It’s remarkable, really, how little resonance that Clinton sex scandal has today. The White House intern who shook the world is barely ever mentioned in the 2012 presidential campaign. If her name comes up at all, it’s as an asterisk to Newt Gingrich. Critics like to point out that while Mr. Gingrich was leading the Republican charge to impeach President Bill Clinton in 1998, he was concealing his own extramarital affair with Callista Bisek, the young Congressional staffer who is now his third wife. The Monica Lewinsky imbroglio is nonetheless at the center of a two-part, four-hour documentary called “Clinton” that will be shown Monday and Tuesday on PBS. It’s a long, solemn and supposedly reflective look back at the life and times of Bill Clinton that feels as if it were made the day he left office in 2001. Amid all the furor over the Starr Report, Linda Tripp and a stained blue dress, it was hard back then to see what really mattered. Eleven years on “Clinton” doesn’t try to find out. The documentary is still too distracted by the Starr Report, Linda Tripp and the stained blue dress. The film breathlessly chronicles every misstep and triumphant comeback of Mr. Clinton’s picaresque career in order to rue the damage his lifelong recklessness did to his reputation and his legacy. (Though actually, despite all that happened between 1992 and 2001, the former president is doing just fine.) What the film doesn’t do is give viewers a more compelling reason to go back and relive that epoch. The film hits all the familiar Clinton milestones — childhood in Hot Springs, Ark.; abusive stepfather; Oxford; courtship of Hillary Rodham; the Arkansas gubernatorial races; Gennifer Flowers; Travelgate; Somalia; Whitewater; etc. — without exploring the deeper happenings that turned out to have had a more lasting impact on the world. Yet two of the major cataclysms shadowing our times, the Sept. 11 attacks and the 2008 credit collapse, have roots that reach back to the Clinton administration. The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which turned out to be a dress rehearsal for Sept. 11, isn’t included in the narrative. The rise of Osama Bin Laden and the failed missile strikes against Al Qaeda training camps in 1998 are noted in passing and presented almost as a pesky foreign policy crisis that briefly distracted Mr. Clinton from the more enduring Monica Lewinsky scandal. And there is no mention whatsoever of the repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, one of several fateful steps that the Clinton administration — in concert with Republicans — took in the name of deregulation. Some policies, like making home mortgages more accessible, helped fuel the economy, but they also heedlessly left Wall Street and other financial institutions free of adult supervision. With the help of the Bush administration that followed, those actions opened the way to derivatives trading that led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and a domino line of multibillion-dollar bailouts to prevent the implosion of the world’s financial system. Put it this way: Robert E. Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, is one of many Clinton administration alumni interviewed on camera, and while the PBS crew spoke to Mr. Rubin in 2010, he wasn’t asked about Glass-Steagall or any of the other decisions that he helped design and that after the 2008 credit debacle look so shortsighted. Mr. Rubin went on to become a top official at Citigroup and earned more than $100 million over 10 years — until Citigroup also teetered on the edge of self-destruction and had to be rescued with a $45 billion bailout. Instead, Mr. Rubin is asked about the administration’s 1993 budget proposal to cut spending and raise taxes. “Twenty-two million new jobs were created,” Mr. Rubin says proudly. “Productivity went up. Incomes rose at all levels. And, for the first time in 30 years, we had a federal surplus.” A lot of former allies are allowed to present themselves in the best possible light, without any hindsight, cautionary notes or credibility checks, including Dick Morris, a political strategist and former Clinton adviser who fell out of favor, had a change of heart and is now a contributor to Fox News. “I said to him, ‘The problem that presidents have is not the sin, it’s the cover-up, and you should explore just telling the American people the truth,’ ” Mr. Morris recalls telling the president. (In Mr. Morris’s recollection Mr. Clinton was humbly grateful for his sage advice but didn’t have the nerve to follow it.) Lucianne Goldberg, the literary agent who helped Linda Tripp entrap Ms. Lewinsky, is quoted at length, as is Michael Isikoff, the investigative reporter who first got wind of the White House affair. So are many of the journalists and biographers who made their reputations by chronicling how Mr. Clinton lost his. Joe Klein, the author and journalist who wrote “Primary Colors,” a roman à clef about the Clintons’ first presidential campaign, is cited more than most and is also given the last word. He disagrees with historians and former aides who say Mr. Clinton squandered his gifts and hobbled his potential for greatness. “I don’t know if you can say of a president who served us well and improved our material good that it was a wasted opportunity,” Mr. Klein argues. “And it was sure a lot of fun to watch.” “Clinton” is fun to watch too, but mostly it’s a wasted opportunity.
