He was the Man from Hope. He was born there - in that small, God-fearing town in Arkansas - and he was always full of it, bursting with optimism to lead his country into the next century.
For a while it all seemed possible: success, prosperity, record-breaking popularity - even the history books beckoned. Now the promise is broken. And William Jefferson Clinton, who dreamed his entire life of becoming president, has only one hope left: his own desperate, narrow survival.
How Bill Clinton threw away the prize he had sought from early boyhood will engage historians, writers and doubtless film-makers for years to come. It is a remarkable story, a journey of such roller-coaster turbulence that those who have followed it from the start become queasy at the recollection. At its core is a personal tragedy repeated, albeit in less spectacular fashion, in millions of lives everywhere: the tragedy of opportunity lost and potential wasted.
And, lest anyone doubt it, the hopes were high. Maybe some Americans have forgotten the excitement Bill Clinton generated when he exploded on to the national scene in 1992. "The failed governor of a small, southern state," the Republicans called him. But voters didn't see it that way. You only had to hop aboard one of the famous Clinton bustours through the American heartland to see that.
On one swing through southern Georgia, the buzz was palpable. People didn't just attend rallies, they lined the highways in crowds to catch a glimpse of the man who would be president. Some held banners urging the young governor with the gargantuan appetite to stop awhile and sample the local peaches or peanuts - and of course, he did.
His aides would get enraged, every stop delaying the tour by a few more crucial minutes. By the end of a campaign day, Clinton would be running four or five hours late, but it didn't matter. In the town square at Valdosta, Georgia, a crowd that had gathered for a 9 p.m. rally stayed put until 2 a.m. Under floodlights in that summer night, they cheered themselves hoarse.
For Clinton promised a new start. George Bush had wrapped up the Cold War, but was floundering at home. The economy was in recession, and Bush couldn't recognise a supermarket scanner when he saw one. Governor Clinton, by contrast, was astounding: he knew the price of bread, butter and cheese down to the last cent. It became an object of parody later, but at the time it worked: Clinton told those in need, "I feel your pain."
Everything was on his side. He was young - a good enough saxophonist to belt out Heartbreak Hotel on late-night TV - he looked good, and he seemed to have a brain of planetary proportions. He wowed academics and experts, showing astonishing mastery of detail of every social programme in the country.
Above all, he appeared to have genuine political commitment. He was passionate both about reforming "welfare as we know it" and ending the scandal of US health care, which leaves tens of millions of Americans with no medical insurance whatsoever.
When victory came, centre-left parties all over the world watched in awe. In becoming a so-called New Democrat, Bill Clinton appeared to have solved the problem which had kept their candidates out of office for decades. He had won over the middle class, shedding the Democrats' association with fringe, minority groups and their reputation for weakness on crime (partly by breaking off from the campaign to return to his home state and order the execution of a retarded black man convicted of murder).
He promised to crack down on welfare dependency, but also to help the poor stay healthy. He had found a new way between left and right. As 1993 dawned, the word of the hour became Clintonisation. Taking careful note were two rising stars in the British Labour party: Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. When the man from Hope swore the oath of office on January 20th, 1993, everything seemed within reach. The new President Clinton had a talent for people, a coherent programme, serious brainpower and - unusually under the US system - no obvious roadblock on Capitol Hill. It's often forgotten that the Clinton Presidency began with tremendous muscle, armed with Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate.
But it didn't turn out that way. Sure, there have been undeniable triumphs. At home, Bill Clinton has presided over a near-unbroken run of prosperity, with the US economy surging ahead in rude health while its rivals have stumbled.
Once Americans feared they were losing their edge to Japan: instead they have seen their own stock rise and rise (until very recently) while Tokyo is in meltdown. The President gets credit, if only for renewing the term of the much-admired Alan Greenspan as chairman of America's central bank, the Federal Reserve.
He's also achieved what none of his recent Republican predecessors managed: balancing the US budget. In the 1992 campaign, a dominant issue was the ballooning deficit, inflated by Ronald Reagan's fondness for spending money the country didn't have, chiefly by cutting taxes and lavishing cash on the Pentagon. Forced to work with a Republican Congress, President Clinton has turned that pattern around so that now the US debates not debt, but how best to spend a surplus.
Abroad, too, Bill Clinton has shown what might have been. All sides in Northern Ireland concede that the US President's role was pivotal in advancing peace.
From the unpopular decision to grant a US visa to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to the late-night phone calls to the peacemakers on the eve of Good Friday, Clinton has shown the difference he can make when he applies himself. In Northern Ireland the President deployed both his gift for personal warmth and his almost uncanny grasp of minutiae - he never forgets the difference between the UDP and the DUP - to great effect.
But the "place in history" which Tony Blair said his American friend had earned in Northern Ireland is the exception rather than the rule. Elsewhere there are precious few examples of potential fulfilled: from the failure to reform health care to the deterioration of the Middle East peace process, the Clinton Presidency is a story of chances not taken.
There are probably two ways to explain how this opportunity slipped away, one political, one personal.
The first is the health-care debacle itself. That policy was the flagship of the first Clinton term and, when it sank, it took much with it.
Under the guidance of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the administration presented Congress with an almost comically complicated blueprint for a new system of medical insurance. Rather than a single, in-principle change it called for a vast, intricate new bureaucratic machine. Expressed as a diagram it looked like a circuit-board for the space shuttle.
The fact that the plan had been hatched by a task force meeting Mrs Clinton in secret only added to its Soviet-era aura. The plan was rejected, along with any compromise alternative. By the summer of 1994, healthcare reform was dead. Bill Clinton's image as a New Democrat was in tatters. He had drifted to the left, accommodating the traditional Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill. Voters thought he was reverting to the party's old, meddling habits: in British parlance, health-care reform was deemed Old Labour. Punishment came in November 1994, when Democrats were swept aside in both the House and Senate. The "Republican Revolution" had arrived.
Until now, this moment always seemed like the lowest of low points. The President was visibly depressed, skulking around behind the gates of the White House, while the new House Speaker and Republican dynamo Newt Gingrich sucked up all the political oxygen. Pathetically, Clinton had to insist he was still "relevant".
With the help of his longtime adviser, Dick Morris, Clinton fought back. He developed the "triangulation" strategy which would place himself between congressional Democrats and the nowdominant Republicans. Once in power, the latter soon became unpopular, adopting ever more extreme positions.
Triangulation paid off when Gingrich went so far as to shut down a large chunk of the Federal Government in the winter of 1995-6, rather than let the House pass a Clinton budget. Suddenly Clinton was the defender of popular services - in education, environment and health - while his opponents were dangerous fundamentalists. He gained a poll lead which he never surrendered, and which he rode to re-election in November 1996.
It worked, but something crucial had been lost. After health care, Clinton would never again offer a large, bold programme. The Morris tactic meant sticking to small, achievable signature items such as school uniforms, teenage curfews, rather than mega-legislation. Bill Clinton's lifetime ambition to reach the White House had been achieved, but for what?
Morris himself has written that without a grand mission his most famous client is lost: without "some important, valiant fight for the good of the world to lend coherence and structure to his life . . . he would become depressed, paranoid, surly and, one suspects, escapist."
Which brings us to the second of the two cancers which have eaten away at the Clinton Presidency. The desire for escapist pleasures is a hallmark of the Bill Clinton life, from the banana-and-peanut-butter sandwiches of adolescence to the serial womanising of married life. Can it be that, bereft of the crusade which his confidant Dick Morris believes he needs, a bored Bill Clinton - cruising toward election - chose the escapist pleasure of semi-sex with Monica Lewinsky?
Even if it didn't, it was this self-indulgent streak which has indirectly hobbled the Presidency for 4 1/2 years. It lay behind the 1994 Paula Jones case, which in turn spawned and legitimated independent counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation of the Lewinsky affair. In 1991, the then Governor Clinton - just months before he would announce his candidacy for the US presidency - allegedly summoned Ms Jones, a 24-year-old receptionist, to a hotel room for a quick bout of doesn't really-count oral sex. That rash moment, like the ones with young Monica in the Oval Office, spilled the first seeds of disaster.
So it's worth remembering that Bill was born in a place called Hope, but grew up in a town called Hot Springs, a racy Arkansas pleasure-pit of gamblers, gangsters and goodtime girls. Clinton-watchers like to talk of a Good Bill, the church-going idealist from Hope, and Bad Bill, the womanising cigar-chomper from Hot Springs. Those two have been at war all his life, but in the White House apparently, Hope became the loser. Such has been the journey of William Jefferson Clinton. He had such big dreams, and for a while America shared them. But few men can escape their nature, nor, in these dramatic days, their fate.