Now comes President Clinton’s “My Life” – all 900 pages of it, according to the advance publicity. Beginning with Dan Rather on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” we have had to relive much of the 1990s through Mr. Clinton’s eyes.

Monica Lewinsky? A “terrible moral error,” Mr. Clinton told Mr. Rather. The Clinton tax hikes? They touched off an unprecedented economic boom by showing the administration’s determination to balance the budget, he asserted.

The gathering terrorist storm? It’s “bull” that Mr. Clinton wasn’t on the case, the ex-president claimed. The impeachment? A “badge of honor” at the hands of power-crazed Republicans. And so on.

You can expect the vast right-wing conspiracy to strike back. Lawsuits reportedly are being readied to make the case that the Clinton book tour is little more than a multi-milliondollar campaign contribution by his publisher, Knopf & Co., to Democratic candidate Senator Kerry, on grounds that Mr. Clinton himself has said he would take every opportunity during the tour to plug Mr. Kerry. But lighten up, folks.

Ex-presidents write books (even though something titled “My Life” seems a bit premature for such a young ex-president). They also spend a fair amount of each election year raising money and speaking out on behalf of their party’s candidates.

It’s certainly no crime for Mr. Clinton to do the same, and just because he can charm the press out of significant amounts of air time is no reason to get mad at him. Save our choler for Mr. Rather and the other avatars of the mindless press who cater to the self-absorbed Clintons.

If Mr. Clinton’s charm could be translated into a presidency for somebody else, after all, Vice President Gore would right now be bellowing at us from the Rose Garden about the need to ban the family auto and its evil internal combustion engines.

Instead, Mr. Gore is backing one losing cause after another, most recently a silly movie titled “The Day After Tomorrow.” Indeed, a fair number of commentators have expressed the thought that the Clinton book tour might actually hurt Mr. Kerry by underscoring just how wooden he is, too.

But the real effect of the Clinton book, insofar as it has any effect at all, may be to remind us just how hollow his presidency really was.

Mr. Clinton is likely to go down as the Warren G. Harding of our times – a tremendously popular man who presided over a reasonably placid “return to normalcy” after World War I, but who is mostly remembered for the unseemly conduct of some of his associates in office.

Even four years later, Mr. Clinton is a staple of lame late-night television jokes about womanizing. And there is constant suspicion of his political ambition: Does he truly want Mr. Kerry to win, or does he want Mr. Kerry to lose in order to prepare the way for Senator Clinton?

On the big issues, Mr. Clinton isn’t likely to make much of a historical dent. There was a reason Ronald Reagan got such a big send-off, and it had little to do with his charm. Love him or hate him, Reagan was a consequential president. Mr. Clinton was the guy who served between the Cold War and the confrontation with Islamic radicalism.

Indeed, the sight of Mr. Clinton once more preening for the cameras is likely to remind many Americans of the real theme of the Clinton years: It’s all about me.

He is an enormously talented politician. But as president, he was an undisciplined, self-centered man in a self-centered time, mostly content to bask in the peace and prosperity that in reality was “the greatest generation’s” contribution to America.

Perhaps that’s just as well. Left to its own devices, unburdened by vast new social programs, America’s amazing economy bounded forward.

So what if Mr. Clinton, like the rooster, thought he had produced the dawn? As long as Mr. Clinton and the Republicans were at each other’s throats in Washington, D.C., the rest of the country was safe.

Except, as we now know, it wasn’t really safe. Might Mr. Clinton have successfully tackled Islamic terrorism if he hadn’t been distracted by the vast right-wing conspiracy?

We’ll never know, of course. But it seems highly doubtful. In the end, this big-talking man was not a man to take big risks. He preferred simply to move on. And when it comes to Mr. Clinton, so, probably, should we.