Aside from a few partisans on each end of the spectrum, there aren’t neatly delineated camps on this question, with Clinton lovers on one side and critics on the other. Rather, a lot of Democrats seem genuinely conflicted, on practically an existential level, when it comes to Clinton. They almost uniformly admire the former president; 82 percent of Democrats polled by Fox News in November had a favorable opinion of Clinton, and, in a New York Times poll released earlier this month, 44 percent of Democratic voters said they were more inclined to support Hillary’s candidacy because of him. And yet, they regard with suspicion, if not outright resentment, the centrist forces he helped unleash on the party. They might love Bill Clinton, but they loathe Clintonism. And it is this conflict that has, in recent weeks, become a subtle but important theme of the 2008 campaign, as Hillary Clinton’s rivals try to portray her as the Return of the Great Triangulator. Whatever else these Democratic primaries may be about  health-care plans, global warming, timetables for withdrawal from Iraq  they are, on some more philosophical and even emotional level, a judgment on the ’90s and all that those tumultuous years represent.

Hillary Clinton’s combative advisers say they welcome that dynamic. “If our opponents want to make this a referendum on Bill Clinton’s presidency, they are making a mistake,” Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications director, said in an e-mail message, “both because it’s a referendum they would lose on the merits and because Democrats are focused on the future and the change that needs to be made going forward.” And yet Clinton’s team often seems perplexed by a political quandary unlike any that has come before: how to exploit all the good will that Democrats have for Bill Clinton without allowing Hillary Clinton to become a constant reminder of the things they didn’t like about his presidency. Generally, the campaign’s preferred solution is simply not to talk about it. When I asked Bill Clinton about this issue, during an informal meeting in South Carolina, he readily agreed to sit down for a longer interview on his legacy’s role in the campaign. A few weeks later, however, and at the last minute, Hillary’s aides canceled the interview. Famously controlling, they would not even allow the former president to talk about his record.

Listening to Bill Clinton that day in New Hampshire, however, it was clear that whether or not he talks about it, his wife’s fortunes are bound up with his, and vice versa. Near the end of his speech in Gorham, he went off on an engaging tangent, as he sometimes does, about the trees he saw from his car window that morning, and how at one time New Hampshire was almost devoid of trees, and how Teddy Roosevelt led a national effort to replenish the forests. “But Theodore Roosevelt proposed a lot of ideas that fell flat on their face until Franklin Roosevelt passed them,” Clinton went on. “The important thing for us to do is to fight for the right thing and keep fighting for it until we finally get it done.” I had heard Clinton compare himself with T.R. before, but this was the first time I heard him do so publicly, and it struck me as an aside that would have made his wife’s advisers wince, if they noticed it. He seemed to be suggesting that Hillary’s job as president would be to cement his own unfinished legacy  provided, of course, that his legacy, or at least a widely held perception of it, didn’t end up derailing her first.

A little over a year ago, while working on a book about the Democratic Party’s divisions, I discussed that legacy with Bill Clinton in his Harlem office. Hillary Clinton had just begun running for the White House, and her husband was already trying to help neutralize her critics on the left; when I arrived at the office, Clinton was meeting with about 20 influential bloggers, who were gnawing on barbecued chicken and enjoying their first-ever audience with a former president. When I entered his office a while later, Clinton had his back to me and was busy rearranging the photos on his shelves, as if trying to get the visual narrative of his presidency exactly right. He recited a litany of his accomplishments  the first sustained rise in real wages since 1973, the biggest land-protection measure in the lower 48 since Teddy Roosevelt, victories against the tobacco and gun lobbies  and told me he couldn’t understand the allegation that his administration wasn’t really progressive.

“I think that if ‘progressive’ is defined by results, whether it’s in health care, education, incomes, the environment or the advancement of peace, then we had a very progressive administration,” Clinton said. “I think we changed the methods  that we tried also to reflect basic American values, that we tried to do it in a way that appealed to the broad middle class in America. We sure did, and I don’t apologize for that. The question is: Were the policies right or not? And I think in terms of the political success I enjoyed, people have given more credit to my political skills than they deserve and less credit to the weight, the body of the ideas.”

At the end of that interview, as he walked me to the lobby, Clinton mentioned a favorite quote from Machiavelli’s book “The Prince” and told me to look it up. When I got back to Washington, I thumbed through the book until I found the rambling passage, and this is what it said:

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor

more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a

new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by

the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by

the new order, this lukewarmness arriving partly from fear of their adversaries,

who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of

mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had an

actual experience of it. Thus it arises that on every opportunity for attacking

the reformer, the opponents do so with the zeal of partisans, the others only

defend him halfheartedly, so that between them he runs great danger.

Image Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton at a fund-raiser in Washington in March. Credit... Jim Young/Reuters

It’s not hard to see why the postpresidential Bill Clinton sees himself in this quotation, and it says a lot about how he views his own place in American politics. In Clinton’s mind, the New Democrats of the late ’80s and early ’90s and their “third way” approach represented a call for fundamental reform, not just of the Democratic Party but also of the country’s industrial-age government. For that, he has been pilloried by Republican business interests, who were doing just fine under the old system, and “lukewarmly” defended by Democrats who resist any real break with the past.