While touring lower Manhattan two days after the terrorist attacks, Clinton began making the case that he had almost single-handedly saved America from this catastrophe. "The best shot we had at [bin Laden] was when I bombed his training camps [in Afghanistan] in 1998," Clinton told reporters. Note the vintage Clintonian usage of the word "I". But this time Clinton caught himself unusually quickly, and downshifted into the more appropriate "we" mode: "We just missed him by a matter of hours, maybe even less than an hour. . . . We wrapped up his training camp, and after that we took down a lot of his terrorist operations around the world, more than were known. We prevented a lot of bad things from happening." Clinton later revealed that he also authorized commando raids in 1999 to capture or kill bin Laden, "but we did not have the necessary intelligence to do it in the way we would have had to do it." At least four bin Laden terrorist missions were successfully foiled while he was president, he said.

It's questionable, however, whether Clinton's wag-the-dog cruise-missile strikes ever came close to taking out bin Laden. In an interview last week with National Review's Byron York, retired general Anthony Zinni, commander of U.S. forces in the region at the time, described the 1998 missile attack as a "million-to-one shot." "There was a possibility [bin Laden] could have been there," he recalled, but "my intelligence people did not put a lot of faith in that. . . ."

Not content to defend himself to reporters, Clinton has also unburdened himself to helpless passers-by. The Washington Post revealed the contents of an e-mail describing one New Yorker's bizarre encounter with Clinton and Giuliani at a Manhattan heliport:

"The mayor took off almost immediately," the 43-year-old [Saul] Finkelstein, a die-hard Democrat, wrote in an e-mail to friends, "and like the consummate campaigner . . . Clinton walked toward me and my sons." In a 15-minute conversation, Clinton assured the Finkelsteins he had done his best to neutralize Osama bin Laden . . . "We missed him by an hour," Clinton said, according to the e-mail. "[Clinton] said that the president can t say this, but it will not be that difficult to get bin Laden [today] because unlike in 1998 . . . the U.S. will have the cooperation of surrounding countries and you can't fight this guy from 1,000 miles away. "

This last claim is astonishing. Essentially, Clinton is whining that Bush will get all the glory for finally eliminating Osama because now it will be so much easier.

The ultimate message of this impromptu lecture, Finkelstein concluded, was that Clinton "had done a lot to go after bin Laden . . . and that what happened on Sept. 11 could in no way be traced to some failure on his administration's part." The senior foreign policy types in the Clinton administration Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, Strobe Talbott, Richard Holbrooke, et al. have been echoing this line on television since the 11th. It's an assertion that grows ever more difficult to accept as we learn new details about their administration's failures (see Joe Klein's piece in the Oct. 1 New Yorker or Andrew Sullivan's Sept. 30 article in the London Sunday Times, for starters).

To their credit, several less-visible former Clinton officials have been more forthcoming. A little over a week after the attacks, the Boston Globe ran a devastating article in which Nancy Soderberg, a former senior aide on Clinton's National Security Council, said, "In hindsight, [what we did] wasn't enough, and anyone involved in policy would have to admit that." Former Clinton deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick concurred: "Clearly, not enough was done. . . . We should have caught this. Why this happened, I don't know. Responsibilities were given out. Resources were given. Authorities existed. We should have prevented this."

But a talent for excusing his own failures is not Clinton's only shortcoming. Since the attacks, we've also been reminded of his need for attention. After the National Cathedral memorial service, Clinton hung around chatting with anyone who would listen for more than half an hour, well after all the other ex-presidents had left. Clinton also hogged the spotlight at a Sept. 22 Giuliani press conference. "I just try to do what the mayor asks," Clinton said, duly noting that when Giuliani implored New Yorkers to go shopping, he had done so, and crowing that he would be making at least four flights on commercial jets that week to reassure Americans that air travel was safe. Despite repeated attempts by Giuliani's press flak to whisk Clinton away for a tour of the mayor's command center, "Clinton lingered for about 10 minutes to answer reporters questions," wrote the Los Angeles Times. "Twice, a Giuliani spokeswoman shouted at reporters to end the questioning, but Clinton continued answering. At one point, Giuliani's spokeswoman told Clinton aide Julia Payne: My boss is waiting. "

Even the claims by Clinton's defenders that he is trying to avoid the spotlight ring hollow. Last week Payne said that Clinton is spending time "every single day, as quietly as he can sometimes hours each day with [victims'] families in New York. . . . We don't call the press." Of course not, they just tell the press that they're not telling them about it.

The creepiest aspect of the post-9/11 Bill Clinton Show is his barely veiled regret relayed dutifully to the press through his cronies that this crisis did not occur during his presidency, when it could have contributed to shaping the vaunted Clinton "legacy." Last Friday's New York Times reported that "Clinton is described by friends as a frustrated spectator, unable to guide the nation through a crisis that is far bigger than anything he confronted in his eight-year tenure. . . . Several people who know Mr. Clinton said he could not help but lament that he was not in the thick of the action. . . . A close friend of Mr. Clinton put it this way: 'He has said there has to be a defining moment in a presidency that really makes a great presidency. He didn't have one.'" Cue the violins.

At his core, Bill Clinton is a narcissist, and he continues to demonstrate a classic tendency of narcissists the urge to relentlessly interpret everything, even events of immense world import simply as a part of his own grand personal drama. Thus the attack of Sept. 11 becomes not just an assault upon the nation and its principles, but a missed opportunity for the greater glory of The Man from Hope. It is of a piece with Clinton's ex post facto description of the Lewinsky scandal and his impeachment as one more episode of personal growth and self-fulfillment: Impeachment, he told a group of evangelical leaders last year, had allowed him to "feel much more at peace than I used to"; the humiliation of "what I went through" had brought him to "a different place."

Rudy Giuliani's performance since Sept. 11 has understandably soured many on the concept of term limits. But the ineradicable presence of Bill Clinton in our national life reminds us that, for some individuals, in some offices, term limits might not be such a bad idea after all.