LEWISBURG, PA.—All Bill Clinton wants is for people to focus on the issues.

“I just think I’m for Hillary, and she’d be the best president,” Mr. Clinton told The Observer, after addressing a basketball gym full of Pennsylvanians at Bucknell University. “And I think that anything that doesn’t create a job, that doesn’t solve a problem, doesn’t help us get out of Iraq, doesn’t figure out who would be the best president, is a distraction.”

At what was the first event in a Sunday sweep through the state, Mr. Clinton exhibited all the folksy charm, encyclopedic intelligence, righteous anger and subtle-but-penetrating digs at an opponent—in this case, Barack Obama—that have made him, bar none, the best campaigner of his generation. He has put at his wife’s disposal assets of incalculable value: a razor-sharp strategic mind, decades’ worth of powerful connections and, of course, the most resonant name in Democratic politics.

It’s something of a wonder, then, that it’s actually an open question within the party whether Mr. Clinton has helped or hurt his wife’s campaign, and whether he has done damage to his own legacy. (The answer to the first seems to change depending on the week, or even the day; the answer to the second, at least according to what polls tell us about short-term public opinion, is yes.)

In a brief exchange as Mr. Clinton reached to shake hands with adoring voters along a rope line at the Lewisburg event, he put some of the blame for his drama-filled campaign season on the media, which has isolated and amplified the sorts of loaded remarks that he used to get away with regularly, often to brilliant effect.

Asked whether he thought his remarks had been misinterpreted, he said, “Of course I do. And you know what they are.”

Actually, there is quite a selection to choose from, if we’re talking about things the former president has said that, whatever other motives have been fairly or unfairly ascribed, all seemed precisely designed to get a rise out of Mr. Obama, and a conflict-hungry press corps.

In December he suggested that nominating Mr. Obama would be like “rolling the dice.” In January, he called Mr. Obama’s antiwar narrative “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” He tried to marginalize Mr. Obama’s landslide win in South Carolina later that month by saying, “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88,” and he carried on a series of angry running skirmishes with reporters.

This week, he once again kicked off what passes for a controversy by criticizing, in an obviously inaccurate manner, the coverage of his wife’s inaccurate account of a trip to Bosnia. In doing so, he revived the story that has hurt his wife’s campaign and, incredibly, drew a soft public rebuke from Mrs. Clinton herself.

It has been enough to prompt even some of the most loyal Clinton supporters to ask whether Mr. Clinton’s comeback attempt was a bad idea from the beginning.

“Maybe there aren’t two lives or nine lives in American politics,” said Ellen Chesler, a historian and major fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton. “Maybe there is just one.”

To be clear, the press has not been charitable toward Mr. Clinton. In what might reasonably be considered a natural reaction to his demonstrated willingness to deal in subtext—the Jesse Jackson comparison being one of the more blatant examples—the operating assumption of the reporters covering him is that he always means something other than what he’s saying.

Hence the interpretation, for example, of a remark Mr. Clinton made at a stop in Fredericksburg, Va., on Feb. 12 that everything other than vision, planning and ability to govern is “smoke and mirrors,” which was taken as a frontal assault on the oratorically impressive Mr. Obama. Maybe it was. Or maybe he was simply making the perfectly valid and obvious point that a campaign, ideally, is decided based on things that are important.

While Mr. Clinton seems genuinely surprised that his eminently parse-able remarks have been so closely parsed, few Democrats outside the Clinton circle see it as anything extraordinary.

“He keeps slipping into it because it worked for him,” said Joe Trippi, who advised John Edwards, of Mr. Clinton’s tendency to make manipulative-sounding remarks.

Mr. Trippi argued that the campaign had made its intention to be aggressive clear from the start, and that Mr. Clinton’s history of bare-knuckles tactics gave him little credence in calling foul.

“It’s the boy crying wolf,” said Mr. Trippi. “It’s not that we just got this in our heads somehow.”

Attending a day full of campaign events when Mr. Clinton is on his game is something to behold.

In Bloomsburg, Pa., on Sunday afternoon, Mr. Clinton succeeded in making his attack on Mr. Obama sound almost positive. As soon as he took the stage, he smiled and told the crowd that someone he had taken photos with backstage had told him, “I just want you to know that the people you are about to see are not bitter—they’re proud.” The unspoken reference was to Mr. Obama’s remarks that the lagging economy had caused Pennsylvanians to become “bitter” and to “cling” to their religion, guns and distrust of immigrants.

The audience applauded warmly.

That’s normal for Mr. Clinton. The press reviews of his appearances are mixed, but for the overwhelmingly friendly crowds that show up to see him, he is the undiminished standard-bearer of the Democratic Party. He is the embodiment of nostalgia for the 1990s boom and, thanks to his hugely successful charity, the personification of goodwill toward men. With his white hair, dark blue suit, lightly checkered shirt and primary red power tie, he looks the elder statesman part.

In his campaign events, he pokes or punches the air when he says of his wife, “She made a difference in our lives.” He boils down complex international affairs to the most digestible basics—Iraq is a neighbor still crashing on your couch five years after his house burned down. “It’s not about the fire anymore,” he says.

Mr. Clinton trusts the audience to understand his lectures on complicated policy topics and they reward him with careful listening. And he connects. “My grandmother’s grandmother was a Cherokee,” said Mr. Clinton in Jim Thorpe, Pa., named after the American-Indian athlete.

On a rope line in Bloomsburg, a woman asked Mr. Clinton if he knew her former doctor, Elias Ghanem.

Mr. Clinton immediately said, “He was a very great man. And his widow—Jody—is a very good friend of mine, and you should know that his son, Elias Jr.”—

“Yeah?” said the woman.

“Has spent three years at one of those golf schools in Florida.”

“Ohhh?” she said.

“Because he is so gifted. And he may be good enough to be a professional golfer.”

But it’s not just what he can do at the retail level.

Mr. Clinton, as supporters point out, is still—after 15 months of presidential fund-raising events—a massive draw for donors.

And, at times, his inside game has been decisive in Mrs. Clinton’s favor.

Campaign insiders argue that the “fairy tale” comment, panned by the press, was a factor in moving white liberal voters to Mrs. Clinton in New Hampshire; that Mr. Clinton’s physical efforts to round up supporters in Nevada won Mrs. Clinton the caucus there; and that his do-or-die declaration about the Texas and Ohio primaries won her another lease on life.

That is the upside. The downside is just about everything else that makes the news.

For Clinton campaign staffers, Mr. Clinton’s unique status basically means that they have to monitor two candidates at all times. While Mrs. Clinton is disciplined, well-briefed and always surrounded by a team of aides, Mr. Clinton isn’t. He has acted on his own, but the consequences of his mistakes have been as severe as if Mrs. Clinton made them herself.

The result has been coverage that makes campaign staffers privately groan. And for some of the campaign’s supporters—who couldn’t wait to remind reporters at the outset of the primary that they were in possession of “the ultimate secret weapon” in the person of Bill Clinton—there is a palpable disappointment.

“Sometimes you are a creature of your own experiences, and sometimes it’s hard to get out of the mold,” said Ms. Chesler, explaining Mr. Clinton’s difficulties. She credited Mr. Clinton with saving the Democratic Party by expanding its base in the 1990s, but said that this time, he and his wife “ran yesterday’s campaign.”

Shortly before the vote in South Carolina, for example, the Clinton campaign removed Mrs. Clinton from the state in anticipation of an electoral drubbing, leaving Mr. Clinton there on his own—with much of the national media.

At the time, Mr. Clinton—along with longtime Clinton adviser and pollster Mark Penn—was advocating a more aggressive, and negative, strategy toward Mr. Obama. So Mr. Clinton did his thing. And it got covered, to disastrous effect.

Another of Mr. Clinton’s great tactical contributions was to advocate, along with Mr. Penn, casting Mrs. Clinton as the experienced candidate—which proved greatly flawed in an election where voters wanted change.

“I don’t think it would have happened without him,” said Bob Shrum, who ran John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. “He may be more gifted as a candidate and more gifted as a person out front than (a) the person who is out freelancing outside of any strategic matrix or (b) helping to create the strategic matrix.”

Ms. Chesler said that she felt many of Mr. Clinton’s comments had been distorted by the press, and that when he appeared at a fund-raiser she had organized after South Carolina, he seemed genuinely “shell-shocked” by the reaction engendered by his comparison of Mr. Obama to Mr. Jackson. “The 24-hour news cycle,” said Ms. Chesler, matter-of-factly. “They weren’t ready for it. He didn’t completely understand it.”

Other Clinton supporters also said Mr. Clinton seemed unready for the new scrutiny of the campaign trail.

“I think part of it is like a teacher who comes out of retirement after eight years and says I don’t have to review my notes,” said a prominent New York supporter and fund-raiser. “And you know, sometimes you get a little rusty after a while. When you are in the White House, there is a lot of prep for everything you do, and campaigns move at a different pace and the media has changed. Bill Clinton can’t have a small conversation in Dartmouth College without it being a front-page story.”

Asked whether Mr. Clinton fully appreciated the change in the media, with bloggers and YouTube turning the once private public, the fund-raiser said, “No, I don’t think so.”

The best defense that can be offered by Clinton supporters for some of the former president’s tactical missteps, ultimately, is simply that he hasn’t always been acting tactically.

“Another fact that should be considered is that he is a human being defending his best friend and the love of his life from these attacks,” said Robert Zimmerman, a major fund-raiser for Mrs. Clinton. “This pop psychology approach to scapegoating Bill Clinton is politically adolescent, and frankly I’m rather disgusted by so many Democrats who benefited from the great success of the Clinton administration now taking such cheap shots at him.”

Senator Dick Durbin, who has enjoyed friendly relations with the Clintons but is now supporting his junior colleague from Illinois, described the story of Bill Clinton and the 2008 presidential campaign as something of a political tragedy.

“I believed that Bill Clinton was the best political mind I had ever worked with leading up to this campaign,” he said. “But I think he faced an extraordinary personal and political challenge the likes of which no one has ever known: a former president campaigning for his wife to run for president against an African-American candidate. It turned out to be a very complex equation, and occasionally he got it wrong.”

When asked if Mr. Clinton has suffered, in terms of his legacy, for those errors, Mr. Durbin replied, “I think he has.”