How Can We Miss You If You Never Go Away?

When a president leaves office we expect him to disappear for a while, cede the stage to the new guy, give us some time to forget why we weren't so sorry to see him go. Jimmy Carter returned to Plains, Ga., to nurse his wounds and work on his house; George Herbert Walker Bush disappeared to Houston, content to load his dishwasher and walk his dogs. But from the hour Bill Clinton's successor was sworn in, the youngest former President in modern history made it clear that he didn't intend to fade from view for even a minute. "I'm still here," he declared as the jet engines revved at Andrews Air Force Base. "We're not going anywhere." The almost spoken promise: Clinton would dominate the power salons of New York City, bask in ovations on the lecture circuit, run the Democratic Party and lead the opposition in the national debate over George W. Bush's agenda. It would be a bold, triumphant new life.

Instead, Clinton's ex-presidency is shaping up to be a shriveled version of his presidency. As he copes with a new crop of scandals--the $190,000 worth of going-away gifts, the $800,000-a-year midtown-Manhattan office suite he wanted to rent, the 177 last-minute clemencies he granted and, above all, the one he handed to fugitive billionaire Marc Rich--Clinton's new life feels like the old one, minus the power and the pulpit and the retinue of aides. His war room is a half-furnished Dutch Colonial in the New York suburbs; his lieutenant, a former White House valet named Oscar who keeps Clinton supplied with diet Coke while the ex-President dials through the numbers he has entered on his new, imperfectly mastered PalmPilot, calling to justify himself to his friends. Clinton's red-faced rages over the Rich scandal have familiar themes: "setups," overzealous prosecutors, unfair legal cases that never should have gone to indictment. What is hard to figure out is whether he is playing out his reasons for pardoning a fugitive or working through his personal grudge against the legal system. Did he pardon Rich or himself by proxy? Either way, sighs a comrade who answered the phone recently to find the 42nd President of the U.S. on the other end of the line, "you get tired of listening to it."

A meteorologist might call Clinton's first month out of office a perfect storm: a freak convergence of fast-moving, late-season weather patterns, a lethal collision of the profound and the trivial. The thunderhead of accusations confirms every fair and unfair thing his enemies have ever said about him--and puts him once again in the sights of a federal prosecutor, this time U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White of New York. Not only are there calls to haul him before Congress, but also they are coming from fellow Democrats who defended him through every past scandal. This time, for the first time, he is out on the cliff, alone.

As Clinton's former Commerce Secretary denounces him and Morgan Stanley apologizes to its clients for paying him to speak, Clinton isn't the only one being damaged. His wife's Senate debut has been spoiled by the calls that are flooding her makeshift work space in the basement of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Hillary last week went to three Brooklyn churches to talk about racial profiling--and ended up answering questions about whether she had properly reported the glittery handbags she'd received (she had).

Where Democrats once expected Clinton to make the case against Bush's tax cuts, the former President's travails are instead drowning out their arguments. He's even dragging down Democratic fund raising, the one area in which he always came through. In Florida, where Democrats say they will need at least $12 million to defeat Governor Jeb Bush in 2002, a moneyman told TIME that normally dependable givers are citing Clinton's latest scandal, with its allegation that he traded pardons for campaign cash, when they refuse to put pen to check.

And so it wasn't entirely believable last week when President Bush declared it was time to "move on." The furor, says Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, is "a godsend for President Bush." Clinton is "making the honesty-and-integrity case for us," says a Bush aide. "We don't have to do anything." Clinton grouses in private that the Bush forces are quietly working to keep the controversies alive, but even he concedes that it's smart politics to do so.

In truth, the scandal doesn't need much of a push from Bush. What keeps the story going is the accumulated weight of embarrassments, the fact that they fit so many preconceptions about the Clintons and the diversion they offer the cable-news networks. It might not have bothered people so much had the hubbub stopped when a few broken glasses on Air Force One were exaggerated into an airborne bacchanal. Or when Hillary accepted an over-the-top book advance. Or when, in the well-established presidential tradition of hauling home favors from the party, the Clintons lifted a few that hadn't been intended for them.

The problem is the picture that forms when the dots get connected, with or without the evidence. The fracas over Clinton's $800,000 lease, which he at first offered to help pay, opened the question of where the money would come from, which led to his presidential-library foundation, which came back around to Rich's ex-wife Denise, who donated $450,000 to that library on top of the millions she had already given and raised for the Clintons and the Democrats. Not to mention that Rich's lawyer is Clinton's former White House counsel Jack Quinn.