What makes Clinton special is that he found a way to connect with us that was personal and up close. He convinced us in words and in deeds that this relationship was at least partly in his heart, as well as in his head. This guy grew up in the back of his grandfather's store in Hope, Ark., hanging out with black kids.

Do you think that his background, being from the South and from a working-class family, made him different in the eyes of African-Americans?

Very much so. He had great opportunity to be in close proximity to black folk. And he hung out with black folk, he understood our music, he understood our culture and he understood how to connect. So by the time he entered the political world, here was a white man who could say, not just "I have some black friends," but say it and mean it.

Was there ever the sense that he was exploiting this background? Or that any of it was false?

It was style and it was substance. We all exploit our friendships. We've all asked our friend to do something for us to help move us along, or to overlook a transgression because we're friends. The key to this is that you cannot exploit a friendship that is only perceived on one side of the relationship. The other side has to perceive you as a friend as well. If Ronald Reagan were to say, "I have black friends," he'd have to enumerate them and, more importantly, he'd have to give them a call to let them know they're on the list. If Bill Clinton gave you that list, you could make cold calls to these people and they would in fact acknowledge having that kind of relationship with Clinton.

Alexis Herman tells a wonderful story in the book about when she headed the Women's Bureau in the Labor Department of the Carter administration. Ernie Green, who then was an assistant secretary of labor, said to her, "Come and go with me to Little Rock. The governor down there is honoring the Little Rock Nine," the blacks who integrated Little Rock High School. She was reluctant; she said, "I have enough bad memories about the South, and a white governor from Arkansas, are you kidding?" He convinced her to go. At the end of the ceremony, Clinton turned to them and said, "What are you guys doing for the rest of the evening? Come to the Governor's Mansion and let's hang out." They go back to the Governor's Mansion and he orders ribs from a black rib joint and a couple six-packs of beer, and they sit around talking about things that people generally talk about outside of politics -- family, friends, growing up, music -- well into the night.

A Clinton-hater might say that he just knew how to play the game. But there was something else that many of the people you interviewed touched on, something about his ease, that they could really sense? What was it?

It's what we perceive. Black folk have a built-in radar for B.S., particularly when it's racial B.S. It started with slavery, when the master would turn to the slave and say, "We need to clean this yard." The slave knew that "we" weren't going to clean this yard. That meant, "You better clean this yard." We understood that there was a kind of a false sense of familiarity that many white folks have with black folks. And the key to Clinton was not so much what he sought to do, but how what he did was perceived by African-Americans. For most African-Americans, he was real, and he connected in a way that others didn't.

Let's go back to this whole pandering suggestion that comes from a lot of folk: "He was just playing to the black community." OK, let's say that that's the case: Then he's better at it than anyone else in the history of the presidency. If that's all that there was -- and I would argue that that's not the case -- but if that's all that there was, then come on, whatever happened to the Gipper, the Great Communicator? Why couldn't he pull that off?

The other thing I thought was interesting was the idea that Clinton was an outsider, especially when the Lewinsky scandal heated up and the Republicans were really after him. Was Clinton an underdog? Could blacks relate to that?

If you look at our struggle, what you find is that there's great sympathy among African-American people. Even in our greatest time of need, we always seem to have just a little space in our heart for somebody else. Whether we're talking about the Seminole Indians with whom we formed a relationship when we were slaves, or whether you're talking about the Asian-Americans who came to work on the Transcontinental Railroad that we bonded with, we always find a spot in our heart for others who we thought were downtrodden.

It all helps, by the way, if the person who we perceive as being set upon is someone that we also perceive as being a friend. And the other piece of it was: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

But Clinton was a centrist, and he did compromise with the Republicans on a few big things, the biggest of course being welfare. How did the black community feel about that?

I think what they decided was that if the choice was between a liberal Michael Dukakis who can't get elected and a centrist Bill Clinton who could, they'd rather have a centrist Bill Clinton than George Bush. A practical political equation kicked in. We'd love to have Michael Dukakis, oversize helmet and big tank and all, but the fact of the matter is, you can't elect Michael Dukakis in America today. You can't elect Walter Mondale, but you can elect a centrist Democrat from the South. And when you do that, what you also know is that you don't get everything that you want politically. The question that begs is whether you got more than you lost.

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