The contrast could not have been more striking. Former president Bill Clinton on the streets of Harlem, surrounded by adoring crowds, announcing that he had decided to open his office there to cries of "Bill we love you." Clinton the hero.
Back in DC, up on Capitol Hill, even his old friends were queueing up to say they thought his pardoning of billionaire fugitive from justice, Mark Rich, was a scandal. Clinton the pariah.
But it's always been love-hate here, with just the numbers shifting occasionally from side to side. Bill Clinton has the extraordinary knack of inspiring deep emotion, an uncanny empathy with those who want to hear his message, and a loathing among Republicans which goes beyond politics.
So we have the improbable sight of centrist Republican Arlen Specter talking about a second impeachment after the president has left office, and in the House and Senate, pardon officials and lawyers for Rich being dragged in to be asked who said what and when.
Now Mr Clinton faces the possibility of criminal charges, though lawyers here say that bribery charges would be difficult to prove, usually requiring the co-operation of one party. However, President Bush's faint "time to move on" is falling on deaf ears.
Jack Quinn, Rich's American-Irish lawyer, says the pardon was based entirely on concern for his client's treatment by an over-enthusiastic Federal prosecutor in New York, one Mary Jo White, a Clinton nominee who heads the office which indicted Rich in 1983. Well, he would, wouldn't he?
And the evidence he has to support his claim? His version of a 20-minute phone conversation held with the then president on the eve of the pardon.
Yet the very fact that Quinn, a former White House counsel, ever got to speak to the president marks the case out. How many "victims" of the US judicial system have lawyers who have such access? Indeed, the access is such that Quinn bypassed all the normal Justice Department procedures for applying for pardons and went straight to the White House.
Neither Ms White nor the pardons attorney of the Justice Department, the official responsible for conducting background research on pardon applications, was asked for their views. The senior justice official, Mr Roger Adams, who received the White House notification of an imminent Rich pardon, says he was not told by the White House that Rich was a fugitive from justice, merely that he was "living abroad".
The president's discretions in these matters is absolute. Although the Justice Department would not have recommended a pardon because its policy was not to do so until five years after an offender had served his sentence, Mr Clinton was not obliged to follow such advice.
The next question is inevitable: was his decision in any way affected by the $1.1 million donations made by Rich's former wife, Denise Rich, of $450,000 to the Clinton Presidential Library Fund, more than $1.1 million to the Democratic Party, and at least $109,000 to Hillary Rodham Clinton's senate campaign?
She is no anonymous donor. TV has repeatedly shown us clips of her presentation at a big function to Mr Clinton of a new saxophone.
He sent a message to her through a friend, the Democratic National Committee's finance chairwoman, Beth Pozoretz, that he was doing his best to organise the pardon. The two women were on a skiing holiday together. Just a coincidence, you understand.
At the very least an appearance of impropriety was inevitable. Bill Clinton's ham-fisted and possibly worse departure from office has cast a new pall over his legacy, undoing much of the work of his last few months remodelling the tarnished image.
ONLY a few weeks ago, many Democrats were hoping that with the eclipsing of Al Gore, Clinton could re-emerge in a leadership role in the party - part fund-raiser, part cheerleader - using his undoubted skills to rally the party faithful against the new Bush regime.
That was then. In the interim, we have had the small matter of the mother of all "gift lists", the removal from the White House of $190,000 worth of state-owned furnishings, the Manhattan office rent fiasco, not to mention a pardon list that had more than Rich raising eyebrows.
The belated decisions to relocate to Harlem, to return White House furnishings and to pay donors for some of the gifts has done little to blow away the stink of sleaze. A close examination of most of the scandals shows that Clinton behaved properly, accepting advice from federal officials about what he could or could not take with him or what rent might be acceptable, but these were all icebergs which he should have seen coming. The letter of the law matters little, appearance, all.
Those Democrats who would in the past have given their support to him are now privately warning of a sense of weariness with the endless Clinton saga. On Rich they are blunt.
"I strongly disagree with the president's use of his constitutional power," Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the judiciary committee said on Wednesday. Charles E. Schumer, the senior senator from New York, said "it makes a mockery of the system".
California's Senator Dianne Feinstein had "concerns not only about the Rich pardon but about a number of others" who were granted clemency on Clinton's last day, including convicted Californian narcotics trafficker Carlos Vignali. Massachusetts Senator Barney Frank warned about Clinton's "insensitivity", saying it would "harm his ability to be useful to the causes he believes in".
Democrats have been furious that their response to the Bush tax package has been overshadowed on news bulletins by the Rich case, some going as far, anonymously, as to talk of "betrayal". When he was in office, such upstaging, intentional or inadvertent, was the just-about-acceptable price of having their man in the White House. Citizen Clinton's excesses are another matter.
His "radioactivity" has been underscored by the embarrassing apology by Morgan Stanley to its investors for having paid the former president $100,000 for a speech and the news that another large company has pulled out of negotiations with him.
Even the junior senator from New York has had to keep out of the firing line, wearily telling all who ask that she has no view on the Rich affair. It is a sorry end to a presidency and president which carried so much hope.