Bill Clinton: The comeback kid (part 2)

His critics dismiss his presidency in a single sentence: 'Ronald Reagan destroyed the Soviet Empire. Bill Clinton had Monica Lewinsky.' But the embarrassment of his moment of madness didn't bring him down then, and isn't doing him much harm now: indeed, the new confessions are doing little to harm sales of a book which earned him a $10m advance. And with one eye still on the White House, the boy from Arkansas may well have the last laugh...

There are only two politicians America needs to focus on in this election year. They come with the names Bush and Kerry. And yet, five months before the votes are cast, the country has found itself wrapped in nostalgia for two presidents past. A national week of mourning has only just ended for Ronald Reagan. Now a frenzy of Clintonmania is about to begin with the publication on Tuesday of his memoir, My Life.

There are only two politicians America needs to focus on in this election year. They come with the names Bush and Kerry. And yet, five months before the votes are cast, the country has found itself wrapped in nostalgia for two presidents past. A national week of mourning has only just ended for Ronald Reagan. Now a frenzy of Clintonmania is about to begin with the publication on Tuesday of his memoir, My Life.

Bill Clinton is forcing himself back into the national consciousness. There is the book itself - all 957 pages of it, spanning everything from his childhood years in Arkansas to his two terms in the White House - and then the coast-to-coast tour to promote it. Starting with an interview on tonight's edition of 60 Minutes on the CBS network, he will bestride America's airwaves for the next several weeks.

You might easily wonder at the timing of the former president's re-emergence. Some Democrats are worried he will suck the oxygen from the John Kerry campaign. But only a fool could imagine that Clinton would stay in the shadows of America's political discourse for ever. The son of Arkansas is simply irrepressible and always has been. And, at 57, he is too young to fade away. When the former president exited the White House he was the same age as Reagan when he just starting in politics.

If Clinton wants to burnish his historical legacy, which surely he does, he seems to be doing remarkably well. Even before the publication of his book, which will inevitably be regarded as self-serving, a Fox News poll released last week showed his approval rating among the American public to be at 52 per cent. That is the first time it has passed the 50 per cent mark since 1998 and about equal to that of President Bush. He is doing far better, in this regard, than the still rather grey Kerry.

Maybe staying relatively quiet since 2001 has helped. Not that he hasn't been busy. He set up a presidential foundation, which he based in Harlem and which works on a variety of do-good missions, including combating HIV-Aids in the developing world. He has been raising money for his Presidential Library, which will open this November in Little Rock. He has also been making money for himself to help to settle the mountain of legal bills he accumulated while in Washington. In each of the two years following his departure from office he made $9m (£5m) giving speeches. The advance for the book was $10m.

His return to the stage now is not exactly as a political figure in a partisan sense. That was the message he gave when early last week he returned to the White House for the first time since leaving it for the unveiling of twin portraits of himself and his wife, Hillary. Clinton did not take the opportunity to score political points or snipe at his host, George Bush. Dubbed by the headline writers as a "love-in", it was his opportunity to say he had risen above the partisan fray. Many will be disappointed when they read his book to discover that even on the Iraq war, Clinton is actually fairly supportive of Bush.

Clinton cannot run for president again and occasional stories about him seeking some other kind of office - most often mayor of New York City - always turn out to be canards. From polarising president, he has re-engineered himself as more a cultural phenomenon. "He is a brand," suggested Chris Atkins, managing director of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. "If you look at the characteristics of successful brands - a Coke or a Starbucks - they make a certain promise to you. He stood, at his peak, for progress. He gave people a sense of momentum. There's that 'feel-good' part of the Clinton brand."

Part of what makes the Clinton brand so potent is the life story told in his book. Remember how he became the "Comeback Kid" when his 1992 campaign with Al Gore almost came off the rails after stories of an affair with Gennifer Flowers hit the news pages? (There is historical symmetry in his TV interview tonight. It was an appearance on 60 Minutes in February 1992 alongside Hillary that, thanks to the couple's candour about difficulties in their marriage, salvaged his candidacy.) It is this against-all-odds spirit that fuels the fascination with Clinton. He helps people to believe in the American Dream because that has been his own life. He climbed from a broken home in Arkansas all the way to the White House.

He was born in down-at-heel Hot Springs, Arkansas, William Jefferson Blythe IV on 19 August 1946 in unhappy circumstances. His father had died in a traffic accident three months earlier and when he was four, his mother, Virginia, married Roger Clinton, an alcoholic who liked to play the ponies. In his book, he says that counselling has taught him how the loss of his own father, the privations of life with his grandparents and the beatings his stepfather used to administer to his mother made him prone, later in life, to self-destructive behaviour when he was tired, angry or alone.

He was in high school when he became a delegate to a national movement called Boys Nation and he met John F Kennedy in the White House Rose Garden. With that encounter came the first political stirrings in the overachieving young Clinton, who later graduated from Georgetown University and, in 1958, won a coveted Rhodes scholarship to study for a year at Oxford. After receiving a law degree from Yale in 1973, he entered Arkansas politics. In 1974, he was defeated running for Congress and a year later married another law graduate, Hillary Rodham, with whom he had his only child, Chelsea. In 1976, he was elected Arkansas attorney general and won the race for governor in 1978. He lost his first bid for re-election for the office but subsequently held four more terms in the governor's mansion before defeating incumbent president George Bush Snr in 1992.

Clinton thereafter became the first Democratic president to be re-elected since Franklin D Roosevelt. In his book he will point to many high points in those two terms: low unemployment rates, the reversal of the federal deficit, dropping crime rates, peace at home, soaring home ownership rates and so on. And yet, his time in Washington was shadowed throughout by ethical investigations, starting with questions about his Whitewater land deal in Arkansas and culminating with revelations of his dalliance with intern Monica Lewinsky and his ensuing impeachment by the House of Representatives. Foes of Clinton will never let the bad memories die. "Write the one sentence about his presidency," said Grover Nequist, a well-known conservative activist. "Ronald Reagan destroyed the Soviet Empire. Clinton had Lewinsky."

That is not the legacy that Clinton wants. Hence the book and all the words that will spill from his mouth in the weeks ahead. There is one other theory about the book and his tour. Daft but certainly intriguing, it goes like this. Clinton shows up Kerry to be a poor second-best ensuring that he loses in November. The path is wide open for Hillary to run against the Republican nominee in 2008. She wins and, presto, Bill is back in the big house on Pennsylvania Avenue. Who said we had seen the last of him?