The potential payoff for Clinton is more ineffable but no less substantial. Last time around, recall, Obama’s candidacy was based in part on the consignment of Clintonism to the dustbin of history. But now, with Obama running unabashedly as the inheritor of that creed, Clinton is reveling in seeing his legacy restored to what he regards as its rightful status: a restoration that will mightily benefit his wife if she hurls herself at the White House again in 2016. Speculation on that topic is rife within the Clinton diaspora; no one has a clue as to whether or not Hillary will run. But, equally, no one doubts that her husband dearly wants her to—mainly because, among members of the tribe, he can’t shut up about it.

Clintonism isn’t the only thing being rejuvenated here, however. What’s taking place is the revivification—and the ­Godzilla-scale enlargement—of Clinton himself. In 2008, a not insignificant number of white liberals and African-Americans assailed him as, if not a racist, a race-baiter; he was battered and bruised, scalded and scarred, mired in self-pity. But in 2012, he has emerged as the Democrats’ own Dutch: revered by his party, respected so much by the GOP that it dare not cross him, sanctified by the great heaving middle.

The irony, and it is thick as porridge, is that the instrument of this transformation has been the younger man whom Clinton once scorned as a usurper—acting with a degree of cold calculation that the elder cannot help but admire. “Obama engineered this reconciliation, and I think the whole time he was, like, ‘Why do I have to do this?’ ” says Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a former adviser to both Hillary and Obama. “He did it because he wanted to win, and this was the way to do it. But in the process, he’s made Bill Clinton the king of the world.”

Clinton, to be sure, has experienced regnant periods before, and every time they presaged a precipitous and self-inflicted fall. As his biographer David Maraniss has observed, Clinton’s life is a ceaseless cycle of triumph, disgrace, and redemption—up and down, up and down, wash, rinse, and repeat. Among those in Clinton’s orbit, the salient question is whether, at long last, the cycle has been broken. Or will the Maximum Canine, having shed his leash, soon find himself in the doghouse again?