Walterboro, S.C.—“This is huge,” Bill Clinton was saying. His speaking voice, the most famously fragile in politics, was at full-tilt croakiness, yet another reminder of campaigns past.

“You can make biofuels in every county in this state…” The former president was standing alone on an auditorium stage in this Spanish moss-festooned town of 5,000 in the South Carolina lowcountry. It was mid-afternoon, and the chilly, darkened hall was maybe two-thirds full.

“You can make it from grass, you can make it from wood chips, you can make it from the leavings of all your agricultural operations. You can make it from all the organic materials in all the landfills. We can get rid of landfills forever and make biofeuls.”

It’s easy to forget it now, in the midst of a campaign in which Barack Obama has cast his opponents as aging impediments to change, but not so long ago, it was Bill Clinton who ran on the word “hope.” At settings like the one in Walterboro, he talked about ideas, cited white papers, proposed programs that married Democratic compassion to technocratic competence. During this year’s South Carolina race, in which Bill Clinton has taken on the role of his wife’s chief surrogate, much has been written about his Southern identity, the empathetic political style that traces its origins to the pulpit. But Clinton is equally a product of another southern political strain, one that dates back to the 1970s and 1980s, when a generation of Dixie Democrats—guys like Dick Riley in South Carolina and Sam Nunn in Georgia—tried to stave off the G.O.P. ascendance in the region by creating a new centrist brand of politics. It didn’t work, but it did create the philosophical basis for Bill Clinton. A lot of the bright Baby Boomers who staffed Clinton’s first administration were people he met at Renaissance Weekend, an annual chin-stroking festival sponsored by a South Carolina couple and held not far from Walterboro. Back then, before all the trials and scandals, the most exciting thing about Bill Clinton was the fact that he liked to think.

In this campaign, Obama has been cast as the cranial candidate, and much of the coverage has focused on Bill Clinton’s other side, his surly mastery of political combat. In light of this, the events he held yesterday, town hall gatherings focused on small-bore policy, felt almost nostalgic. At the event in Walterboro and another in the evening in the small town of Barnwell, no one asked about Obama, or attack ads, or the fraught issue of race. (Perhaps this is because the crowds were mostly white. And, I should add, surprisingly small and subdued.) Instead, the people in the audiences wanted to talk about heart medicines and workers compensation and nuclear power. A man in the audience in Walterboro asked about predatory lending practices, a big issue in the state—it seems like half of South Carolina’s strip mall tenants are check cashing places. That launched Clinton into a jag about microloans in Africa and rural banking initiatives Hillary started in Arkansas. The next questioner, a woman, asked why less than 5 percent of federal expenditures are directed toward rural communities.

“You guys you have no way of knowing it,” Clinton said, with tangible glee, “but I swear to all of you—including the press that are here—I had nothing to do with his question or hers. This year I hosted a conference at my library about this very thing.” And then off he went, veering here and there, quoting statistics, and finally winding up with a lecture about New York’s political geography. “People think that New York is a big Democratic state and just one big city. But here’s what New York is like: New York is a big Democratic state because of New York City, Buffalo, and some of our cities. Forty of our 62 counties went for George Bush over John Kerry. Surprises you, doesn’t it? Most of the landmass of New York is rural, small-town, agricultural, Republican. When Hillary ran for reelection she carried 36 of those 40 counties and got 60 percent of the vote because of the intense work she had done on rural development.”

Just as Bill Clinton sometimes takes the flesh-pressing side of his persona a bit too far, the technocrat in him—call that side Wonky Willy—can inflate to unpleasant extremes. Whereas in 1992, the town hall setting worked brilliantly for Clinton because it conveyed to voters the message that he was learning from them, in 2008, the information flow seems to go entirely in the opposite direction. In several hours of questioning, some phrases I never heard him use included, “Gee, that’s interesting,” and “I didn’t know that.” When one older African-American gentleman in Barnwell brought up an esoteric subject, the advantages of bamboo as a construction material—the man had apparently built an addition to his house out of the stuff—Clinton took a seat on a flight of stairs leading up to the stage and held forth.

“Actually I’m glad you mentioned it,” he said. “The floor in my presidential library is in bamboo.” He called the wood a “miracle material” which can grow anywhere, and enthusiastically described how it could be transformed into clothing and biofuels. The question was so far inside Clinton’s wheelhouse that it briefly occurred to me that it might, in fact, have been planted. But then I thought about it, the way he fielded all the questions that evening the same way, displaying knowledge so omnivorous that it bordered on one-upsmanship. I know some people (well, men) who are like that—I’m related to a few—and from what I understand this is a trait that worsens with age. If Hillary Clinton were to serve two terms in the White House, she would remain in office until January 2017, when Bill Clinton will be 70 years old. Are the American people ready for a First Fuddy Duddy?