Bill Clinton: The Bitter Half

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And yet the person who seemed least aware of the havoc he was causing was Bill Clinton. "He was firmly convinced in his mind that every last thing he did was right," says former Democratic National Committee chairman Don Fowler, a South Carolinian who spent much of that week at Bill Clinton's side. "He wouldn't admit any misjudgments or miscalculations."

But the damage had been done, particularly among African-American voters. Ten days before the crucial Ohio and Texas primaries, Hillary was still on the defensive, saying at a conference on African-American issues in New Orleans, "If anyone was offended by anything that was said — whether it was meant or not, misinterpreted or not — obviously I regret that."

It rankles Bill Clinton to see his strong support among African Americans slipping away, but "there's a part of him that understands it, because he understands black people as well as anybody I know," says an old friend who is African American and continues to support him. "He understands it — doesn't like it — but he has to understand."

Those close to the former President say that much of what is driving him is frustration and dismay. "In the past, when he was on the ropes, he could get himself off the ropes," says an adviser. But Clinton has begun to accept the fact that there are limits to what he can do when he is not the candidate. He correctly blames the media for uneven treatment — saying reporters have taken a tougher stance with him and his wife than with Obama. (After Saturday Night Live lampooned the media for their love affair with Obama, Bill telephoned guest host Tina Fey to thank her.)

But he is appalled, friends and aides say, by what he has privately described as "political malpractice" by Hillary's campaign. It spent money with abandon in the earliest primaries and assumed that the race would not last past Super Tuesday, on Feb. 5 — and failed to prepare for any of the states that followed. Two weeks before the Texas primary, Bill Clinton telephoned Waco insurance mogul and philanthropist Bernard Rapoport, a friend and backer since the 1970s. Rapoport told Clinton that this was the first contact he had had from anyone on the campaign. "He was madder than mad," Rapoport says. "He was right. There was so much we could have done, but we never heard from anyone at headquarters."

That Bill Clinton would be surprised at any of this is surprising in itself, given the wide perception that he is the unseen hand guiding his wife's campaign. But friends and advisers say that was never the case — in part because he understood Hillary's need to establish her independence, and in part because of long-standing mistrust between his political operation and hers. He deferred to her team and its pseudo-incumbency strategy throughout the fall, friends say, even though his instincts told him that Obama was gaining steam and should be dealt with as a threat. When Bill visited Hillary's Des Moines campaign headquarters a few days before the Iowa caucuses to give a pep talk to her young volunteers, her then campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle didn't come out of her office. Those who were there saw it as an unmistakable snub and an assertion of who was in charge.

While his public profile has been lower lately, Bill Clinton has been getting far more involved in the campaign's inner workings. It was partly at his instigation that Maggie Williams — who had been chief of staff in his post-presidency office in Harlem, in addition to serving as his wife's chief of staff in the White House — has replaced Doyle. Some of his former White House aides, including senior adviser Doug Sosnik and deputy chief of staff Steve Richetti, have been brought closer into the campaign fold. And Bill has been more assertive in giving tactical advice — coaching Hillary's strategists on how to talk about trade in Ohio, for example, and scrutinizing the map for targets of opportunity that the campaign may have missed. It was Bill Clinton, aides say, who suggested deploying himself to campaign in Alabama, even though Hillary was certain to lose the popular vote. Sure enough, Obama won by a comfortable 14 points — but Hillary came out of the contest with 25 delegates to Obama's 27.

But maybe what's really wrong with Hillary's campaign is something that is simply beyond even Bill Clinton's ability to fix. "It may be," says a friend, "their day has passed." As Bill told the folks in Chillicothe back in 1993, it is simply "a new and uncharted time."