They just remembered that America of the mid to late 90s was more of a fun place than it is now. People were happier and, in a perverse way, the essentially trivial Lewinksy scandal helped Bill in retrospect. If the worst thing about him was a fling with an intern, was that really so bad?

The clamour over the stained dress drowned out whimpers from the prudish that Clinton was as corrupt as any president in US history and had put the White House up for sale. Tycoons ponied up $200,000 for a night in the Lincoln bedroom. Among the last documents he signed as president was a pardon for the fugitive financier Marc Rich.

Rich's former wife Denise, who campaigned ardently for the pardon, threw $450,000 into Clinton's library fund, $70,000 to Hillary's Senate campaign and another half-million to Democratic causes. Dick Morris claimed the zaftig Denise paid one hundred visits to Bill in the White House, the year before the pardon.

Came the Bush years, mostly not fun at all, and Bill flitted around the globe, associating his name with worthy endeavours like the fight

against AIDS. As an ex-president he could never aspire to the elevated moral tone copyrighted by Jimmy Carter, but a solid chunk of Americans felt warmly towards him, most conspicuously blacks.

All that changed in the first primaries, most notably in South Carolina where he was widely regarded as having been dismissive of Obama as a black man. Since then his transmutation has taken on a macabre tempo: it's like watching an old movie of Jekyll turning into Hyde.

The bouncy charmer of January is now disclosed as a predatory lobbyist demanding outlandish sums for services rendered to a unalluring collection of patrons. The rewards are large. To take one example, committed to the Clinton Foundation is $131m from Canadian mining czar Frank Giustra.

Clinton flew to Kazakhstan with him to hunker down with Kazakh tyrant Nursultan Nazarbayev, after which Giustra was leased valuable uranium mining rights.

The political inconvenience for his wife of Clinton's lobbying has become a staple of the talk