Clinton is a big personality who has led a big life, and for some of the media conventional wisdom to boil it down to a view that ’all people are really interested in’ are a few moments of madness in the Oval Office gets him, the importance of the presidency, and the significance of his life, all wrong.

Campbell argues that Bill Clinton’s public legacy is too often reduced by “conventional wisdom” in the press to the Lewinsky scandal—“a few moments of madness in the Oval Office.” By stressing Clinton’s “big personality” and “big life,” he frames the scandal as a sensational but ultimately partial lens that distorts both the office and the individual. The quote is also a critique of media incentives: scandal is treated as the only thing audiences “are really interested in,” crowding out policy, governance, and the broader arc of a presidency. Implicitly, Campbell calls for proportion—judging leaders by the totality of their actions and historical impact rather than by the most lurid episode.