HE CAN’T run for president again. He hasn’t been invited to become Secretary-General of the United Nations. There’s no vacancy for the presidency of the World Bank. So what’s a 50-something former president with a famously insatiable appetite for the glare of the public spotlight and the obscurer minutiae of public policy to do?

The answer has been playing out in New York this week at the inaugural meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.

At the Sheraton Hotel in New York, a few blocks from Times Square, on a stage fitted out like a late-night television arts review set, Bill Clinton has been doing what he loves best: hosting famous and powerful people at a colloquium on the world's great challenges.

For two days, familiar figures from politics, the corporate world, non-governmental organisations and, of course, show business, have been chewing the Clintonian cud on four grand questions: global poverty; religion and conflict; climate change, and governance.

The participants have included Tony Blair, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Shimon Peres and Barbra Streisand. They have ruminated on the prospects for peace in the Middle East, saving the planet from global warming and alleviating disease in Africa.

But this is above all a Clinton event. After a scandal-ridden start to his ex-presidency four years ago, after the steady rehabilitation since then from his charitable efforts around the world, after heart surgery last year, this is the event that says Bill is back, energised, focused and homing in at last on fruitful territory in his long search for that elusive legacy.

You know it’s a Clinton event from the armies of former Clinton administration officials, greeting each other like reunited exiles in the lobby; from the battalions of pretty assistants who buzz with the self-importance that only an intern for a former president can summon; from the platoons of luminous icons, the Barbra Streisands, moving through the crowds of gawping tourists.

And you knew it was a Clinton event from the invitation to a media reception, scheduled to begin at 11pm at an achingly trendy Japanese restaurant a few blocks from the hotel, where the likes of Elvis Costello mingled happily with the hacks.

Culturally this kind of gathering is about as far from America as it is possible to get without leaving the country. At a welcoming dinner on Thursday night the participants got a private tour of the Museum of Modern Art, strolling among the giants of American twentieth century art. But never mind the Pollocks, there was serious work to be done.

On stage the action is sacramentally worthy; the aim here is not to provoke or condemn but to empathise, to demonstrate compassion for the earth and its unluckiest inhabitants.

But precisely to avoid the charge that this was simply an excuse for yet another high- profile gabfest, Mr Clinton came up with a novel idea.

Each participant was given a card on which they are required to complete a sentence that begins “I commit . . .”

This is genuinely impressive stuff. Many commitments are serious and breathtaking in their scale. Plan International, a British-based organisation headed by Tom Miller, commits a minimum of $1 billion to combat child poverty in Asia. World Bicycle Relief pledges $1.5 million to source 24,000 bicycles locally in Sri Lanka.

Some have a suspiciously vacant look. The Puntacana Resort and Club in the Dominican Republic commits to “continue to provide economic opportunities for its employees and the . . . community”.

But there is no doubting the gravitational pull of this former president. It’s hard to imagine the stars coming out for anyone else. And for many at the conference, and presumably many beyond, Mr Clinton’s presidential term now looks like a halcyon era of peace, community and international solidarity, one extended summer of love that preceded the current global winter of fear.

And though it’s easy to mock there’s no doubt that real good will flow from the prolixity and the turgidity that holds Manhattan in its grip this weekend.

And yet it is still hard to resist the conclusion that, not wholly unintentionally, the two principal beneficiaries will be the reputation of the former president, at last freed from the shackles of scandal, and the presidential prospects of his smiling spouse, dispensing bonhomie among the crowd but whose mind was surely set on securing a whole different set of commitments.

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