Clinton Embraces Return to Ambassador Role

Back home, even unwavering allies acknowledge that Clinton is now in a period of recovery. "They don't call him the comeback kid for nothing," Mark Penn, the chief strategist for much of the campaign, said -- implicitly acknowledging Clinton has something to come back from.

"If there's one thing that we've learned in the last 20 years, it's never to count Bill Clinton out," said Howard Wolfson, the senior communications adviser to Hillary Clinton's primary campaign. "And I think this trip is a very powerful reminder of the really extraordinary work that he has done around the world over the last eight years and he will continue to do. And in the end, his work on behalf of people and the substance of that work will trump the YouTube moments that came to characterize some of the last 18 months for him."

Perhaps mindful of the way former vice president Al Gore reversed his downward trajectory after losing in 2000, Clinton has brought along a documentary film crew, sponsored by his Hollywood friend Steve Bing, to chronicle his trip. And two months after his last campaign appearance for his wife, on the eve of the South Dakota primary, Clinton started to talk again to reporters, a species he came to especially resent during the course of the campaign after what he and aides felt was a raft of unfair coverage.

Clinton said that even if Obama wins, people who voted for him will still have immense work to do.

"What we Democrats can't afford to do, even as we support Senator Obama, is try to build one America on the cheap," Clinton said, explaining that people could not tell themselves, " 'I voted across the racial divide; I have no obligations to do something in my community or around the world.' In other words, if he wins . . . we've still got a lot of problems. We've got to heave-to here. We've got to show up."

Asked his view of Obama's high-profile overseas trip, Clinton said it could wind up helping him in the long term if not right away. "I think that the benefit Senator Obama may get out of that trip may come later in the course of this campaign in ways that aren't as obvious as having however many people -- 200,000 people or however many people -- showed up in Berlin."

Obama might be helped, Clinton said, "in some debate when he can say, 'You know, a captain I met in Iraq said this to me,' or, 'I observed this in Afghanistan' -- and I don't mean in a phony, showy way. I mean you want your president to have a feel for this. . . . It's like everything else. You just learn it. You absorb it, so every time you do it, your comfort level goes up."

Clinton said it is an open question whether Obama's big events overseas ultimately helped or hurt politically. But, he said: "He should not be either discouraged or encouraged by the reaction of that trip. He should internalize it. It should be a thing that had merit for him in and of itself. And the fact that it had very little political impact in the short run should be of no concern to anybody. Most voters don't have the space for it right now."

Still, there is a new world order for Clinton, even half a planet away. His trip has drawn large crowds in the places he has gone but has been little more than a blip on the global radar screen, low-key compared with what a Clinton international visit once was and almost invisible compared with the journey Obama made just a week earlier.

Even in Africa, the continent to which Clinton has devoted so much energy, the enthrallment with Obama, the son of an African father, is evident: Before dawn Saturday at the Kigali airport, where Clinton was to arrive to take a helicopter ride out into the country, workers gathered around a television to watch a story about Obama, who was thousands of miles away. At a hotel later, local workers asked reporters if they knew Obama. An African guest wore an "Obama '08" T-shirt.

Clinton is on a characteristically whirlwind journey: After starting out in Ethiopia, he flew to Rwanda on Friday. He travels to Liberia and Senegal on Sunday, making announcements on work his foundation has done on malaria drug price reductions and HIV, and then, without even an overnight stop, he will travel back across time zones to Mexico City to deliver the keynote address at an international AIDS conference on Monday.

His daughter, Chelsea, who took a leave of absence from her job to campaign for her mother, joined her father at every stop, asking questions of local officials and posing for photographs.

And McAuliffe, the over-the-top advocate who introduced Hillary Clinton as "the next president of the United States" on June 3, the night she effectively lost the nomination, brought his exuberance to the small villages along the route as if it were a campaign trail.

As Clinton strolled through a rural town Saturday morning, McAuliffe, running ahead, spotted a group of young children and local villagers waiting to meet the former president. He ran up with his arms outstretched. "How we all doing? Good?" McAuliffe shouted at the bewildered crowd. He waved the Vilsacks over and ordered up a photograph of the moment, and soon the entourage was on to the next stop.