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Clinton's era

With his astonishing mix of blarney and brilliance, personal empathy and political calculation, Bill Clinton could have walked off the pages of a southern novel. The revivalist language of repentance and redemption is second nature to him, but so too are the practices of “war room” politics. Often in the past eight years he has seemed like one of Flannery O’Connor’s enigmatic characters, caught between God and the devil—with Hillary Clinton, Dick Morris and assorted other characters nipping at his heels.