Bill Clinton, the former president, joined his wife’s presidential campaign last week, just as his new book, Giving, began appearing in stores. It did not appear to be a coincidence. A big heart is an electoral asset. Mr Clinton wants to show that his wife has one. Politics is generally “a ‘getting’ business”, he admits, but Hillary is “a different story”. In a week when Time magazine worried that Americans lack a way to “put their ideals into action”, hearing what Mr Clinton thinks about giving should be fascinating. It is. His book is neither well written nor well thought-out. But it is evidence that he has cracked the code of an inchoate form of political power that is still illegible to most of his contemporaries.

The need of Mr Clinton’s friends and (especially) his enemies to present him as a “passionate” man has obscured the cold, technocratic neutrality that was the dominant mood of his presidency. Giving is structured like the weakest speeches of his first term, with a great deal of intellectual to-ing and fro-ing but no real thinking and no logical argument. Mr Clinton places himself on the right side of a platitude (in this case, generosity) and then pummels the reader with statistics. The result is something between a brochure and a spreadsheet: “LISC operations have created more than 70,000 jobs, helped more than 100 businesses, developed 53 supermarkets and farmers’ markets, built 120 child-care facilities for 11,000 kids, renovated 136 playing fields serving 120,000 children, and financed 80 schools for 28,000 students.” There is a solid chapter on forming consortiums to get lower prices for Aids drugs and a beautiful reminiscence by Oprah Winfrey about what it felt like, growing up poor, to be remembered by nuns. (“The best gift wasn’t the toys. It was being able to give an honest answer when the other kids asked what I got for Christmas.”) But Mr Clinton scarcely remarks on the complex problems – of moral hazard, of privacy, of displaced economic activity – that beset charities.