There could hardly be a greater contrast between your view of how to deal with the world and our allies, and the much more unilateral approach of this White House. As you travel around the world, how do you assess the reaction to this change? Do you feel the Bush administration has undone the goodwill and prestige that grew from a more open, multilateral policy?

There's no question that we have suffered some loss, if not of prestige then at least of support in the world by following a more unilateral course. But that's not very important to [the Bush White House], because they saw 9/11 as an opportunity to move the country to the right and mold the world the way they thought it ought to be molded.

That's why they morphed the attack by al-Qaida into the war on Iraq, which is something they wanted to do beforehand. Paul Wolfowitz tried to get me to depose Saddam ... They see the world very differently. I believe we ought to be trying to build more and more institutional cooperation in the world, while reserving the right to act alone when we have to. They have believed, at least for the first three and a half years, that they should act alone whenever they can, using the springboard of what happened on 9/11 -- and cooperate when they have to. In the end it may bring us to the same place. In Iraq they've gone to the U.N. to get a resolution. But in the meanwhile we're leaving a lot of broken pottery along the way ... That's one of the things that ought to be debated thoroughly in this election.

Senator Kerry got in trouble earlier this year for suggesting that leaders around the world are hoping he will be elected in November. Have you picked up that sense abroad?

I think that a lot of countries would like to see us go back to a more cooperative, multilateral approach like I followed, even though there were times when they didn't agree with me. Now, I signed every international agreement except the landmines treaty, because I thought that had two parts that were malicious and would put our soldiers at risk. And I was doing more to destroy landmines than anybody who signed the treaty.

There will always be times when we are at odds with the rest of the world. But what they want to know is that we basically favor cooperation and that we care what happens to them. When they don't feel that way, they hope for a change in policy. So I think that [what Kerry said] is accurate. John got in trouble partly because nobody can be "outed" admitting that. He would have been better off not saying it, and letting other people say it. None of these people could afford to admit that and make their relations with America even more tenuous.

Iraq was the last straw. They also didn't support the International Criminal Court, although today I see they've changed their policy on that ... They got out of the climate-change agreement, which hurt America's prestige enormously. They got out of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. They don't want to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention. So Iraq has to be seen in the larger context.

Many critics, including some Democrats, believe that your presidency damaged the Democratic Party by bringing the party to its present diminished state, where the Republicans control the White House, both houses of Congress, many state houses and the Supreme Court. How do you respond?

I talk about this a lot in my book. I did play a role in losing the Congress in '94. Part of it was inevitable. We had to clean up their fiscal mess and we lost some votes because we did it. The Republicans portrayed our budget as nothing but a tax increase and we didn't effectively counter that ... We should never have lost the White House and we didn't -- we just didn't win by enough to stay out of the Supreme Court. When I left office, about 65 percent of the American people approved of what the administration had done, and we should have won the White House on that.

I feel terrible about that, because I think it's very dangerous for the country to have a party as far right as the Washington Republican Party is, in control of the White House and the Congress, packing the courts with all of these ultraconservative people. It came out today that one of the people who wrote these questionable legal opinions about the treatment of people in Iraq is now a Court of Appeals judge. Whatever they find out about what he did, he's now got a lifetime job.

Did Al Gore make an error in 2000 by seeking to put some distance between himself and his campaign for the presidency, and you and your administration?

In the beginning, I supported his going out on his own with Joe Lieberman, because every vice president has the same problem in running directly for the presidency. People don't give the vice president credit for the good things that happen in the administration, as much as they should. I tried to solve that by giving Al lots of credit all through the eight years, but [voters] don't absorb that ... I thought Gore ought to be independent ...

But I thought it was not a good idea to not embrace the record more explicitly and say we ought to keep the change going in the right direction. Remember in Los Angeles, he said the issue was the people versus the powerful, which it certainly was. Every powerful right-wing interest group in the country was behind Bush. But that didn't send a clear signal that it was necessary to vote for Gore to keep the prosperity going. At the end of the election, when Gore came back to that theme, about eight days before Election Day, he made up points in a hurry and actually won the election by about 500,000 votes ... He probably would have won by enough to stay out of the Supreme Court if that had been the theme from August straight through November ... I campaigned in California and Arkansas, and those were the states where we beat the three incumbent Republicans that lost in the House.

I believe Al lost Arkansas because of the National Rifle Association ... and maybe Missouri, and maybe Tennessee, and maybe New Hampshire (in addition to the Nader vote) ... I don't think the NRA got near as much credit as they deserve for Bush's election. They hurt us bad.

If you were John Kerry, what would you do to close the deal with voters this year? They seem to be wavering in their support of President Bush, to say the least, but not yet fully embracing Senator Kerry.

They don't know Kerry yet. That's why Bush is running all these ads, trying to fill in the blanks in a negative way, saying Kerry is not a positive figure, he's focused on the past, and all that. What he needs to do is keep doing what has been doing, saying what he thinks and what he would do. To win he needs to have a very good convention in Boston, and then acquit himself well in the debates, and then maximize the time he has following the convention.

Right now he's got a real problem because he got nominated, in effect, so early that even the Democrats in states that weren't involved in the nominating process didn't know him all that well. The independents and the Republicans who would like to vote for somebody other than Bush didn't have much information about him. It's just the downside of the early nomination, although we got more out of that than we lost because we're united and raising lots of money for him on the Internet and doing a lot of good things. He just has to keep doing what he believes is right and keep carrying on. I think he's doing it very well ... The chances are more than 50-50 that he's going to win this election.

Have the fiscal policies of the Bush administration destroyed your legacy?

No, but they've destroyed the surplus! [Laughs]. I think that he returned to trickle-down economics because that's what they believe in. They don't believe it's important to keep the deficit down, keep debt down, keep interest rates down. They spend money on what they want to spend money on and cut taxes, especially for upper income people. Though he has reversed our policy, he can't destroy our legacy. Our legacy is how many people got jobs, how many people got homes, how many people got college aid -- how many people were helped.

Nothing is permanent in politics, but they can't change whether people were better off when you left than when you started. The country needs to return to an economic policy that's an updated version of the one I followed ... with even more emphasis on a new energy policy to create jobs and free us from foreign oil and do our part to deal with the environmental challenges we face ... What they've done is undisciplined and shortsighted and wrong on the economic front.

If you had another chance, how would you change your approach to achieving universal healthcare? Although some incremental changes were made, we're still a long way from the goal you set in 1992.

Well, we were in better shape when I left office than we are now. We had a decline in the number of people without insurance. We passed the Children's Health Insurance Program, which covered about 5 million kids and was the biggest expansion in healthcare since Medicare. We needed a simpler plan ... When Senator Dole decided to filibuster any healthcare plan we should have stopped and moved on to welfare reform, and then come back after the [1994] election ... .If you're not going to have an employer mandate, then probably the only way to do it is some version of what Rep. Rahm Emanuel [D-Ill.] is now suggesting -- which is to allow all the uninsured people to buy into the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program. That's a private plan with a lot of different options and costs. And then subsidize the purchases for small businesses and those who can't afford it. That's the simplest way to do it, with low administrative costs.

You promoted regional and global trade agreements -- some would say at the expense of labor and environmental standards. Is there a way that globalization can enhance rather than diminish those standards in both the developing and the developed world?

Sure. We don't have enough votes in Congress to do it right now. When they had the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle, I went out there and said the demonstrators in the street are wrong in saying that trade is making the world poorer but they're right in saying that you can't have a trade-only policy and build the kind of world you want. I went to the World Economic Forum in Davos and said the same thing to the WTO and the International Labor Organization ... They're going to have to open the process of the WTO up, involve the nongovernmental organizations more, and integrate the labor and environmental concerns into their multilateral deliberations ...

We need to do more to make sure that the global economy doesn't just make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The problem is that without labor and environmental agreements, and without significant new investments in health, education and development, you can lift a lot of people out of poverty with trade -- but all the population growth is occurring in the poorest countries, so there will still be more poor people every year. You cannot have a global economy without some sort of global social compact.

People sometimes mention possible future jobs for you, such as head of the World Bank or secretary-general of the U.N. when Kofi Annan leaves. What do you plan to do next?

I can't imagine that [those jobs] would ever be a serious option. I haven't thought about it. What I plan to do now is complete the book tour, do whatever I can to help Senator Kerry, and then as quickly as possible get back to work on my foundation.

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