U.S. President Bill Clinton does not seem to know the meaning of the phrase "lame duck." Although his successor will be sworn into office in less than a month, Mr. Clinton is pursuing a flurry of initiatives more worthy of a man taking office, rather than one packing his bags to go. His intentions may be good, but the timing is not. His actions could tie the next president's hands. Go slow, Mr. Clinton.
Mr. Clinton was reportedly already thinking about his legacy less than halfway into his second term in the White House. It will be a complicated judgment. He has presided over the longest economic expansion in U.S. history and governed while the U.S. enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. Mr. Clinton made sustained and historic personal interventions in the peace processes in the Middle East and Northern Ireland. No other president has staked so much of his office's prestige and power on such efforts.
At the same time, the cloud of personal misconduct hangs over his eight years in office. Mr. Clinton will be remembered for the Lewinsky scandal and the fact that he was only the second president in U.S. history to be impeached. The president who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement failed to get the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Land Mine Treaty and legislation enabling an international criminal court. Mr. Clinton apologized for the enslavement of Africans hundreds of years ago, but his administration looked away when hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were slaughtered only five years ago.