As President Clinton heads for his last Democratic Convention while in office he has once again expressed repentance for his affair with the former White House intern, Ms Monica Lewinsky, hoping this will help Vice-President Al Gore.
Before a gathering of evangelical ministers in Chicago, Mr Clinton spoke freely about his attempts to put his life together again and insisted it would be wrong of voters to hold Mr Gore responsible for sins that were not his.
"Surely no fair-minded person would blame him for the mistakes I've made," he said.
There has been speculation that Mr Clinton would express regret for his affair and its effects on his family and Mr Gore at his valedictory speech to the convention in Los Angeles on Monday night.
But the White House spokesman, Mr Joe Lockhart, has ruled this out.
At the gathering in Chicago which was beamed by satellite to 15 cities across the US, Mr Clinton was questioned by Pastor Bill Hybels who is one of the President's religious counsellors. The event took place in Rev Hybels's community church before 4,000 ministers.
Rev Hybels said that some people still believe that Mr Clinton has never fully acknowledged his guilt. The President responded: "I think I gave a clear, unambiguous, brutally frank and frankly personally painful statement to me because I had to do it. I finally realised . . . it would never be all right unless I stood up there and said what I did and said it was wrong and apologised for it.
"I'm in the second year of a process of trying to totally rebuild my life from a terrible mistake I made. I don't think anybody can say `Hey, the state of my spiritual life is great, it's constant and it's never going to change.' I think I've learned enough now to know that's not true, that it's always a work in progress and you just have to hope you're getting better every day."
Asked for a comment, Mr Cliff May, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said: "If it's therapeutic for Clinton to talk about his personal growth, I can only wish him well."
Mr Clinton said the extent of the disgrace he suffered helped him to face the truth. "It may be that if I didn't get knocked down . . I might not have had to really deal with it 100 per cent. When there's nothing left to hide, it sort of frees you up to do what you ought to be doing anyway.
"And I think that as awful as what I went through was, and as humiliating as it was, more to others than to me, sometimes you think you've got something behind you and it's not behind you."
Mr Clinton said he had not thought about the Lewinsky affair and its consequences for "a long, long time". He was doing so now because he had been questioned about it. "I thought about it a little bit now because you asked me to do this and I said yes, and here we are in the soup together."
President Clinton said more than 60 per cent of Americans had "stuck with me." But he said his relations with his family remained an ongoing struggle, then declined to go further.