But what enlivens Clinton most, still, is clearly politics. He plumps like a sponge when discussing it. You can just tell how much it kills him to be benched. Shortly after Bush released his first budget, Leon Panetta, Clinton’s former chief of staff, recalls chatting with his old boss and listening to him try to formulate the Democratic response. “At some point,” Panetta says, “I began to think, That’s great, but I’m here in Carmel Valley, 3,000 miles away.”

Protocol dictates that former presidents, especially ones of a recent vintage, can’t spend much time in Washington. So Clinton keeps up mostly by phone: with John Podesta, his former chief of staff, who now runs a think tank; Rahm Emanuel, a former policy aide who’s now chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; his former campaign advisers; Berger; and, naturally, his wife.

But with the exceptions of Emanuel and senators Christopher Dodd and Ted Kennedy, he doesn’t chat very much with members of Congress, unless they want his campaign advice. (For this, they call him all the time.) “Clinton didn’t leave Democrats with a new sense of mission and direction, a legacy they could build on,” says Robert Reich, the president’s former Labor secretary and one of his less bashful critics. “There was no Clinton doctrine, no Clinton approach to foreign or domestic policy. But he is one of the best political strategists in America. So how does he use his skills to the utmost? Beyond doing what he’s been doing, I only see him getting his wife elected president.”

Unlike Al Gore and John Kerry, Hillary will certainly take Bill’s advice. She already has. One can already hear it in her speeches—not just in her deft and gingerly discussions about abortion, but in the general moderation of her tone. (The day before I attend a Democratic Leadership Council event in New York where Bill is the headliner, it’s reported in Roll Call that Hillary has joined the DLC.) Unfortunately, playing consultant to his wife will, in some cases, make it harder for Clinton to play consultant to others. As Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator and current head of the New School, points out, “Presidential candidates would have to phone and ask, ‘Say, have any good ideas about how I can beat your wife?’ ” He pauses for a minute, reconsidering his syntax. “Wait. Please say defeat your wife. I meant defeat.”

(Though now, inconveniently, Hillary herself has to defeat Jeanine Pirro in 2006.)

But politics is something Clinton knows, at least. What he’s doing now is improv, and he’s not quite sure where he’s going. Watching him invent his new life is fun, intoxicating, but a tad bittersweet too—sometimes he seems to be taking a mulligan on his presidency, doing the redo, and he often repeats himself, retelling almost verbatim anecdotes he’s written for My Life. His aides, like faithful spouses, have heard his stories dozens of times, and if the setting is informal, they cluster toward the end of the table and talk among themselves as he entertains. Many still wind up playing cards with him until the small hours of the morning.

These young aides are now the backbone of his life. Clinton may be treated like royalty abroad, but on this trip, he travels with a corps of just a half-dozen or so, which seems pathetically meager for a man with so many lingering ambitions. “I think he misses the ability to say ‘Do this’ and it happens,” says John Breaux, a recently retired senator from Louisiana. “He’s very impatient.”

The irony is that Clinton has never been better equipped for elected life. “Watching him today, with the self-assurance he has with foreign leaders and the knowledge of the world he’s acquired,” says Holbrooke, “it’s impossible not to think, Oh, if only he’d known all that when he was president. I feel it. Everyone feels it. He’s now operating at a level so extraordinary, you know he’d have accomplished more. But that’s life.”

Clinton is staring out the window of his SUV, the sumptuous, feminine hillscape of Kigali flying by. “A lot of the borders in African countries are just as artificial as the borders in the Middle East,” he says. “But Rwanda, as you see, is highly mountainous, so it’s basically been a mountain kingdom for 500 years . . . ”

“Lookie here,” he interrupts himself. “That is a big wedding.” We stare at hundreds gathered outside a brick church.

Kigali is the one place in Africa where I do not see Clinton getting a hero’s welcome. At the moment, we’re on our way to the genocide memorial. As he waves to people standing by the road, almost none wave back.