BILL CLINTON is finding it difficult to transfer voters’ affections for him to his wife as opponents exploit concerns that two dynasties – the Bush and Clinton families – could dominate American politics for 28 years.

The former president was in the small town of Glenwood, on the fringes of western Iowa, campaigning for Hillary last week. “I feel like an old racehorse who is semi-retired,” he said with self-deprecating charm. “Every now and then they drag me out of the barn and see if I can make it round the track one last time.”

The audience loved it but his mission in Iowa was deadly earnest. Hillary Clinton leads Barack Obama by only three points in an early voting state which advisers in both camps say will provide the key to victory or sudden death in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination on January 3. John Edwards is narrowly behind them in third place. As soon as Hillary left Iowa, Bill stepped in to fill her place.

“If a woman is intelligent and strong enough to do the job and is credible on national security,” he said, “having a woman candidate will be an asset, not a liability.” He reeled off a list of women who had made it in politics, including Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the new president of Argentina who has just succeeded her husband. “It’s hard to believe that America is more sexist than Argentina,” he added.

The United States, however, considers itself to be a more mature democracy. Grover Norquist, one of America’s most influential Republican activists, aims to turn the question of dynasty into a campaign issue.

“It will be ridiculous to have Mr President and Madam President in the White House,” he said. “We’re the United States of America. How can we say to President Mubarak [of Egypt], ‘You can’t hand off the presidency to your son, it’s got to be your wife’ or, ‘Hey Syria and North Korea, you’ve got to knock this stuff off and be like us’.”

Norquist has commissioned lawyers to draw up a constitutional amendment that would ban family members from succeeding one another to elected and appointed office. If passed, it would not apply to the Clintons as a Bush was elected in between them. But Norquist believes that it will alert voters to the perils of dynasty. “Americans don’t like to go back,” he said.

“Reaganism was forward-looking. Hillary is running a reprise of her husband’s campaign. The advantage for the Republicans is that Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney are new.”

President George H Bush was sworn into office in January 1989. If Hillary Clinton wins two elections, the Bushes and the Clintons will have been in the White House for more than a quarter of a century.

In Glenwood, some voters expressed enthusiasm for a “two-for-one” presidency, saying they liked the Clintons’ “package”. Others left the hall full of praise for Bill but with doubts about Hillary.

“I’d vote for Bill again in a flash, but Hillary is divisive . I’m looking for a president who can unite us,” said Bob Chambers, a local politician who is backing Obama.

Later that day Obama addressed an equally large crowd nearly 200 miles away in Knoxville. The parking attendants at his rally were members of Barack-Stars, 17-year-old school pupils who are entitled to vote in the Iowa caucus if they turn 18 by November 4, 2008, election day.

Obama’s innovative organisation has paid more attention to mobilising the teenage vote than any other campaign.

Andrew Lopez, 17, said: “I wasn’t even born when the first Bush became president. Bill Clinton is one of my all-time favourites, but there’s something about Hillary’s nature . . . As a kid, I don’t feel she gets me. She seems too uptight.”

Others were concerned that Republicans would be able to revive the dormant scandals of the Clinton era. In his first stumble of the campaign, Bill Clinton last week accused his wife’s opponents of “swift-boating” her – an over-the-top reference to the smearing of John Kerry in 2004, which her advisers regretted and which may have been provoked by his own vulnerability to attack.

Last week Kathleen Willey, who claimed in 1998 that Bill Clinton had groped her, published a book, Target: In the Crosshairs of Bill and Hillary Clinton, rehashing the old allegations on right-wing television chat shows.

Bonnie Merckley, 21, said: “I thought Bill Clinton was a great president, but when people remember his presidency, they remember the scandals.” She added that Obama was better placed to win a national election, a theme the senator for Illinois took up in his address.

“There are a lot of disaffected Republicans and independents who are willing to give us a chance, but we have got to have a candidate who can bridge that divide,” Obama said.

Peggy Noonan, former speech-writer to President Ronald Reagan, noted in The Wall Street Journal last week that Obama was beginning to win support from Republicans and independents who “see him as a Democrat who could cure the Bush-Clin-ton-Bush-Clinton sickness”.

She added: “I say sickness because on some level I think it is driven by a delusion: ‘We will be safe with these ruling families whom we know so well’. But we won’t. They have no special magic. Dynasticism brings with it a sense of deterioration. It is dispiriting.”

Hillary Clinton's official campaign website

Going on and on

1989-1993 George H Bush First Bush to be elected president

1993-2001 Bill Clinton First Clinton to be president

2001-2009 George W Bush Second Bush to be president

2009-2017 Hillary Clinton? First woman president and first wife to be president

See http://bushclintonforever.googlepages.com

Times Recommends

• 'Lost' cargo ship Arctic Sea gives up its secrets
• Army wants to retreat in Afghanistan
• Jungle angel was Obama’s mother