Like the man who came to dinner and didn't know when to leave, Bill Clinton continues to hover over the Democratic political landscape nearly nine years after the end of his presidency.

The latest manifestation has come in the new book by David Plouffe, Barack Obama's 2008 election campaign manager. He says in "The Audacity to Win" that the former president may have cost his wife, Hillary, the vice-presidential nomination.

Plouffe writes that Obama argued until late in his deliberations on the choice that his main rival for the 2008 presidential nomination warranted strong consideration on her merits. But in the end, Obama told him: "I think Bill may be too big a complication. If I picked her, my concern is that there would be more than two of us in the relationship."

In other words, the old Bill Clinton sales pitch in his own 1992 presidential campaign — that in electing him the country would get "two for the price of one" in the brainy Hillary as a working first lady — backfired in reverse in 2008. The thought of a political menage a trois in the White House apparently was too much for Obama to contemplate.

There were ample reasons for the Democratic presidential nominee to want to avoid such a circumstance, including the prospect of having a strong, willful man who had himself occupied the Oval Office lurking around the premises.

But the memory of Bill Clinton's involvement in the 2008 Democratic primary in South Carolina may have been an even greater sticking point. Campaigning for his wife in this state of heavy African-American population, he got into a mini-debate with Obama over whether President Lyndon Johnson's legislative actions or Dr. Martin Luther King's rhetoric did more to break the back of racial segregation in the South.

Bill Clinton also took Obama on over his boast of having been against the war in Iraq from the start, calling it "a fairy tale" and noting Obama had voted to continue it once he got into the Senate. And when Obama easily defeated Hillary Clinton in that primary, husband Bill made a point of noting that Jesse Jackson had won the state in 1984 and 1988. The obvious implication was that Obama's race was what carried the day for him — not a far-fetched conclusion.

At the Democratic National Convention last year, however, the former president said all the right things about Obama and he campaigned for him in the fall, somewhat compensating for that South Carolina unpleasantness. But the specter of his presence remained along with a lingering bitterness among many Hillary Clinton supporters over her loss of the nomination and the failure of being named Obama's running mate.

It apparently was a closer call than generally realized at the time.

According to David Axelrod, Obama's chief political adviser, in discussions on the vice-presidential nomination Obama kept coming back to Hillary Clinton, before finally deciding on Joe Biden as his running mate.

In the end, much of the bad feelings dissipated when Obama chose her to be his secretary of state, a decision strongly supported by Biden.

Since the inauguration, the relationship between Obama and Biden has been a close and harmonious one. The new vice president has been given an unusually heavy and visible governing role in the administration, from overseeing the economic stimulus and recovery package to monitoring the political situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bill Clinton, meanwhile, has continued on his post-presidential path as an independent political force. He has pursued his own foundation's agenda in fields of philanthropy, while occasionally teaming with the senior former President George Bush in responding to catastrophic human emergencies around the world.

The Clintons' two-for-the-price-of-one offer, once held at as an inducement, has pretty much lost its luster and relevance, probably to the benefit of all concerned.