that covering an American presidential campaign is "better than watching the best circus that ever was.''
Things that are well made are long in the crafting. As a young boy, Bill Clinton played touch football in his yard and sometimes pretended he was a Kennedy on the White House lawn. A few years later he was on that lawn, shaking hands with the Kennedy who lived there, vowing privately, we now know, that it would be his house one day. Two devastating political defeats and several more victories helped him hone his political skills, and by 1988 he seemed ready. He passed that year, but in the years to follow he burnished his centrist credentials with the single-mindedness that has characterized his life. Ronald Reagan was gone but his legacy endured. The nation's political
