(FORTUNE Magazine) – In his first term, Bill Clinton took risks. A crusade against the military for gay rights. A budget plan that raised taxes. A proposal to reshape the health-care system. An emotional White House meeting where he nudged Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat into the most portentous handshake of the decade. In his second term, Clinton has taken risks of a different sort. Dozens of meetings with a White House intern. A political strategy of denial and delay. A legal strategy that jeopardizes two centuries of presidential privilege for his own protection. Appearances with glamorous women like Kim Basinger and Christie Brinkley in the midst of a sex scandal.

So it comes to this: The man who began his presidency as a risk taker in his public life is winding it down as a risk taker in his private life--and as a result is risking not only his own presidency, but the stature of the presidency itself.

What makes the presidency of Bill Clinton so fascinating is the juxtaposition between the risks he chose to take and the ones he avoided. He risked the Democrats' alliance with black voters by criticizing rap singer Sister Souljah for her anti-white rhetoric after the Los Angeles riots--winning the enmity of Jesse Jackson but also winning the confidence of the white working-class Democrats Ronald Reagan had lured into the Republican fold. As President, however, Clinton never pressed for proposals that might help close the racial divide. Indeed, the latter years of his political life mostly can be characterized by risks not taken. Talk, but no real plan, to save Social Security. Talk, but no real plan, to shore up Medicare. Talk, but no real offensive, to broaden free trade beyond NAFTA. The President was willing to stand against the Democrats' labor allies to support fast-track authority last winter--in the very month the Monica Lewinsky drama was unfolding. But Clinton never mounted the sort of public campaign that Reagan used again and again during his Administration to push for his budget cuts, his tax reductions, and most of all, his landmark 1986 tax overhaul.

There's a reason for all this political risk-aversion. One of Clinton's goals is to pass on his presidency to Al Gore. Clinton and the Democratic loyalists around him don't want to take controversial political positions that might hurt Gore in 2000. The irony, of course, is that Clinton's risky business with Monica has tarnished his entire Administration much more than a principled stand on a controversial political matter would.

Armchair psychologists--you can see them every night on cable--argue that the turning point in Clinton's presidency came when he met Lewinsky. Not so. The turning point came on a summery afternoon in 1994 when his health plan crashed to earth. He quit taking political risks and channeled all that risk-taking energy into his personal life. Frank Farley, a Temple University psychologist who studies risk takers, has a brisk description of the breed: They are "stimulation seekers, arousal seekers, excitement seekers. They thrive in ambiguity." Whoa! Who does that sound like?

The man who always did have trouble separating his personal and public lives now finds them converging in a fateful way. Letting that happen may be the biggest risk Bill Clinton has ever taken.

DAVID SHRIBMAN is Washington bureau chief of the Boston Globe and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter.