent than ever on a labor movement that is itself declining.

Moreover, Clinton's triumph for liberalism was a matter of politics much more than of policy. In many respects, Clinton's has been a bystander presidency. It may be true that if not for Clinton welfare would not have been reformed, capital-gains taxes not cut, and NAFTA not passed. But Newt Gingrich was at least as indispensable for each achievement. Most of the rest of Clinton's policy legacy is trivia: paid volunteerism for kids and unpaid leave for new parents.

It is tempting to suggest that this is in fact Clinton's real legacy: the trivialization of the presidency, of the government, of politics. The presidency may have grown more powerful by some measures: the independent-counsel law is dead, and it has become more acceptable to govern through executive order and regulatory fiat. But the presidency has never had less respect. Washington has never seemed more irrelevant. Clinton suggests, deceptively, that he has reduced the federal workforce. But it is surely true that the government's place in the American imagination has been downsized. Politics is now a spectator sport, which is to say a television show.

But this judgment may be too harsh — or, to put it another way, even the view that Clinton's chief legacy was to shrink the presidency may ascribe too much importance to him. The end of the Cold War was bound to alter the nature of the presidency. (Neither Clinton nor George W. Bush would have won a presidential nomination if the Soviet Union were still a menace.) It's not Clinton's fault that television's cultural influence peaked during his tenure.

Clinton probably contributed to these trends, but he didn't cause them. The empathetic style with which he is identified has been gaining force for three decades, as his generational cohort advanced through their careers. His presidency, and particularly the Lewinsky scandal, coarsened the culture; the stain on her dress is a stain on his record. But by the mid '90s, radios were already broadcasting stuff that would have shocked listeners ten years before. (Hard as it is to remember, there was a national controversy over whether stations would play George Michael's song "I Want Your Sex" when it came out in 1987.)

Bill Clinton was a man of many firsts: the first Democrat to be reelected to a second full term as president since FDR; the first president to talk about his underwear in public, or apologize for an affair. But the era of Bill Clinton is ending. It is impossible to say how much his presidency reflected his times, and how much they reflected it. The question left for Clinton's successor is what to make of a diminished thing.