Stern Constitutions Needed for Globe-Trotting With Bill Clinton

The trip went on and on this way: With the schedule now delayed, events in all the subsequent countries had to be rearranged, airplanes moved, hotel rooms scrambled. An entire village in northern Rwanda spent a day waiting for Clinton, who did not arrive until the following afternoon. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, had to adjust her schedule to meet with Clinton on Sunday rather than Saturday as planned. And Senegal -- where Clinton was making a relatively important announcement on AIDS policy -- was barely a three-hour blip on the screen, lasting just long enough for a swarm of DEET-resistant mosquitoes to attack the traveling delegation during a hospital stop.

Kate Snow, the ABC correspondent, described it as "a lot like a campaign trip."

"No sleep, bad food, forgetting where you are . . . with the added twist of having no written schedule so you don't know where you're going next," she said. "But I can't complain too much. I just got to see four amazing places that I might not have ever seen in my life. Although, in Senegal, I actually only got to see the airport tarmac and a hotel."

When Snow interviewed Clinton, he apologized for the repeated plane debacles. "You know the first plane broke down three times, and then the second one, and then we lost the second," he said. "I've never had that happen before, that I had it happen twice. So it's still been a wonderful trip -- but it's been hard on everybody that has had to change planes. I'm sorry."

When I interviewed Clinton a night earlier, I broke the ice by saying I was trying to decide who had come closer to killing me -- him or his wife, with her brutal campaign schedule. (She once made a 24-hour trip to California and back without pausing for a nap.)

Clinton laughed and responded that their personal trainer, a tough German athlete, had observed that "she's actually stronger than she was when the campaign started, you know, physically." So the Clintons are Nietzscheans after all.

At the same time, it was impossible to dwell too much on such logistical problems as lack of power or Internet access -- even though not having either meant being unable to work -- while looking out the window at the dust-covered mothers along the roadside in Rwanda, the crumbling, bullet-ridden walls sheltering families in Monrovia, the children crawling on piles of burning garbage in Dakar. Who were we to complain when, during one leg of the trip in Rwanda that involved helicopter rides out to the countryside, we did not have access to water for most of the day?

There was a soothing sight awaiting us on the runway in Dakar: A North American Airlines jet, part of the fleet that ferries Sen. Barack Obama on the campaign trail, and for a while transported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. There were only a couple dozen passengers left, but no one had the energy to worry about the carbon footprint. When the plane finally touched down in Mexico City for the International AIDS Conference, where Clinton was giving a speech, it was hardly a surprise to discover that it hadn't landed in Mexico City at all, but some other airport -- more than an hour and a half from where it was supposed to be.