Most likely, the people who got the idea to make a big thing of the 25th anniversary of the Clintons’ 1992 win of the presidency had a different sort of a party in mind — perhaps a triumphant tableau of a new kind of first couple: The first gentleman, along with the first female president, lit with the glow of their his-and-hers power, just as they always had planned.

Instead, they had Hillary looking embittered, gnawing the bone of her loss last November, and Bill looking perplexed as he pondered the fact that a number of Democrats — Democrats! — were expressing regrets that they hadn’t forced him from office during the madness of 1998. But it was Republicans who expressed most displeasure, saying it was too little too late, that it cost nothing, that it changed nothing, and should have come sooner. But none of these things may be true.