Chastised Bill’s new mantra: It’s all about Hillary

So what audiences in places like Lancaster, a working-class town of 33,000 about 30 miles southeast of Columbus, are seeing is a subdued and substantive former president going on at length about Iraq, health care, education, job creation and what he portrays as the multiple sins of the Bush administration. What he lacks in passion he makes up for in sheer volume of words.

In the Lancaster High School gymnasium on Monday, Clinton spoke for an hour to about 2,000 people. The room could have held 1,000 more, but the rest of the gym was curtained off. Earlier in the day, at a college campus in Chillicothe, he spoke in a gym that was two-thirds empty.

Instead of waxing nostalgic about his years in power or highlighting his own accomplishments, Clinton now peppers his remarks with phrases like “Hillary wanted me to tell you” and “Hillary has a plan for that”. He is as humble as he is capable of being about his own role.

“You know, I’m a little out of practice at this political stuff,” he said at the beginning of his remarks on Monday night. “Every election time I feel like the old horse they drag out and lead around the track one more time.” Clinton’s latest, less voluble incarnation was a result of deliberations within the Clinton camp in the last days of the South Carolina primary race, where Clinton had taken on his most publicly aggressive role to date against Clinton’s Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama.

While Bill was drawing goodsize crowds in South Carolina and Clinton aides at times felt he had Obama on the defensive, Bill’s campaigning seemed to be backfiring, several advisers concluded. As a result, they decided that in Ohio and Texas he would focus solely on describing his wife’s record as first lady and senator and would share personal anecdotes that might humanise her more.

But his presentations are less than transfixing. The Lancaster crowd, a mix of older residents and students receiving extra credit for attending, was attentive. They cheered when Bill promised that if his wife were elected president, she would end the war in Iraq and dismantle the No Child Left Behind legislation (which she voted for in 2002). But some left before he finished. And some of those who stayed were not overwhelmed.

Keith Crabtree, a 47-year-old airport technician from Lancaster, said after listening to Bill that he was still undecided about how he would vote in Tuesday’s primary. “He convinced me more than Obama did,” Crabtree said. “Obama says what he’s going to do, but he doesn’t say how he’s going to do it or how he’s going to pay for it.”