Thanks to those who emailed me about the link to Bill Clinton’s “cover-up” outburst in South Dakota yesterday (although posting comments is better). Several in our fledgling cyber-community wonder why Clinton sounds unhinged these days. I think I know. Critics of the former president’s—including some Hillaryites—complain that Bill Clinton acts as though the 2008 election is all about him. In one way, this might be true: it’s all about his legacy.

Here is how I believe Bill Clinton sees things: His presidency can be judged two ways. The first narrative—that’s the hot word in Democratic Party political circles—flows from Hillary Clinton’s election as the 44^th president of the United States. In this scenario, William Jefferson Clinton is the chief executive who presided over a humming economy during eight years of relative peace. He was impeached by frustrated Republicans over purely private behavior in a power grab that amounted to an assault on the Constitution. Yet the voters, in their infinite wisdom, elected Clinton’s vice president to succeed him, a result overturned by Floridian incompetence, a partisan Supreme Court, and a governmental relic known as the Electoral College. Nonetheless, Clinton’s wife was elected and re-elected to the Senate, the Congress subsequently went Democratic, and Clinton’s former first lady was chosen as president 10 years after Republicans impeached her husband. On that day, January 20, 2009, Bill Clinton enters the Democratic pantheon as the man who accomplished what even the sainted FDR couldn’t even pull off: Eleanor Roosevelt was never elected president.

That’s one story line. Here’s another: Hillary Clinton is denied the nomination. Barack Obama (or John McCain) is elected president. The contentious, scandal-a-day Clinton years are mercifully put behind us. Congress begins working together again—and in concert with the White House. Clinton’s presidency is remembered for corruption (renting the Lincoln bedroom, raising money from Buddhist monks, selling pardons on the way out the door), ineffectiveness (failure to ratify the Kyoto climate accords and Hillary’s health care fiasco), and his own tawdry treatment of women (see: Paula Corbin Jones, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, and Monica Lewinsky). All the while, Osama bin Laden was busy planning global assaults on Americans in general and the attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center in particular. Two American embassies are bombed by al-Qaeda and a Navy ship-o-war is nearly sunk while Clinton and his foreign policy team dither with paperwork. Afterwards, Clinton, who'd since been disbarred, dispatches his national security adviser to pilfer documents from the National Archives so we’ll never know what those papers would have revealed.

Two competing narratives. One possible 2008 result. No wonder he gets red in the face talking about it.