ON the eve of yesterday’s vote in South Carolina, it was finally possible to glimpse America’s greatest power couple together. Hillary Clinton stood at the centre of the stage in front of an adoring audience, while Bill sat meekly to one side.

As she reminisced about shrimping in the coastal town of Charleston in the early days of their political life, Hillary turned to him and asked in a folksy manner: “Honey, what car were we driving then?” as though he really was auditioning for the traditional role of first laddie.

The light comedy act did not last long, as she went on to recall that he had not driven his own car since 1992 when he was elected president. Since then Bill Clinton, 61, has grown accustomed to life as one of the most famous people on the planet. His role in his 60-year-old wife’s campaign became so dominant last week that it was as if he was running for a third term in office.

Camille Paglia, the cultural commentator who has voted for him twice, pities whoever might serve as Hillary’s vice-president, should she reach the White House. “It’s pretty clear that Bill Clinton will castrate any vice-president that Hillary nominates and undermine her authority,” Paglia said. “His behaviour is atrocious. It is one lie and fantasy strung out one after another. It just feels tacky and trashy.”

A race like a crackpot Dynasty

The contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton matches any fiction

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She predicted: “He is not going to sit on the sidelines. He is going to be out of control in office.”

Bill Clinton’s emergence as the leading attack dog for his wife raises the vexing question of whether Hillary can win and govern without him. Yet, if the exit polls are confirmed, his behaviour may have contributed to a backlash in favour of Barack Obama, who won an emphatic victory in South Carolina last night.

The battle for the nomination now heads towards Super Tuesday, February 5, the national test for Obama, when 22 states will vote. The question is: are Americans more addicted to the Clintons’ long-running psycho-drama and “two-for-one” presidency than they are inspired by Obama’s soaring rhetoric at a time of looming recession and foreign policy challenges?

The arc of the presidential campaign stretches from east to west and north to south. “I feel very good about Super Tuesday,” Hillary Clinton said before bolting to Nashville, Tennessee, without waiting for last night’s result, while her husband headed for Independence, Missouri.

Her team has been working out not only the best states, but also the best districts in which to maximise her share of voting delegates at the Democratic National Convention in August. Her advisers are confident they can roll on from the disappointing result in racially polarised South Carolina to victory across the country.

In New Jersey last week, a February 5 state with 127 delegates, Hillary addressed a largely white crowd of 2,000 at a school hall, who were enthralled by the Bill and Hill show.

“There’s an entertainment factor,” said Cathy Botti, 38, a former New Jersey councillor. “It’s like Prince Harry and Wil-liam. We just love to hear about their lives and girlfriends. They’re imperfect but we love that. It’s the same with the Clintons.

“We want our leaders to be a little bit imperfect, but strong. It will be great for the country to have them back. It’s a continuation of the story.”

Campaign aides claim the tough fight with Obama is helping Clinton to raise her game and widen her support, so that she will be a stronger candidate against the Republicans in November’s election - as long as she does, in fact, win the nomination.

The Clintons made a great pretence of ceding South Carolina to Obama last week in order to make their projected loss there irrelevant.

Together they have been portraying Hillary as the “insurgent” candidate against Obama, the vaunted favourite, a tactic that succeeded brilliantly in New Hampshire and Nevada, so-called “comeback” states where she had actually held the lead for almost the entire year.

In reality, Bill Clinton fought tooth and nail to win in South Carolina, spending all last week there, tying down Obama while giving his wife the space to cast her campaign ahead to future, delegate-rich primaries. She knew she could count on Bill, the “big dog” as he is known, to do the heavy lifting for her.

But did he overdo it by exploding red-faced in anger at reporters and tearing into Obama for carrying out a “hit job” on him? The Onion satirical magazine parodied Bill Clinton’s intervention in the race as “Screw it! I’m running for president”.

After Obama said plaintively that “I can’t tell who I’m running against”, the former president shot back: “I thought he was running against me for a while.”

He took umbrage at Obama’s claim that President Ronald Reagan had dominated the battle for ideas in the past 10 to 15 years. Bill Clinton had praised the Republican icon himself when he ran his first presidential campaign at the same age as Obama, provoking charges of hypocrisy.

Aides to the Clintons, including Mark Penn, the poll guru, devoted hours last week to briefing against Obama’s alleged “kneecapping” of Bill and accusing the Illinois senator of running an “under the radar” smear campaign against him for months that was now in the open. “We’re not going to stand for it,” they fumed.

It was vintage Bill Clinton, playing the victim, right down to the finger-waving seen when he fibbed about not having sex with Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern.

George Stephanopoulos, a former White House aide, once said Bill had six types of anger, including one for show. There is no doubt the upstart Obama got under the veteran campaigner’s skin. But Clinton’s display of pit-bull aggression was also a calculated move to whip up mistrust of his wife’s rival and overwhelm Obama’s rock star status with his own celebrity wattage.

Sally Bedell Smith, author of For the Love of Politics, an exploration of the Clintons’ White House years, said: “In the early days of the campaign there was a lot of jocularity about Bill Clinton being the first laddie but, in fact, he is the president. He is using his unusual status as a way of getting attention and campaigning as Hillary’s de facto running mate.”

At times he would forget to drum up support for his wife and lapse irresistibly into talking about himself. At a college in Orangeburg he was asked what Hillary Clinton planned to do in her first year in office about the gap between the haves and the have-nots. “Good question!” he replied. “I want to claim some credibility on this,” and went on to talk about his antipoverty initiatives in the White House.

It was the same when he was asked about his wife’s preventive healthcare policies. “Great question!” he responded, mentioning that he ran a national project for heart disease.

It enraged Shaquannah Young, 25, an Obama supporter. “He just talked about himself. He hasn’t been president for eight years, so what does it matter?” she said. She was also upset by his jabs at Obama. “You’re showing your true colours when you’re slandering somebody else.”

Inside the hall, however, were plenty of young African-Ameri-can students for whom Bill Clinton was his wife’s greatest asset. Kenton Waring, 23, said he would vote for Hillary because of Bill. “A lot of people think that if she gets into office, she’ll do what Bill tells her to,” he said approvingly. “It helps her to appear qualified.” Paglia believes that Hillary Clinton’s dependence on Bill undercuts her qualification to be America’s first woman president. “As a feminist, I find it very unsavoury that the first credible woman candidate for the White House is using her husband as a shield,” she said.

“I loved her at the start of Bill’s presidency and I’ve tried to give her a fresh look, but my present disillusionment is entirely to do with her behaviour. We’re really getting the essence of the Clintons now.”

Hillary Clinton would have preferred to win with Bill on the sidelines. He had stayed away from her public campaign – in case he outshone her – but as the threat from Obama grew, he was brought to the fore as her chief surrogate.

During the Iowa caucuses there was a lot of sniping in Hillaryland, the close-knit world of her female confidantes, about Bill stealing her limelight and going off-message. But shaken by her humiliating third-place defeat, Hillary turned to Bill – always her closest adviser – to save her.

Together they rounded on Obama’s lack of experience and Bill launched into the “fairytale” of Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war.

The issue of race soon followed, with Hillary patronising Obama in debate as a “talented” and “young African-American man” and Bill belittling South Carolina voters by saying he would understand if they chose Obama over Hillary for reasons of racial “pride” – while disingenuously accusing Obama and his aides of being the first to inject race into the campaign.

Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and author of a new book about the Democratic party’s checkered history of racism, said: “Hillary and Bill and their surrogates have been pushing the limits of what you can get away with saying in a public sphere. If they were Republicans, they’d be crucified.”

The effect, he added, was to turn Obama into “the 2008 version of Jesse Jackson”, with the white vote deserting him.

Obama is often contrasted with Jackson, the civil rights leader who ran for the White House twice in the 1980s, for aiming to be president of all America as opposed to president of “black” America. Yet he could end up with little more to show for his campaign once the Clintons have finished with him. It is largely forgotten that in the 1988 White House race, Jackson won 11 primaries and caucuses as the “minority” candidate, including his home state of South Carolina, industrial Michigan and predominantly white Vermont.

In an example of how split African-Americans are over Clinton’s candidacy (and perhaps how determined they are to hedge their bets), Jackson’s wife Jacqueline is supporting Hillary, while Jackson is supporting Obama in lukewarm fashion and his son Jesse Jackson Jr, a congressman, has a leading role in Obama’s campaign.

It is not just whites, Bartlett points out, who have been rallying to Clinton ever since the race card was played. “The way the race issue has played into black and Hispanic rivalry is going to be a key element of this race,” he said, pointing to Super Tuesday states such as California, Arizona and New Mexico.

Obama was initially thrown on the defensive by the Clintons’ aggressive tactics. He briefly ran a hard-hitting radio advertisement accusing Hillary Clinton of being willing to “say anything” to get elected and his wife Michelle railed last week against the way some “folks still feel entitled to the mantle of power”.

However, without the Clintons’ megaphone, Obama’s coun-terattacks have looked somewhat puny. “His answers have not been pointed. You can’t keep doggedly saying, ‘That’s not what I meant’,” Paglia said. “We’re in the final weeks of the campaign and his responses don’t have that sense of urgency.”

Several leading Democrats rushed to Obama’s aid, including John Kerry, the 2004 presidential candidate, who accused Bill Clinton of “getting frantic” and abusing the truth, and Robert Reich, labour secretary in the 1990s, who said that his old boss’s behaviour was “demeaning” for a former president.

Bartlett believes the Republicans have finally found a juicy target in the Clintons, who have proved just how polarising they can be against a member of their own party.

“Instead of doubling their assets, they might be doubling their negatives in the general election,” Bartlett said. “It’s interesting to hear so many Democrats say, ‘I never understood this thing Republicans had against the Clintons – now I get it’.”

Should the Clintons reach the White House, the public is already getting a preview of how the “duopoly” will work, according to Bedell Smith. It will extend far beyond Bill serving as Hillary Clinton’s ambassador-at-large, she observed. Earlier this month Bill said in Napa Valley, California: “I’ll be there talking her through everything like she did with me.”

“Because of Bill Clinton’s stature and force of personality, his informal authority would override everybody else’s from the vice-president down,” Bedell Smith said. “Hillary will be a forceful president but there will be moments when people wonder who is in charge.”

You can forget the nonsense about calling him first laddie, she added: “He will still be called Mr President and she will be called Madam President.” It could still be hard for Obama to match the public’s fascination with that new dynamic.

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