Rupert Cornwell: Back on show: the same charming and maddening Bill

For a few days at least, America is back in a gentler age, of obscure real estate deals in distant Arkansas, stains of body fluids on dark-blue Gap dresses, when the country was led by the most charming, talented, infuriating and flawed President of modern times.

Since just after midnight, Bill Clinton's My Life has been on sale at bookstores across the country. It is a publishing event that will see a Democratic former president effortlessly, if briefly, eclipse the every striving of John Kerry, the Democrat who is seeking to win back the White House for his party.

To judge from the handful of pre-publication reviews of sneaked copies, the book itself is no great shakes. The best bits, by common consent, are those dealing with his childhood in Arkansas, split (like his own personality) between prim, small-town Hope, where he was born, and racy Hot Springs, where he largely grew up.

The rest is mainly autobiographical boilerplate. Barring a few nuggets, Clinton's account of his presidency seems barely more invigorating than his wife Hillary's Living History , published a year ago and memorable only for the few paragraphs dealing with the Monica Lewinsky affair.

In the case of Bill's book too, that episode has inevitably made the early headlines. Pride of place going to his shamefaced "Just because I could" explanation for the sin - "just about the most morally indefensible reason anybody could have for doing anything," the 42nd president told Dan Rather of CBS in Sunday's pre-launch edition of 60 Minutes .

Some of the details, however, are a little too good to be true. Mr Clinton says he slept on a couch for eight weeks after being expelled by an enraged Hillary from their bedroom. But did he really? Does not the White House residence have a host of other bedrooms where the man with the most daunting responsibilities in the world could get a decent night's sleep?

Many are already complaining at Mr Clinton's verbosity. In fact, at 957 pages My Life is far from the longest presidential memoir in history - Ulysses Grant, Harry Truman and Richard Nixon all weighed in with volumes of 1,100-plus pages. But it is certainly the most lucrative (a reputed $2m of advance sales) and incontestably the most skilfully promoted. For all the ballyhoo, the special edition of 60 Minutes was not even the start, for the former president has been softening up the market at publishing conventions and the likes for weeks now. But now the pace gets torrid. Time magazine and Newsweek are full of Clinton. Today sees the official launch party, followed by live phone-in television appearances on the Larry King Show and, better still, with Oprah Winfrey .

Knopf, the publisher, has even persuaded the normally arch-rival breakfast shows, NBC's Today show and ABC's Good Morning America to share a joint interview. Then comes three weeks of bookstore signings. If the 60 Minutes appearance is typical, the full Clinton repertoire will be back on show in the coming weeks: the trademark "spontaneity" of the minutely weighed answers, the chewing of the lower lip, that blend of Southern redneck and voracious intellectual that is uniquely Clinton.

In short it's the same maddening Clinton - irresistibly charming and engaging, yet impossible to pin down, always one step ahead of the questioner, always able to slip free when you think he's cornered.

His ability to polarise is also unchanged. Pro- and anti-Clinton websites are flourishing, the merits and demerits of the 42nd president are again the fodder of the talk shows, and half-forgotten catchphrases are back in the headlines.

As Mr Clinton put it yesterday, the Whitewater controversy is proof of what Hillary famously called a "vast right-wing conspiracy". Except, he argues, it wasn't a "conspiracy" because conspiracies are supposed to be secret, while this assault was as clear as daylight. Typical Clinton hairsplitting - but somehow a blessed, if temporary, relief from the real news of the moment.