Sunday Times

The former president has been making himself a fortune since leaving office. Now he is here with his daughter, Chelsea. Watch out, warns Andrew Sullivan. He needs money and love.

Bill's Big Bucks

Think of it as the Gorbachev tour. Unable to get a rapturous reception in his own country, mired by domestic scandal, pummelled by the press, spurned in the end by his own party, Bill Clinton did what Mikhail Gorbachev did. He went to the places where he was still popular, where his celebrity would not be swamped by domestic bitterness, where he can enjoy the mass adulation he needs the way most human beings need food and water. It was all in plentiful supply. He went abroad, where the scam still works.

In the past few months, Clinton has been to 10 countries. He has ridden on an elephant in India. He has been egged in Poland, mobbed in Ireland and feted in China. Now it is the turn of Hay-on-Wye, the bijou border town in Powys that hosts the annual book festival, to greet him.

The organisers of the festival - which opened last week and is sponsored annually by The Sunday Times - have been driven close to despair by the fast-changing demands of the Clinton entourage since they invited him to attend.

The low point came 10 days ago when his "people" suddenly demanded a five-bedroom interconnecting hotel suite in Hay. None exists. The biggest building in the tiny town is the ruined castle.

The real crush will occur today, however, when Clinton plans to browse in Hay's 35 bookshops with Chelsea, his daughter. It is the busiest day of the year in Hay - an interesting challenge for the phalanx of secret service bodyguards whose role it is to ease his path through the crowds.

WHO, one wonders in retrospect, expected Clinton to lie low? The man is unable to bear a second of solitude, silence or reflection. Until the last minutes of his presidency, he was psychotically throwing himself into every issue he could, staying up all night, attempting to burnish his legacy one more time.

For two months after he left office, he dominated the news headlines in America with his last-minute pardons of crooks, felons and low lifes connected either to his family or to his fundraising. He was and is incorrigible.

When Al Gore declared that he was leaving the stage for a while to give George W Bush some space to assume the difficult mantle of the presidency after a divisive election, he was telling the truth.

Gore may be a bad politician, but he was brought up right. Hogging the headlines when your time is over is simply not classy. Which, of course, is why Clinton could not resist. He has no class. Dignity and restraint are not words in his vocabulary.

Two things, in fact, have always mattered to William Jefferson Clinton more than anything else: attention and money.

He spent most of his early political career seeking attention from Democratic party elites and engaging in classic southern money politics in his home state of Arkansas, where he left not a sleazeball unturned in his search for political donations and contacts.

As president, Clinton was obsessed with celebrity, turning Washington into an extension of Hollywood, giving the nation a soap opera on the nightly television news and dominating the national culture. At the same time, he trawled through every corporate and Hollywood cranny for political money. He all but rented out the White House for donations, shamelessly spent more time fundraising than any president before him and loved every back-slapping, corrupting minute of it.

But, sadly, it couldn't last. As the pardon scandal resonated in America earlier this year, it became clear that Clinton would actually have a hard time showing his face for a while or indeed making vast sums on the lecture circuit. Many big American corporations and even endowed universities were leery of the ethical stench that would inevitably follow. Even the Democratic party, aware that its image had been deeply stained by Clinton's fundraising sleaze, quietly urged him to take a breather.

The only place in America where Clinton could have been assured of a rapturous welcome - Harlem - had already been milked for every drop of sympathy and support it could muster. Suddenly America was a place where, for the time being at least, neither attention nor money was in very great supply. Last week he was even reported to be having difficulty finding a golf club that will accept him as a member.

So what to do? Go abroad. It's a feature of most presidencies that they end up - especially in a second term - spending more and more time outside the United States. This was true of Clinton as it was of Bush and Carter before him. By their second terms, most presidents have used up most of their political capital and set out to be statesmen.

Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan end wars or engage in geopolitical intrigue. Democrats such as Jimmy Carter parade their bleeding hearts from continent to continent, understanding the needs of dictators and fostering peace processes that often end up fomenting war. What Clinton has done is ratchet this trend even further.

The man who celebrated what he called "the permanent campaign" has innovated a "permanent presidency". He is not the first former president to try his hand at the international lecture circuit. Reagan raked in a fortune in a couple of speeches in Japan; George Bush did the same. But their forays tended to be discreet affairs, sealed off in hotels or conference centres and kept deliberately below the radar screen. Clinton's relentless journeying since leaving office has been so above the radar that it has created media static.

FIRST there was the Hague in March, swiftly followed by Baden-Baden, where he he was welcomed by a saxophone band playing Don't Be Cruel. He appeared to blink away tears after appealing for rich nations to give more to poor nations. Next Copenhagen, where he caused a minor panic among his secret service bodyguards by strolling through the streets to a coffee shop. In each place he made a speech for a high fee.

Although spurned by American politicians, he turned up at some unexpected places in America. In March 200 executives from the company that owns the Ripley's Believe It or Not chain of museums gathered in Gatlinburg, a Smoky Mountain resort. They were told to welcome a surprise speaker. In walked Clinton. He also addressed the Asian American Hotel Owners' Association in Atlantic City for a fee of about £90,000.

Returning overseas he went to India, South Africa and Nigeria. But probably his biggest pay day was the double fee he received for two speeches in China three weeks ago. First, Fortune magazine's global forum in Hong Kong; second, an investors' forum in Shanghai. Estimated income for the day: £200,000.

By May 14 he was in Norway: lunch with the prime minister and in the evening a 45-minute speech on "leadership and communication" to an audience of 1,400 people, most of whom had paid about £640. "Everybody can give a speech. Everybody has a story. Remember the microphone is your friend," Clinton told them.

Fatherhood, he revealed, was the most important part of his life: he drove Chelsea to school until she was 13 (when the secret service took over the task) and did her maths homework with her until it got too difficult for him to follow. He was reported to have earned about £100,000 for the evening.

Next day he was in Stockholm saying pretty much the same thing to 500 Swedish business leaders. On Wednesday it was Vienna; on Thursday in Warsaw, where someone threw an egg, the speech was "globalisation and the world economy" but the fee was much the same.

Don Walker of the Harry Walker Agency, which books some of Clinton's speaking engagements, said: "I've been doing this for 29 years and he's by far the most popular speaker in the history of the lecture circuit. The offers are piling up like airplanes over LaGuardia [airport] on a foggy day."

"Life's great," the former president confirmed to reporters last week during a four-day visit to Ireland, where he was mobbed. Bertie Ahern, the taoiseach, truly spoke for a nation when he said that "we in Ireland have come to see President Clinton not just as a statesman of great vision and ability, but as a friend". Bono of U2 pronounced himself a fan.

The highlight of Clinton's stay was a £70,000 lecture on globalisation at Trinity College, which was not fully scripted but was delivered with the help of some notes. Even the Irish media were shocked by its banality. The Irish Times dismissed it as "lofty, fine-sounding, amoral rubbish".

That aside, there was golf, schmoozing and a gala dinner at Dublin Castle, said to have raised £700,000 for a reconciliation fund for Northern Ireland.

In Northern Ireland itself his reception was slightly more conditional. He was heckled in Londonderry and more eggs were thrown. (They missed.) He arrived bearing gifts, including cash for a peace centre and student scholarships. His speech - at Queen's University - was free; but he wanted this kept a secret lest the precedent bite into his future income.

On Friday Clinton was in Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and where Chelsea is said to be keen to study. Yesterday the entourage drove into Newport, South Wales, where - in the absence of acceptable accommodation half an hour away in Hay-on-Wye - the temporary high command was bivouacked at the Celtic Manor resort hotel.

Its owner is the Welsh computer multimillionaire, Terry Matthews, founder and chairman of Mitel - which was sponsoring a dinner for Clinton last night held in a marquee on the little football pitch of Hay's primary school.

The list of celebrities eager to dine in the same tent with the former president was constantly changing last week, causing security nightmares. Among those expected were Joseph Fiennes, Paul Merton, David Baddiel, Alan Rickman and Sophie Marceau, the French actress. National newspaper editors booked tables at £2,395 a time, as did publishers hoping for a contract on Clinton's memoirs. On the menu was Welsh chicken, a variety of cheeses from Pembrokeshire and champagne from Bollinger.

In future, the children of Hay school will all be able to say: "Bill Clinton ate here" - a cheaper way of sharing his aura than the £100 a ticket paid for his lecture before the dinner. The 1,000 seats were sold out. The normal charge for Hay lectures is £4 to £12; but Clinton is getting a fee of about £90,000.

Clearly his visit has been a coup for the festival and its director, Peter Florence. But privately there have been complaints that the former president has reneged on agreements to give interviews in Hay. There have also been rumours of exasperating behaviour by his representatives, who countermanded each other in passing on his requests and instructions to the festival organisers. And big American sponsors were reluctant to be associated with Clinton's presence.

For the bibliophiles of Hay, light relief has come from the tall men with crew cuts who have checked the school, the castle grounds, some of the dinner guests and some bookshops. Phil Pankhurst, who manages the Mark Westwood Bookshop, spotted "some very heavy gentlemen in dark shades . . . They did stick out, though, rather like a sore thumb".

CLINTON says he's just a citizen on this tour, which, like most things he says, is an evasion of the truth. Private citizens do not command 60 minutes of the Chinese president's time during a tense stand-off with the Bush administration over the detained American spy plane on Hainan island. Private citizens do not go on televised walkabouts in big European cities or speak of the peace processes in Northern Ireland and the Middle East without consulting his government. These are the actions of someone who still, somewhere in the back of his mind, thinks he is president - or ought to be.

The style has not changed. He loves hobnobbing with world leaders and celebrities. Since leaving office, he has met more foreign leaders than George W Bush, visiting 10 countries to Bush's two.

He is also still addicted to the privileges of power - just as he was in office. He loved Air Force One and the White House, treating them as personal fiefdoms to dole out goodies and perks to his friends, family, celebrities, movie moguls and financial backers. Now he has to make do with commandeering huge hotel suites in foreign countries and sending in hordes of secret servicemen wherever he or his daughter travels.

He is rarely content to travel light or modestly. The expense? The trouble? The security? They are someone else's problem. The one thing to remember about Clinton is: it's always all about him.

Of course, he is also really good at this. It's hard to meet him without being seduced within seconds. He is a master of warm blather, which is perhaps why the Irish have taken to him so readily. He also has a warm physicality about him, engaging men and women with equal passion, reserving his leers for occasional pretty girls.

Getting out of a limo to greet even a small crowd is what makes him feel full. He needs their love, like an addict needs the next fix. So what if that keeps his hosts waiting for him later in the day?

Clinton was famous as president for never turning up on time, for delaying decisions to the last minute, playing havoc with schedules while he satiated his enormous ego with glad-handing.

So in Ballybunion, the scheduled golf game starts late and ends at dusk as an 18-hole outing becomes twice that, and nobody sees fit to criticise him or stop things short.

The ex-presidency, however, is a difficult and still-evolving institution. At 54, Clinton is one of the youngest former presidents ever, still obviously in command of all his virtues and vices, and someone who knows little else about the world except how to schmooze it into submission.

Jimmy Carter largely rescued his reputation as president with an almost holy ex-presidency. Setting up the Carter Center in Atlanta, he devoted himself to world peace, human rights and poverty at home. He was occasionally used as a freelance ambassador in delicate international situations. He wrote several books, even poetry, and burnished his image as a devout if overly sincere southern Democrat.

Clinton cannot capitalise on sanctimony. The last thing anyone associates with him is holiness or sincerity. He is a charming, even lovable, charlatan. As a freelance diplomat, his skills have not been found to be very good. He presided in America over one of the most ideologically polarised periods in recent history. There are not many presidents in American history who have so mismanaged their relations with Congress as actually to get impeached. His attempt to bring peace to the Middle East opened up a vicious new war. His inaction in Bosnia during his first term all but guaranteed the genocide that he was eventually forced to stop. His handling of Russia and China was solid but unspectacular.

It's difficult to think of George W Bush using him in any way as a diplomat. Besides, at a pinch, Bush has another former president with a more tactile global reach and a better reputation for high diplomacy - his father. It would be far more sensible in, say, a tricky conflict with China to send Bush Sr rather than Slick Willie.

What are his other options? The first is raising money, Clinton's quintessential skill. He needs the money more than any previous former president because even Nixon didn't rack up the legal bills that Clinton did in his constant game of chicken with the American legal system. He reportedly told a friend: "I'm in such debt, I won't crawl out of the hole for years."

He is still too ethically radioactive to raise much money for his party; but wait a year or so and you'll see him being wheeled out again for the faithful in order to finance the 2002 congressional elections.

A television chat show? It has been rumoured - but one has to wonder whether even Clinton might find that a little cheesy for a former president. Another run for office? It's possible, but somewhat clouded by the career of his wife. A married couple and both senators? Barely heard of.

There is always a chance that he would do something crazy and run for mayor of New York City or something, but I doubt it. He has a presidential library to fund and build, a wife to support and money to make. If he does seek political office again, it won't be for a while.

His liabilities after office remain what they were in office: discipline and sex. He will do what he has always done: dabble in fundraising, travel abroad to all sorts of places, blunder into more sleaze, get obsessed with one topic after another without mastering any. Because he seems incapable of self-reflection, he shows no signs of having absorbed the reasons for his own failures as president.

For Clinton, the impeachment simply didn't happen - it was about extremist Republicans rather than his own pathological perjury. He says now that he tried to do too many things at once when he first came into office, but he never seems to have internalised what that meant. In many respects, his second term was as chaotic as his first - the only discipline forced upon him by having to deal with a hostile Congress.

The discipline he will need to be a good former president will therefore be hard for him. He probably won't limit his causes to a single one. He could, for example, devote the rest of his career to racial reconciliation in America. He's uniquely suited for it. But it would be too constrictive a project for his expansive and hyperactive ego.

Similar things could be said about his weakness for women. Some have described his sexual recklessness in office as a conscious moral or personal choice. But it's far more likely to be something he simply cannot help.

Sexual gratification is his medication for the hugely busy but strangely empty life that he leads. Now that he is no longer president, being sued for sexual harassment or committing perjury in a deposition, that's a matter for him, his wife and his God. But it will surely get him into trouble again. Another sexual harassment lawsuit from an aggrieved intern and he will be toast. But how will he resist? He shows no sign of having grappled with his obvious psychological problem - even the humiliation of 1998 didn't do that.

Witness what happened in Oslo after Clinton gave his speech two weeks ago. Rather than retiring to bed, Clinton went out to dinner with some students at a branch of TGI Friday, the American restaurant chain. A 19-year-old girl presented him with a tulip. Clinton gave her a hug. "You're too beautiful to only get a hug," he told her.

Anybody who thinks he has changed is fooling himself. These patterns of behaviour are driven so deep they will almost never change. In this sense, Clinton is once again a sex scandal waiting to happen. And the scariest thing is that he barely knows it.

IF HE is unlikely to channel his talents and energies into a disciplined post-presidency, that doesn't mean he will go away. He is still the dominant figure in the American Democratic party. Look at the others.

Gore's presidential campaign, under almost ideal circumstances, showed that political skill is still vital if you actually want to win. The new Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, handed power by the defection last week of a liberal Republican, Jim Jeffords, to the Democratic ranks, has the charisma of a rainy day in Rotherham.

Whether the Democrats like it or not, Clinton is still the biggest talent they have. Like Margaret Thatcher and the Tories, they will neither be able to live with nor without him for the foreseeable future. He is still politically lethal in the middle of the country, where elections are won and lost. But it is difficult to usher such a figure off the stage at the peak of his considerable, undisciplined powers.

Get used to him. He is going to return to Britain in December for more fundraising and glad-handing. Neither hemmed in by conservative restraint nor deterred by liberals' distaste for money-grubbing, Clinton is coming to a fundraiser near you soon.

There isn't a continent he won't hit up. There isn't a culture he won't try to embrace. He'll talk to anyone wealthy for the right amount of money; and he'll talk to anyone unwealthy if they'll return his love. Spurning him doesn't help: he'll just try even harder to win you over.

Forgive America if it sighs a little as it sees his charm exude exponentially elsewhere - for the moment at least. After eight long years, it's time for someone else to take the strain.

Richard Brooks, John Burns and Maurice Chittenden contributed to this article

-- Anonymous, May 27, 2001