Even Bill Clinton knows he went a bit too far.

His L.A. church tour this week, coupled with the general feeling that an invisible leash has been put around the former president's neck, come as clear indicators of a big "whoops" revelation the weekend before Super Tuesday.

In the coming months, Bill will likely regain (almost) all the respect he lost over the last few weeks from Democratic voters who remember a very different, exponentially more affable man from the 1990s. He deserves that opportunity; his contribution to U.S. policy and his abilities as a statesman were too great during his presidency to burn him at the stake for getting too enthusiastic about his wife's candidacy.

We remember John Quincy Adams as intelligent and diligent, but his presidency is diminished by the hint of dynastic succession and is seen as emblematic of a parochial time when America was ruled by an incestuous elite. Some day, I suspect we may detect the same narrowness in the rise of the Bush Dynasty and, if there is one, in the Clinton Dynasty.

We added the 22nd Amendment, limiting presidents to two terms, on the rationale that levers of power should turn over to keep our democracy healthy. Many Democrats today would consider Bill Clinton intrinsically the best person to serve as president for the next eight years. And yet, even if there weren’t a 22nd Amendment, we would shy away from that; we prefer the risk of an unproven president to the risk of stasis and aristocracy.

Over the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.

My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.

Essentially, Clinton and Obama will enter February 5 with roughly the same number of delegates and, if Obama wins South Carolina, similar chances at winning most states (though I think Clinton will retain an advantage). But, no matter what happens, it seems likely that the two candidates will not differ in total delegates by more than 10 percent or so. What does this mean? It means we'll have a lot more campaigning left after February 5. Neither candidate will be ready to concede and neither candidate will be clearly winning so the campaign will continue.

For the past few years, progressives have been saying that one of the most important things Democrats needed to do was to get tough. Republicans had been kicking sand in their faces too long, and the time had come to hit back just as hard.

But now the candidate who should be as familiar as anyone with "the Chicago way" -- given that he's actually from Chicago -- is on the receiving end of some less than polite politics, and more than a few progressives don't like what they're seeing. Barack Obama and his advisors did a lot of careful planning for this campaign, but there's one thing it doesn't seem they prepared for: Their main opponent, Hillary Clinton, is running like a Republican. And it appears to be working.