Clinton's Last Campaign

In his early days as President, when it seemed as though great things were still possible, Bill Clinton steeped himself in the histories of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. But as he prepares for his sixth State of the Union speech next week, this President, so publicly fixated on the 21st century, is spending his private hours pondering the quiescent, almost forgotten stretches of the 19th, the times Clinton calls "fallow periods." The biographies he has devoured lately include those of such unimpressive Chief Executives as Rutherford B. Hayes and Ulysses S. Grant. He even had adviser Sidney Blumenthal dig...