US:As the outset of the campaign it was feared Bill Clinton might upstage his wife. He did, but not in the way people expected, writes Edward Luce
THE DEMOCRATIC primary season that formally ended last night not only broke all records on cost, duration and levels of participation. It also shattered many tenets of conventional wisdom held at the start.
Of these, the expectation that Bill Clinton would be Hillary Clinton's greatest asset was perhaps the most axiomatic.
"Bill Clinton is an extraordinary and unique asset for Hillary," Donna Brazile, who was campaign manager for Al Gore as the former vice-president ran for the White House in 2000, told the Financial Timesat the start of these primaries. "Their challenge is to ensure that he remains the trimmings - she is the entrée. She is the main course." Nobody imagined Mr Clinton would turn into the indigestible shellfish. At the start people were worried he would outshine his wife, pointing to how effortlessly he upstaged her when they made side-by-side orations at Coretta Scott King's funeral the previous year.
In the event, Mr Clinton did upstage his wife frequently on the campaign trail but not in the way that people had expected.
Wearing his trademark pink shirt and aqua blue tie, the abiding 2008 image will be of the former president wagging his finger, face reddening, and upbraiding the media for its allegedly biased coverage of the former first lady's campaign. With each "shame on you" outburst, Mr Clinton diverted attention from his wife's campaign and reminded people that she was there by virtue of her husband's former presidency. In addition it reinforced the sense that the Clintons somehow felt entitled to the nomination.
Mr Clinton's most recent loss of temper - at a campaign stop on Monday in South Dakota - also served to remind people of the seamier sides of the Clinton saga. He was responding to a question about an article in the latest edition of Vanity Fairthat detailed lucrative associations with wealthy businessmen such as Ron Burkle, the California-based supermarket chain owner, and Frank Giustra, the Canadian mining magnate.
Todd Purdum, the author of the article, also made several insinuations about Mr Clinton's associations with women. "He is still a scumbag," the former president said when reminded that Mr Purdum was married to Dee Dee Myers, his former press secretary. "He is just a dishonest guy - he can't help it."
But perhaps the most damaging impact Mr Clinton had was to give the impression that he was stoking the profound demographic splits that have characterised the Democratic race - most importantly between black voters and their white blue-collar counterparts.
In fact it is questionable whether Mr Clinton ever intended to "play the race card" as conventional wisdom (undaunted by its previous failings) now claims he did. That allegation first arose in early January, just before Mrs Clinton won the primary in New Hampshire, when Mr Clinton dismissed as a "fairy tale" Barack Obama's claim to have a pristine record of opposition to the Iraq war.
Some of Mr Obama's supporters stretched the context to interpret Mr Clinton's choice of words as implying that it was fantasy to assume a black man could ever make it to the White House. Either way, instead of adapting to the ubiquitous YouTube environment, Mr Clinton continued to be tripped up by it.
Two weeks later, on the day of the primary in South Carolina, Mr Clinton dismissed Mr Obama's expected victory in that state by reminding people that Jesse Jackson, the last African-American candidate, had also won South Carolina but had gone on to lose the nomination. Given the state's preponderance of black voters, his implication was clear.
Sore, perhaps, at losing the epithet of being "America's first black president", Mr Clinton alleged in a radio interview in April shortly before the primary in Pennsylvania that the "race card" had in fact been played on him and not vice versa.
Thinking he was off-air, Mr Clinton then added: "I don't think I should take any shit from anybody on that, do you?" Friends of Mr Clinton say that he believes his reputation and legacy will survive the controversies and bitterness of his wife's bid for the Democratic nomination. Others are not so confident. Some even feel it has the whiff of tragedy.
They point to Mr Clinton's quadruple heart bypass operation in 2004 and say that the effect of the surgery and the cocktail of post-operative medication that he still takes has combined to alter his character and shorten his fuse. Others point to the drastic changes the internet has wrought on the nature of campaigns and say they have rendered Mr Clinton's undoubted political genius increasingly irrelevant.
But whatever the diagnosis, there is no escaping that Mr Clinton began the campaign as his wife's greatest asset and ended it arguably as her greatest liability.