I ask Clinton why the Bush administration has gotten much softer press coverage than he did. He gives a variety of explanations, including September 11 and the rightward drift of the media. Then he gives an explanation that’s surprisingly tart: “The Bush people didn’t have anybody working for the White House who, as far as I could tell, had an inexplicable, craving need that a lot of the young people did who worked for me in that first year to talk to the press—even when they didn’t know what they were talking about.”

Wow. Kids, you know who you are.

It may be true that every former president obsesses this way. But it’s striking how hurt Clinton still is by Al Gore’s choice to distance himself from his administration’s record. “When he changed the theme of the campaign to ‘Don’t put your prosperity at risk,’ there was an astonishing closing of the gap,” he says. “He picked up like a rocket, you know. And won the race. You can go back and look. Watch the polls.”

During the 2000 campaign, Clinton says, he even suggested to Joe Lieberman, Gore’s vice-presidential nominee, that he and Gore try to use Clinton’s impeachment to their advantage. “I mean, heck, if a pollster called me and asked me if I approved of Bill Clinton’s morality based on Monica Lewinsky, I’d say no too,” he says. “But I thought this was really a great opportunity for two people who no one would ever suspect would make a personal mistake to say, to say, ‘What Bill Clinton did was wrong, but he paid for it. What the Republicans did was worse, because they trashed the Constitution. You can’t afford to give them the executive and legislative branch—because they will abuse power.’ ”

The disarray of Clinton’s party continues to rankle him. You can hear it in his voice; he’s constantly fretting to friends. When the Swift Boat ads were saturating the airwaves, Clinton told John Kerry that he should immediately call for a town-hall meeting with Bush and Cheney, so that everyone could “sit around and talk about what they did during the Vietnam War.” The campaign didn’t listen.

Why?

“I don’t know,” he says at first, then reconsiders. “But I do know that when voters hear all these attacks, they may not necessarily believe them, but they give great weight to how you deal with them.”

A big part of the GOP’s success, he ventures, “has been the increasing capacity of Republicans like Karl Rove to go after Democrats as people and as Americans.” But, he plaintively adds, “if they keep beating us with the same old strategy, we have to say it’s as much our fault as theirs.”

“I want to thank you for coming today,” says Clinton. He’s in Zanzibar at one of his foundation’s community centers for people living with HIV/AIDS. Twenty-two women and three men are sitting on benches and a giant rug on the floor. Some have brought their children. One woman has an emaciated infant in her lap. “I know,” he adds, “that it means overcoming a big stigma.”

The room is small, stuffy, humid. At first he talks simply, without tenderness even, about his foundation’s AIDS work. Then he gets much more personal.

“You know,” he says, “many of you may feel very lonely in your illness. But you should know that there are people out there in the world who think about you every day. We get some money from governments, but some of our money also comes from regular people.”

The translator converts this sentiment into Swahili. The women seem surprised to discover this.

“Back when AIDS was discovered in 1981,” he adds, “America had the worst problem with the disease. And starting about twenty years ago, I knew people personally who contracted it, and they didn’t make it. I buried them. By the time I became president, we were fortunate enough to have the medicine, so we could just give it to everybody who needed it. And we’re going to try to do the same here.”

When Clinton started his foundation, AIDS was already well-covered ground: by the Gates Foundation, the Global Fund, the World Bank, Unicef, Doctors Without Borders. But when Ira Magaziner, currently director of the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative, met with foreign officials, he kept hearing the same thing: No one was working on getting AIDS patients into treatment. “It was all education and prevention,” says Magaziner. “The subtext from the Western world basically was, Africans die all the time.”

In July 2002, Clinton and Mandela both spoke at the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, where it became clear that the high cost of anti-retrovirals was killing AIDS patients in developing nations. At the time, the average cost of treatment was $1,600 per person annually. In most of the African countries the foundation was looking at, incomes averaged $400 per year.