“Clinton Embraces Return to Ambassador Role” is the dull headline of a revealing Washington Post article—reporter Anne Kornblut was the first print reporter to interview the former president (in his hotel room in Kigali Rwanda, one stop on his annual African tour) since Hillary’s defeat. Having spent two years, 16 hours a day, seven days a week as I interviewed, researched and wrote Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House, this window into the former president’s current state of mind got me thinking again about Bill.

Only the second American president to be impeached—the other was Andrew Johnson, and both escaped conviction by the Senate—Bill Clinton has had an exceedingly bad year since he joined his wife on the campaign trail in July, 2007.

Before he started to campaign for Hillary, you might have thought that the former first lady and senator from New York was the single mother of Chelsea. Hillary referred to her daughter often, but rarely mentioned her husband. Hillary’s advisers fretted that Bill might kill a sure thing—i.e. Hillary’s inevitable march to the White House; back then, she was, remember, ahead by double digits in the polls and “inevitable” was attached to her name as tightly as Monica was to Bill’s. When Katie Couric asked candidate Clinton how disappointed she would be if she was not the Democrats’ nominee, she answered, “Well, it will be me.”

Then still possessing an impressive barometer for politics, Bill knew that the young sensation from Illinois might be an impediment, but Hillary’s inept aides dismissed Obama as a flash in the pan. Eventually even they began to notice that Obama, just three years out of the Illinois state Senate, was attracting huge audiences. So they unleashed Bill that summer of ’07 to accompany Hillary to the state fair in Iowa. Her handlers continued to fret: Bill was running with a fast crowd of billionaires—among them, divorced grocery magnate Ron Burkle and Hollywood movie producer/playboy Steve Bing, he of the famous Elizabeth Hurley paternity test, and heir to a real estate fortune. Bill was often aboard their private jets, and what went on in the lavish interiors was anyone’s guess, and, one day, the worry went, someone was going to collect the evidence to hazard more than a guess.

So they tried to keep Bill on a leash, but he was unpredictable and stubborn. He went from being consigned to a stool after introducing Hillary at a broiling Des Moines rally—the stool was designed to keep the ever sleep-deprived former president from falling asleep as he listened to the less-than-scintillating Hillary. (Hillary had not yet “found her voice.”) Bill didn’t have the Nancy Reagan total-adoration act down and, as uncomfortable as the stool was, he appeared on the verge of drifting off into deep boredom or light sleep.

As Barack began to surge, Bill’s concern turned to anger. Who were these American voters not to recognize that Hillary was entitled to be president? Look at all she had put up with; look at all she had sacrificed. The Clintons had an agreement that he’d serve two terms and then she’d have her own two terms, but they seemed to forget that the American voter hadn’t signed on to that deal.

When I was interviewing for Clinton in Exile, pundits and politicians told me that Bill is the most brilliant political strategist of all times. But he seemed to have lost it. He erupted into red-raced rages and boneheaded remarks—as when he alienated the African American voting bloc—a bloc that had given Hillary majority support– by comparing Obama’s win in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s there in 1984 and 1988. As things got worse for Hillary, Bill became increasingly volatile. He called Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum, “a scumbag” because the reporter printed in the July issue the chatter—mostly attributed to anonymous sources– that Bill’s personal and business activities post presidency were potentially scandalous.

As shoddy as the reporting was in “Bubba Trouble: The Comeback Id,” I believe that had Hillary captured the nomination, Bill’s extracurriculars would have killed her chances to defeat John McCain. They have certainly made it impossible for Obama to select Hillary as his VP.

Bill Clinton dubbed himself “the Comeback Kid” with good reason: when, in 1980, he lost his first bid for reelection to the Arkansas governorship, he spent two years apologizing and learning from his hubris and he was reelected. In 1988, the still-young governor gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention—the same opportunity that sent Obama on a trajectory that might propel him to the Oval Office. Gov. Clinton blew it by delivering speech so long and boring that his only applause line was, “In closing.” Every pundit worth his hairspray announced that Clinton had made such a fool of himself in public that he was finished in national politics, but he apologized, went on Johnny Carson, donning shades and playing the saxophone with Doc Severinsen and the NBC Orchestra. Skipping ahead to 1992, after getting caught in an affair with Gennifer Flowers and lying about it on “60 Minutes,” he still managed to eke out a victory against George H.W. Bush (thanks to a supermarket scanner and the presence in the race of Ross Perot).

Bill Clinton was, in effect, a one and a quarter term president—the Lewinsky scandal broke on January 21, 1998 and he spent three years attempting to keep his job. Once the Senate voted not to convict, he had to work hard to elevate himself from late-night comics’ joke to a man who could be judged as having had an admirable legacy.

On leaving the White House on January 20, 2001, he was buried in bad press for granting a pardon to the fugitive from American justice, Marc Rich. Clinton’s reputation was so deep in the cellar that respectable people did not want to be seen with him and the chairman of the first company, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, that invited him to speak post White House let it be known that he would have liked to have rescinded the invitation.

But Bill survived and then some. He established his foundation and his Clinton Global Initiative—the 4th CGI will take place in New York next month–and became the rock-star ex-president, the most popular man in the world. And there he happily resided until he began to campaign for Hillary. While no one is rescinding speaking engagements—he made $10 million on speeches in 2007 and would have made much more had he not taken time to campaign for Hillary—he has lost his luster. The late-night comics were giving him a rough time again; he just seemed pathetic, he was widely blamed for ruining Hillary’s chances.

Since Hillary admitted in a speech on June 7 that Barack Obama was indeed the nominee—her supporters disagree and are working for a roll-call vote in Denver later this month—Bill seems to have spent most of his time sulking. He has had only one conversation with Obama and told Kornblut that he does not yet know what his role will be at the convention.

Obama’s handlers surely wish that he would stay in Africa or Asia or somewhere equally distant and take Hillary with him. Bill Clinton has been “shut out of the Obama campaign almost entirely,” Kornblut writes. Clinton didn’t offer the reporter many words of praise for Obama—mustering only “smart” and “a good politician.”

Among those accompanying Clinton on Africa tour were long-time Hollywood pals Mary Steenburgen and Ted Danson, Terry McAuliffe, a former head of the DNC, and the Clintons nonstop fundraiser/“cheerleader.” Kornblut reminds us that last June 3, the night that Obama amassed the number of superdelegates he needed to claim the nomination, the goofily enthusiastic McAuliffe introduced Hillary Clinton as “the next president of the United States.” (Earlier he had announced, “This thing will over by February 5th [Super Tuesday].”

Also along were Christie and Tom Vilsack. Tom is the former governor of Iowa and himself a very short-lived contender for the presidential nomination. He seemed on an extended tryout to be Hillary’s vice president until Obama won Iowa (Hillary came in third, behind John Edwards.) Vilsack is probably making the same bet as the Clintons; that Obama will lose in 2008, Clinton will run in 2012, and perhaps tap Vilsack as her vice president (assuming she wins Iowa next time). Vilsack better use the next four years to brush up on international affairs. He told reporters on this trip that Clinton’s work in Africa–which included breaking ground on a new hospital in Uganda—was “what foreign policy ought to be about.”

Kornblut also reported that Clinton brought along a film crew, “sponsored” by Steve Bing, to document his good works. The former president will not be happy to read her observation that “even in Africa, the continent to which Clinton has devoted so much energy, the enthrallment with Obama, the son of an African father, is evident. Before dawn Saturday at the Kigali airport, where Clinton was to arrive to take a helicopter ride out into the country, workers gathered around a television to watch a story about Obama.”

Clinton is likely still seething at the fact that 200,000 people turned out to see Obama in Berlin. Those kinds of crowds are supposed to be reserved for Bill Clinton. When Obama was drawing standing-room-only crowds and Bill Clinton was speaking to half-full gymnasiums, Clinton, who sometimes seemed to forget to mention Hillary as his speeches devolved into “me, me, me,” said, petulantly, that one million people had come to see him in Africa. “I’ve been told I give a pretty good speech,” he volunteered at that campaign stop in eastern Texas.

Bill Clinton gave his first broadcast interview to ABC News on Monday. Talking to him in Monrovia, Liberia, correspondent Kate Snow observed that “at times, he appeared to grow testy as he discussed his wife’s failed bid for the nomination.” Snow asked him if he was partly to blame for Hillary’s loss (which seemed akin to asking him if he still beats his wife). He admitted that there were “things I wish I hadn’t said. He then added, “But I am not a racist. I’ve never made a racist comment and I never attacked him [Obama] personally.”

For Bill Clinton, it’s undoubtedly hard to accept that he and Hillary are not poised to return to the White House –I had planned a sequel, Clinton Back in the White House. It must be even harder for him to accept that the Obamas, come January 20, might be moving into his house, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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Carol Felsenthal, a Chicago native, is a regular columnist for the Huffington Post and the Chicago Daily Observer. This column was written exclusively for The Observer.