The President In the Room

It's such a delicate subject that many people who know the Clintons well refuse to talk about it. If they do, they summon their most diplomatic selves when addressing it.

"I guess the best way to say this is that they're going to be watched very closely," says Leon Panetta, Clinton's former White House chief of staff. "I think the press and everybody around him is going to be watching to make sure that the same mistakes aren't made."

Discipline: That's the key. It was Clinton's struggle while in the White House, says Panetta -- to stay focused, to not respond to diversions or to provocations. That struggle is an essential aspect of Clinton's personality.

"Clearly, in someone who is probably the brightest and most capable that I've ever met in politics, that's the weak side," Panetta says.

And it's not just sex we're talking about. It's the need for attention, adulation; to play a grand role, make a sweeping impact.

There's something unbridled about Bill's neediness, this love of the crowd -- like the story about his trip to the World Cup in Berlin this year. En route to the stadium on a bus carrying several aides and donors, Bill told the bus driver to head instead to the Brandenburg Gate, the New Yorker reported. There, hundreds of thousands of soccer fans had gathered to watch a match on giant television screens. Uninvited, the former president mounted the stage where a rock band had been performing, and just stood there waving and thanking the crowd, which responded with roaring cheers.

Could Bill's hunger for the spotlight pose problems? You bet, says James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. Hillary will have to be careful not to be upstaged by him or lost in the glare of his global political stardom.

Thurber, called the issue of Bill "a central question to her candidacy."

For starters, he said: "You have to be very careful in terms of Bill Clinton taking the headlines. So one way you do it is use him behind the scenes, to bring in money to your campaign through closed events. And in my opinion, you rarely have them appear on the stage together, and if you do, you don't have him speak."

Her campaign strategists also have to be "very careful" about managing Bill because "he sucks up the air around everybody when he's there," says Thurber. "And he needs to be loved. She is more self-assured, doesn't need as much adulation as he does. And that's trouble."

There are "so many barriers for her, alone, and then add Bill in there and then add his infidelity to it," says Thurber. "Well, she doesn't want to be looking over her shoulder and having questions asked by the media about it."

But there will be questions aplenty. How could there not be? The Clinton marriage fell into political soap opera with the troubles of Bill's White House years, with nothing but question marks hovering overhead, for a time. Was he contrite? Had she forgiven him? Would she stay? The woman whose earlier assertiveness as first lady rankled some now was tagged with a new set of labels: Hillary the martyr. Hillary the steadfast, for sticking with her man. Hillary as Machiavelli, accepting marital humiliation as the price of power.