SO many of the recent books about Bill Clinton have been hatchet jobs a relief to read one written from a basically sympathetic viewpoint and which tries to put him in an international as well as an American context The fact that the author was at Oxford with Clinton when he was a Rhodes scholar in the late 1960s explains the sympathetic approach. And then, Mr Walker's present job as the Washington correspondent of the Guardian gives him a perspective on the Clinton presidency which is not available to American biographers.

Pinning down Bill Clinton is a nearly impossible task. What does he really stand for? What does he mean when he calls himself a "new Democrat"? For many it means being a "liberal Republican". On a more personal level, how can a man who was regularly unfaithful to his wife preach ad nauseam about the need for "family values"?

This book makes a good shot at answering many of the apparent contradictions in the Clinton career, from broken home in backward Arkansas to the White House via Georgetown University, Oxford, Yale law school and the Little Rock Governor's mansion. Part of the explanation, Mr Walker writes, for this rise of a country boy from the South is in the interlocking networks of "Friends of Bill" who were built up by Clinton from his student years and whose intellects and skills were available when the road to the White House opened up.

But it was wife Hillary Rod ham Clinton who saved him from political extinction when she stood by him when the Gennifer Flowers storm broke. How George Bush, victor of the Gulf War, lost that election to a Clinton damaged by his womanising and draft dodging is still hard to understand, although Ross Perot's 19 per cent of the vote goes some way to explain it.

Perhaps Clinton was more surprised than anyone. His first two years in the White House were a nightmare as he and his inexperienced staff stumbled from one gaffe to another. But as the author points out, "if there was one constant characteristic of Bill Clinton's political career, it was an utter refusal ever to give up". Unlike Jimmy Carter, who alienated his own Democratic majority, Clinton quickly learned how to govern with the first Republican majority in both Houses on Capitol Hill in 40 years, so much so that he seems set to beat Robert Dole and win a second term when America goes to the polls on Tuesday next.

How he reinvented himself after that Republican mid term landslide in 1994 to make himself virtually unbeatable in 1996 will long be studied by politicians and political theorists inside and outside the US. Mr Walker's concluding chapter, on The Coming of the New Consensus is particularly revealing. He sees Clinton as "tee first president since Roosevelt to watch the simultaneous crumbling of fifty years of agreement on the fundamental principles of policy at home and abroad. He was also to become the first president since Roosevelt to craft the framework of a new consensus for foreign and domestic strategies alike."

Mr Walker is also perceptive on how the Clinton foreign policy has become so trade orientated in the aftermath of the Cold War and so determined to exploit the new global economy. But embracing the benefits of free trade is not without risks even for an economic giant like the US.

Bearing the brunt of free trade with its cheaper priced imports means that domestic policies must adapt to a new consensus of "cleaner and meaner government". This means that old style Democratic liberalism such as open ended support for welfare programmes by the federal government would have to be jettisoned.

Education, leading to new skills and therefore new jobs, must replace "welfare as we know it", Clinton has urged, and then signed a welfare reform Bill that disgusted such close allies as Senators Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd.

More death sentences and police on the streets is his answer to increased crime. Curfews, harsher anti drug laws and TV censorship are the ways to protect youth, according to the Clinton doctrine. Yet this conservative agenda of which Newt Gingrich would be envious comes from a president who is "in his flaws and sensual weaknesses, his readiness to put off hard decisions until it was almost too late, his fondness for spending, and his casual approach to debt, utterly typical of the America of his day. He was, in that sense, the president America deserved." Hence Mr Walker's title.