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Infinite LoopWhat Bill Clinton's talkathon can teach us.

By Jacob WeisbergPosted Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2009, at 7:02 AM ET

When Paul Begala came up with the phrase "the comeback kid" to spin Bill Clinton's second-place showing in the New Hampshire primary in 1992, he may have been making a deeper observation than he knew. At any given moment, Clinton seems to be winning your admiration, squandering it, or putting every ounce of his energy into regaining it. He's at his best in a corner. But after a while, you begin to notice that it is always the same person who puts him in the corner. There's a Houdini element to the performance. Clinton allows himself to be bound in chains so that he can emerge to amazement and applause. He's like a fireman whose hobby is arson.

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The Clintonian loop of accomplishment, self-sabotage, and recovery means that whoever you are—a member of the public, a journalist covering him, an aide, his wife—it is impossible to maintain any kind of consistent attitude toward him. If you invest your hopes in him, he will disappoint you. If you fall in love with him, he will cheat on you. And if you decide you're giving up on him once and for all, he will move heaven and earth to get you back. This routine, embedded since childhood, will continue until the day he dies. It played out most recently in the 2008 election. Clinton helped to undermine his wife's presidential chances and infuriated even his most ardent defenders by diminishing Barack Obama's primary victories and dismissing his popularity as a "fairy tale." Through the first half of last year, everyone was completely disgusted with him. But the ex-president has been on his best behavior ever since, and we've all forgiven him once again

For an inside look at this cycle, enablers can now turn to a curious artifact, The Clinton Tapes. Taylor Branch, the author of a magisterial three-volume biography of Martin Luther King Jr. and a friend of Bill and Hillary's from the 1972 McGovern campaign, coaxed the president into sitting for 79 recorded interviews spanning his eight years in office. The tapes were made as a historical record for unspecified future use. Clinton expected to draw upon them when he wrote his memoirs and eventually make them available to historians. Because of various sensitivities, the project was kept secret from all but a few essential helpers. Branch would meet the president in the White House residence, often late at night, and gently interrogate him about events of the previous weeks and months.

At the end of each session, Branch would hand his recordings over to his subject. Clinton kept the tapes but, true to form, procrastinated for so long on his memoirs that he finally had no time to make much use of them in churning out that windy doorstop. Branch, however, kept his own unofficial record of the unofficial record, dictating a reconstruction of each session immediately afterward, usually while driving back to his home in Baltimore. He draws on his version, for though the new book seems to come with Clinton's tacit blessing, Branch did not have access to the actual tapes. To the mostly paraphrased account, he adds ruminations on his multiply conflicted role—friend, speechwriter, unpaid adviser, historian, journalist, and freelance advocate for Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the ousted and then restored president of Haiti—but only minimal interpretation of his own.

A more apt subtitle for the book might have been "Wrestling with the president to get back to the point." During his conversations with Branch, Clinton would sometimes stick to the chronicle and sometimes rage or ramble about whatever was on his mind—Bosnia, golf, Maureen Dowd, golf, the Razorbacks, Ken Starr, golf, and the bottomless category of miscellaneous but irrelevant. I did not know that Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, has a higher proportion of trees to landmass than any national capital other than Washington, D.C. Nor did I know that most players use an iron to cross the water hazard on a tricky par-4 hole at Deerfield Beach. At times, Clinton seems like someone trying to win the Trivia Bowl.

To wade through nearly 700 pages of such asides, meanderings, and tirades about the press is to relive in miniature the kind-of-interesting-kind-of-boring talkathon that was the Clinton presidency. In one meeting just after the catastrophic defeat of 1994, when the Democrats lost both houses of Congress because of Clinton's tax increase, Branch arrives to find the president dead asleep in the barber's chair. Clinton is roused with difficulty, then nods off some more while a tailor adjusts his suits to accommodate his swelling waistline. Woken again, he ranges brilliantly across matters domestic and international, but "again and again, he fell asleep while talking," Branch records. Clinton's endless stream of table talk has something of the same narcoleptic quality.