Bill Clinton: The Bitter Half
- From: jose <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 09:08:10 -0800 (PST)
Bill Clinton: The Bitter Half
By Karen Tumulty
With just over a week to go before the Ohio primary, Bill Clinton's
arrival in Chillicothe was greeted as a homecoming of sorts. More than
a few in the audience at the college gym could remember the first time
he came to the city. It was 15 years before, almost to the day, and
the new President was in town to sell his economic plan. The 46-year-
old baby boomer had seemed the very embodiment of the freshness and
change that the people of this downtrodden burg on the edge of
Appalachia had been praying for. They were giddy when he jogged
through Yoctangee Park with the mayor in 3�F (-16�C) weather and
dropped by their new McDonald's for a decaf. But it was the hope in
his words that thrilled them most of all. "None of us have all the
answers," Clinton declared back then. "This is a new and uncharted
time. And I want to encourage you to continue to believe in your
country."
But today's Bill Clinton after a quadruple bypass has given up jogging
in favor of long walks, and his hair is a halo of white. And he had
come to deliver a very different message. Don't fall in love, he
cautioned, simply because someone tells you that "we need to turn the
page in America, and we need to adopt something fresh and new —
whatever that is."
It is hard to miss the irony: the man from Hope is now trying to
figure out how to tamp it down. But that tells you pretty much
everything you need to know about the spot in which Bill Clinton finds
himself today, as his wife's presidential campaign fights for its life
in Ohio and Texas. What is harder to figure out is how much of the
blame for her predicament belongs to him. "I think he just did her
such damage," says a friend and supporter, expressing a sentiment that
many feel privately. "They'll never see it that way, because they
can't. And he has no self-knowledge. This has magnified all his worst
traits."
Everyone around Hillary Clinton always recognized that Bill would be a
mixed blessing for her campaign. Back in the pre-Obamamania days, her
supporters assumed that no one could draw crowds, bring in money or
ignite the base like the only Democratic President since F.D.R. to win
re-election. Bill was considered the sharpest political strategist of
his generation. And as public approval for President George W. Bush
sank lower and lower, the Clinton years, for all their drama, were
looking better and better. Yet there was always the worry about
whether Bill would be able to stay within the constrained, derivative
role of the candidate's spouse. The biggest fear was that he would
shine too bright, burn too hot, consign the candidate to his shadow.
In a campaign that has turned out to be all about change, however,
Bill's presence has become a reminder of the past and of the style of
politics that Barack Obama has promised to bring to an end. Even
worse, say many Democrats, Bill has put his wife's political career in
jeopardy by displaying the same character traits that almost ran his
own presidency off the rails — a lack of self-control and an excess of
self-absorption. It hasn't always been clear whether Bill Clinton sees
Obama as a threat to his wife's prospects, or to his own legacy.
On the campaign trail, Bill's way of grabbing the spotlight has
reminded voters of what they didn't like about the last Clinton
presidency and what might be wrong with the next one. Lobbyist and
former Texas Lieut. Governor Ben Barnes, long a prolific donor to the
Clintons and other Democrats, says the former President is — as
everyone knew he would be — his wife's most powerful weapon. The
problem is, says Barnes, who now supports Obama, "that gun kicks as
bad as it shoots."
In Iowa, Bill Clinton shaded his own nuanced record on the war, saying
he "opposed Iraq from the beginning"; in New Hampshire, the criticism
he got for that didn't stop him from blasting Obama's claim of
steadfast opposition to the war as a "fairy tale." He twisted Obama's
observation that Ronald Reagan had changed the country to make it
appear that the Illinois Senator had praised Reagan's ideas. And Bill
churlishly diminished Obama's sweeping and historic primary victory in
heavily African-American South Carolina by pointing out that Jesse
Jackson had also won the state. Liberal columnist Jonathan Chait
wondered, "Were the conservatives right about Bill Clinton all
along?"
Nowhere did it get worse than in South Carolina. A Clinton campaign
official says Bill "hijacked the candidacy in South Carolina. It was
appalling to watch it." In the week before the primary, his attacks on
Obama put the former President in the news more times than any of the
Republican candidates, according to a study by the Project for
Excellence in Journalism; during a debate in Myrtle Beach, Obama
complained, "I can't tell who I'm running against sometimes."
And yet the person who seemed least aware of the havoc he was causing
was Bill Clinton. "He was firmly convinced in his mind that every last
thing he did was right," says former Democratic National Committee
chairman Don Fowler, a South Carolinian who spent much of that week at
Bill Clinton's side. "He wouldn't admit any misjudgments or
miscalculations."
But the damage had been done, particularly among African-American
voters. Ten days before the crucial Ohio and Texas primaries, Hillary
was still on the defensive, saying at a conference on African-American
issues in New Orleans, "If anyone was offended by anything that was
said — whether it was meant or not, misinterpreted or not — obviously
I regret that."
It rankles Bill Clinton to see his strong support among African
Americans slipping away, but "there's a part of him that understands
it, because he understands black people as well as anybody I know,"
says an old friend who is African American and continues to support
him. "He understands it — doesn't like it — but he has to
understand."
Those close to the former President say that much of what is driving
him is frustration and dismay. "In the past, when he was on the ropes,
he could get himself off the ropes," says an adviser. But Clinton has
begun to accept the fact that there are limits to what he can do when
he is not the candidate. He correctly blames the media for uneven
treatment — saying reporters have taken a tougher stance with him and
his wife than with Obama. (After Saturday Night Live lampooned the
media for their love affair with Obama, Bill telephoned guest host
Tina Fey to thank her.)
But he is appalled, friends and aides say, by what he has privately
described as "political malpractice" by Hillary's campaign. It spent
money with abandon in the earliest primaries and assumed that the race
would not last past Super Tuesday, on Feb. 5 — and failed to prepare
for any of the states that followed. Two weeks before the Texas
primary, Bill Clinton telephoned Waco insurance mogul and
philanthropist Bernard Rapoport, a friend and backer since the 1970s.
Rapoport told Clinton that this was the first contact he had had from
anyone on the campaign. "He was madder than mad," Rapoport says. "He
was right. There was so much we could have done, but we never heard
from anyone at headquarters."
That Bill Clinton would be surprised at any of this is surprising in
itself, given the wide perception that he is the unseen hand guiding
his wife's campaign. But friends and advisers say that was never the
case — in part because he understood Hillary's need to establish her
independence, and in part because of long-standing mistrust between
his political operation and hers. He deferred to her team and its
pseudo-incumbency strategy throughout the fall, friends say, even
though his instincts told him that Obama was gaining steam and should
be dealt with as a threat. When Bill visited Hillary's Des Moines
campaign headquarters a few days before the Iowa caucuses to give a
pep talk to her young volunteers, her then campaign manager Patti
Solis Doyle didn't come out of her office. Those who were there saw it
as an unmistakable snub and an assertion of who was in charge.
While his public profile has been lower lately, Bill Clinton has been
getting far more involved in the campaign's inner workings. It was
partly at his instigation that Maggie Williams — who had been chief of
staff in his post-presidency office in Harlem, in addition to serving
as his wife's chief of staff in the White House — has replaced Doyle..
Some of his former White House aides, including senior adviser Doug
Sosnik and deputy chief of staff Steve Richetti, have been brought
closer into the campaign fold. And Bill has been more assertive in
giving tactical advice — coaching Hillary's strategists on how to talk
about trade in Ohio, for example, and scrutinizing the map for targets
of opportunity that the campaign may have missed. It was Bill Clinton,
aides say, who suggested deploying himself to campaign in Alabama,
even though Hillary was certain to lose the popular vote. Sure enough,
Obama won by a comfortable 14 points — but Hillary came out of the
contest with 25 delegates to Obama's 27.
But maybe what's really wrong with Hillary's campaign is something
that is simply beyond even Bill Clinton's ability to fix. "It may be,"
says a friend, "their day has passed." As Bill told the folks in
Chillicothe back in 1993, it is simply "a new and uncharted time."
.
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