Porn going mainstream.

Under the stupid new FCC rules Clinton cannot legally describe his second term in Monica I wonder how this will be handled?

Clinton Planning to Use Book Tour to Assist Kerry
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

s former President Bill Clinton prepares for a barrage of publicity and a cross-country tour to promote his memoirs, his political advisers are consulting with the Democratic Party and Senator John Kerry's campaign about ways that Mr. Clinton can lend a political hand in the process.

Mr. Clinton received an advance of more than $10 million to write his memoirs, "My Life," and aides to the former president say his first priority now is to sell as many books as possible.

But they also say that whenever his book-selling obligations allow, Mr. Clinton is eager to pitch in for the party by plugging Mr. Kerry and subtly putting down Republicans at book-selling events, and by speaking at fund-raisers or campaign stops on his tour.

He is also going out of his way not to overshadow Mr. Kerry. For example, Democratic Party officials said Mr. Clinton was scheduled to speak on the first night of the party's convention in Boston, but executives of Knopf, which is publishing "My Life," said that to keep the spotlight on Mr. Kerry, he did not plan to hold a book signing or other event while in town.

"He wants to make sure that there is no way that anything he does is competing with or intruding on the attention paid to Senator Kerry," Steve Richetti, Mr. Clinton's top political adviser, said. "We have met with the campaign so that they can be aware of what we are doing and where we are going. He wants to be helpful in any way that he is asked. He knows John Kerry and he likes him a lot and thinks he would be a great president. At book events, I think he will be asked about and he will be able to talk about John Kerry in a very thoughtful and compelling way."

Mr. Clinton's efforts to help Mr. Kerry are fraught with risks, Democratic strategists say, including the danger of arousing the legions of Clinton-haters, the possibility of upstaging the candidate himself, and campaign finance rules restricting publicity expenditures around an election. For months, Democratic strategists have worried that if Mr. Clinton's book appeared too close to the election, he could hog the limelight and upstage Mr. Kerry. In the last election, Vice President Al Gore sought to distance himself from Mr. Clinton on the campaign trail rather than risk association with the scandals surrounding his administration.

Richard Stengel, a former national editor of Time magazine and now president of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, said: "It is one of those things that is a double-edged sword. You don't know if it is going to blow up in your face or it is going to blow up on the other side."

But unlike Mr. Gore, Mr. Kerry plans to embrace Mr. Clinton, capitalizing on his support as much as possible in places where he is popular, aides to Mr. Kerry said. The two men speak personally roughly once every 10 days, their aides said.

"I intend to get him to campaign as much as he can," Mr. Kerry said in a recent interview about Mr. Clinton's book. "I think he's good."

A Democratic Party official, speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed that the party saw opportunity in Mr. Clinton's tour. "If Bill Clinton wants to crisscross the country reminding everyone at every stop that when a Democrat was in the White House things were better, all the more power to him, we say,'' the official said. "And if he wants to sell some books, God bless him."

Larry Noble, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics and a former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission, said the current campaign finance rules allowed plenty of room for Mr. Clinton to criticize Mr. Bush or to endorse Mr. Kerry at appearances paid for by his publisher, as long as his principal purpose is selling the book.

Still, Mr. Noble said, the rules are gray enough that "I am willing to bet that complaints will be filed against the publisher as Clinton goes around on his tour, because that is just the nature of the beast."

Robert Barnett, the lawyer for Mr. Clinton who negotiated his book deal, said, "In every respect, all applicable laws and regulations will be scrupulously followed."

Paul Bogaards, Knopf's publicity director, said the company was not worried about any perceptions of partisanship . "At the end of the day it is the strength of the work that people are going to come to," he said.

For several months, beginning even before Mr. Clinton had finished the manuscript, a so-called war room brain trust consisting of members of his legal, public relations and other staffs as well as Mr. Bogaards, has convened for a daily conference call to chart a marketing campaign for the book, Mr. Bogaards said.

Knopf, part of the Random House division of Bertelsmann, is kicking off publication on June 22 with a party for 1,000 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The team has taken advantage of the demand for access to Mr. Clinton to reach an extraordinary series of deals filling the airwaves with Mr. Clinton and his voice during the week of publication. For five days leading up to publication, Infinity Broadcasting, which owns news radio stations in big cities around the country, and America Online will play Mr. Clinton reading a new anecdote from the book each day.

On the Sunday before publication, Dan Rather will interview Mr. Clinton for the full hour on the CBS program "60 Minutes." On the day of publication, Oprah Winfrey will interview him for another hour. The next day, "Today" on NBC and "Good Morning America" on ABC have dropped their requirements of exclusivity to run taped interviews with Mr. Clinton simultaneously.

People involved with planning the tour said explicitly political considerations had not yet come up in picking locations, partly because the first locations were determined by the size of the markets and the suitability of the venues. But the publisher's commercial interest also dovetails with the Kerry campaign's goal of dispatching him to the places where he is most popular, Kerry aides say. Political considerations might begin to tip the scales in favor of certain cities later on, they said, although selling books would always come first.

In addition to picking the biggest book-buying markets, Mr. Bogaards said, the publisher is using sales data to identify places where Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoirs sold well. In the battleground state of Ohio, for example, Mrs. Clinton's memoirs sold extremely well in the Democratic stronghold of Cleveland, and less well in moderate Columbus and conservative Cincinnati.

Mr. Bogaards said Knopf also planned to send Mr. Clinton to places where books appealing to African-Americans sell well, beginning with a signing at the Hue-Man Bookstore near his office in Harlem on the day of publication, in part because he is popular among blacks. But that emphasis also reflects his own wishes. "He wants to do a book tour that looks like America," a person close to Mr. Clinton said.

During a speech at a booksellers' convention in Chicago this month, Mr. Clinton demonstrated his deft hand at turning discussions of his memoirs into a subtle attack on President Bush. He digressed into what he called the takeover of the Republican Party by "the religious right." "Politics is not religion, and we should govern on the basis of evidence, not theology," he said.

Mr. Clinton has often joked about outselling his wife, whose tour covered more than 40 cities over six months. That schedule would put him on tour through the election. Bookstores say Knopf has told them Mr. Clinton is trying to schedule only one event a day so he can sign as many books as possible.

Vivien Jennings, owner of Rainy Day Books in Kansas City, Kan., said she noted in her proposal to Knopf that her store's events drew crowds from the pivotal state of Missouri. "I thought if some of it was politically motivated it wouldn't hurt to remind them," she said, "although I am sue they are aware of that."