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It seems a little late in the day to ask how President Bill Clinton is doing, but he's now a victim of a sort of criticism that afflicts every President sooner or later in his second term. No matter how brilliant or bold his performance from now on, he is not going to be elected again. And it's become a journalistic routine at this stage to shake the head over the built-in weakness of a second term president: that he has lost the power to coax or bully his party into his chosen policies because he has no rewards to offer them. The beautiful, large, round barrel of patronage is emptying for him. So, it appears that for the time being, the media are becoming more interested in the possible runners for the next presidency rather than in any big plans Mr Clinton might have for his remaining three years. There's nothing new in this. It happens to every President who, from the day of his second inauguration is, of course, in theory a lame-duck president.

It occurs to me that perhaps not everybody knows the episode in American history which explains how an American President in his second term is always a lame duck - how, in fact, the restriction on two terms, no more, came about. It's a fascinating story. It's hilarious. It turns on an act of random cunning from a rogue of a party boss (the mayor of Chicago, no less). It also has the advantage - as Henry Kissinger used to say - of being true.

Quite simply, when Franklin Roosevelt - first elected 1932, and then again in '36 - when he was coming to the end of his second term he dropped the astounding hint to Republicans, an outrageous hint, that he might be available to run for a third term, something nobody had ever done. Although there was no law against it, the belief that two four-year terms were enough had become a tradition sanctified by the first president, George Washington, who wrote a long farewell address to the nation, elaborating in many eloquent sentences on the wisdom of not keeping the executive head of the government too long in office - hinting indeed that that way a dictatorship might emerge.

Well, in the summer of 1940 the Democrats met in convention in Chicago to nominate their next candidate for president. There were at least three famous men ready to be chosen and all the popular discussion and lobbying was about them. They had their sponsors and their names were put in nomination. Before the nominations closed, the Democrats' leader in the Senate rose on the floor of the convention to read a message from the President. The massed delegations assumed it would be a pious blessing on his successor. What it said was: "The President has never had, and has not today, any desire or purpose to continue in the office of President .. or to be nominated by this convention for that office." But (the "but" is mine): "He wishes in all earnestness and sincerity to make it clear that all of the delegates to this convention are free to vote for any candidate."

We who were there can even now, in our mind's ear, hear Roosevelt dictating that last phrase to his devoted secretary, "Free to vote for any candidate." (Including - guess who?) There was a long, stunned, uncomfortable silence in the convetnion hall and then a voice over the loudspeaker came booming in with a chant, "We want Roosevelt We want Roosevelt" It came out later that this powerful all-booming voice was that of only one man but, amplified through great loudspeakers, it sounded like the voice of Chicago, at least, and then slowly taken up by delegates on the floor, came to sound like the voice of the party. For that matter, the Voice of America.

And Franklin Roosevelt was nominated again. That voice became known as the Voice from the Sewer. It was the voice of a man standing in the basement of the convention stadium. He'd been coached to start the chant on cue after the Senator had finished reading Roosevelt's message. The man was a member of the Chicago Democratic machine run by a ruthless party boss, the Mayor of Chicago, about whom Roosevelt had once said (in a polite version): "Yes, he's a son of a gun but he's our son of a gun."

Anyway, millions of ordinary citizens were listening in to the broadcast - radio, of course, then - of the convention. And the Voice from the Sewer primed the pump or charged the battery for the Draft Roosevelt movement. When it got well underway across the country, Roosevelt went on the radio to give one of his fireside chats to the American family. How he longed, he said, to retire to his home up the Hudson River, to enjoy like Washington the serenity of ageing.

But the summer of 1940 was also the summer when 330,000 men had been driven to Dunkirk and beyond across the Channel. It was the summer when France had surrendered to Hitler. It was no time, Roosevelt sighed, for free men to seek to enjoy retirement having set his hand to the plough .. et cetera. With a heavy heart he would accept the convention's nomination. So, he ran again and to the palpitations of the Republican Party he became the first third term President.

Worse, in the summer of 1944, when the Allied victory was in sight, the Democrats nominated him for a fourth term. And though Roosevelt was mortally ill (which we didn't know at the time) he accepted, he ran again - and once more to the stupefaction of the Republicans he was elected - now not just the only third term but obviously the only fourth term President ever.

The Republicans in Congress resolved that he would be the first and the last. Early in the first term of his successor, Harry Truman, they got busy with an amendment to the Constitution. It was passed by Congress in March, 1947. (You know any amendment must be ratified by three-quarters of the legislatures of all the states.) And this was done by the end of February 1951: the 22nd amendment, declaring flatly, "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice."

I don't suppose there's been a President since Roosevelt who would love to run again and again more than Bill Clinton. That's not to say a desire to be President; it's the campaigning he loves, especially of a sort he's made his own, resembling a talk show approach where he appears in a schoolroom, a day-care centre, before a church social, every kind of small audience he can face sitting on a stool and fielding every question that comes at him. Lately he's been doing less of this for, the obvious reason, it wouldn't be building up to his own re-election in 2000.

But he's awfully busy around the country in fund-raising appearances, raising enough to pay off the Democratic Party's debt. Both parties are, a year after an election, always in debt. They always spent too much in funding their Congressional candidates last time.

So why do the media pick on the President at this moment - not to fight or deplore any policy of his but to make the extraordinary charge that he's bored with his job - that he is at times listless (if not, like former President Reagan, actually asleep at White House meetings) - that he'd rather talk about golf than anything. This is a most extraordinary tack to take. It must be because Congress is in recess and there's no opponent to fight in public. Perhaps what's called "the perception" that the President is tired or barren of new ideas is simply an invention of journalists who themselves are bored with Mr Clinton, not he with his job.

It happened at just this time to President Eisenhower in his second term. Waiting for the new Congress, the press took to writing parodies of Eisenhower's complicated grammar and double talk. It happened even sooner - to Kennedy - at the end of only three years. At the very last press conference he ever gave, the week before he made the fatal trip to Dallas, a famous correspondent put, what in retrospect has become a doom-laden question: "Mr President, whatever happened to the momentum?"

The Kennedy regime had taken off with silver trumpets and banners flying and bold and brilliant promises - like saying that Americans would make any sacrifice to preserve the liberty of forty-three allies - and a whole raft of domestic programmes which it took the successor, Lyndon Johnson, to coax or wheedle or bully through Congress - arts of leadership President Kennedy did not possess.

Well, the "perception" (that the President was bored and fresh out of ideas) was no sooner passed from one or two Senators to the press to the telly than the President himself came through with a stunning rebuttal. He called a press conference, an institution which - for reasons we needn't go into now - has fallen more and more into disuse. It turned out to be the longest presidential press conference of which there is any record, over an hour and a half. And the President took on all comers, every sort of question from Bosnia to welfare reform, Saddam Hussein to gas emissions. Absolutely nothing fazed him.

He showed himself, once again, alert, shrewdly intelligent, an easy, eloquent, unstoppable master of his homework. He knows the arguments on both sides, sometimes on three or four sides. In short, he was in crackling form. And when it was all over, the correspondent of a magazine that had circulated the "perception" that he's listless and tired, meditated, "My God, if this is being listless put on your bullet-proof vest against the day he wakes up."