Short-term, their verdicts naturally tend to be astigmatic. So citizens may let the president off by a process much like jury nullification. Journalists cannot help speculating on what will be the ultimate verdict on Clinton. Close up, he seems to represent an oddly contemporary discontinuum of effective leadership and breezy squalor. But Americans disconnected their judgment of Clinton's moral behavior from their opinion of his job performance.
History is holistic only in the lives of the saints.
Otherwise, the disconnects and ambiguities prevail. Perhaps we journalists should not ask, what place a president will occupy in history, but should try to anticipate the eventual range of ambiguity about him. As a people, our judgments, after all, run to extremes. So he seemed close up. His approval rating in polls at the end of his presidency was 23 percent, an all-time low.