The Spoiler

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"There may be a better salesman than I am," Bill Clinton said, smiled, then paused as chuckles rippled through the audience. A better salesman? On what planet? This was classic, postpresidential Clinton, able to riff on his well-earned reputation as a mythic slinger of bullpucky. I should add that the topic in question was nuclear nonproliferation. He had the audience hanging on his every word about ... nuclear nonproliferation. The Bush Administration wanted to develop two new nuclear weapons, he said, while it was trying to persuade the Iranians to stop enriching uranium. "There may be a better salesman than I am," he said, "but that's a tough sale. We're telling the Iranians, 'You can't have any of something we want two more of.'"

His voice was hoarse. His cheeks were splotched with wine-red daubs of what looked like clown rouge. He seemed a bit disheveled, wearing a light gray-green suit and a garish yellow tie, a costume more fitting for a used-car salesman than a former President. An aide told me that Clinton had pulled a Clinton the night before. Unwilling to stop campaigning after his last event, he had gone to the cafeteria at the University of South Carolina. About 15 kids were there, and they started texting their friends. Pretty soon several hundred kids had gathered, and Clinton held forth for two hours, answering their questions.

There are no 12-step programs for political junkies. And for Bill Clinton, there is no more powerful jones than grabbing an audience, explaining something really complicated and worthy—nuclear nonproliferation—in a way that keeps the crowd completely enthralled. For a man known for his cornucopia of appetites, this is the greatest hunger. There is no controlling it, especially when he is in a defiant mood, under attack for his latest eruption of narcissism. It's his way of saying "No! Look! I'm not overwhelmingly selfish—just extremely, passionately interested in making the world better for you!"

I should add a bit more context here. The speech was given the night before the South Carolina primary. The setting was a historic spot, Penn Center on St. Helena Island, a complex of rude buildings that had served as a center for the civil rights movement, dating back to the Civil War. The crowd, however, was overwhelmingly white—a silent reproach to Clinton by his best-loved constituency, those unutterably decent, hardworking, middle-class, churchified African Americans. They had been shocked and hurt, and then enraged, by his foolish, two-week effort to diss Barack Obama. The next crowd, at Hillary Clinton's closing rally in Columbia, was equally pale and must have been deeply depressing to the ex-President. I remembered a huge inter-racial crowd in the Mississippi Delta, late in Clinton's presidency. I was standing next to Jesse Jackson, who was quite moved by the "glorious" sight of whites and blacks salt-and-peppered through the audience. I asked Jackson why he found it so moving; he had seen crowds like that before in the South. "But look," he said. "They're talking to each other!"

That was one of the great unquantifiable achievements of Clinton's presidency: he brought whites and blacks together, after years of racial tension, even within the Democratic Party. He was the first President to talk easily with blacks, as equals, without condescension. He was the best white politician I have ever seen in a black church. The bond he built with that community seemed unbreakable. And so it was shocking—heartbreaking—to see it shattered in South Carolina, shattered by a thoughtless, solipsistic need for victory at any cost.