The President's much-vaunted advisory panel on race relations has issued its final report - a document attacked as too bland by liberals and a waste of taxpayers' money by conservatives.
While Bill Clinton has been given full marks for trying to make America more aware of its racial divisions, the 17-month effort to come up with a strategy for dealing with them is being viewed largely as a noble failure.
For virtually all of this year, the many public meetings the advisory board held attracted little media attention - overshadowed mainly by the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
The panel was also hobbled by bureaucratic inertia and reported meddling by White House aides fearful that the project would become too radical.
From the start, Republicans gave the initiative little support, charging that discussions were being dominated by liberals sympathetic to the President's own views on social issues.
'Whether he [Mr Clinton] did not do more because of his preoccupation with his personal problems, I don't know,' said John Hope Franklin, the black historian who led the project. 'But I always felt that I had a job to do and went out and did it.' Tellingly, the final report's most notable recommendation was for the White House to set up a permanent panel on race to keep the 'dialogue on race' going.
