Bill Clinton may be biggest loser of campaign
Posted on Sunday, May 4, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Perspective/224800/
Hillary Clinton will have
nightmares about her
botched run for the
presidency; it’ll be worse for Bill Clinton. Senator Clinton’s impressive Pennsylvania primary victory last week exposed Barack Obama’s general-election vulnerabilities. However, there is nothing to suggest Clinton would be a stronger nominee. Thus, Obama remains the clear favorite to win the nomination, and the New York senator’s painful legacy, in the most important professional endeavor of her life, will have been picking the wrong people and putting together a deeply flawed campaign.
In time she will have fresh opportunities; perhaps a Senate leadership role, or she may emulate Edward M. Kennedy as a truly great lawmaker, or, if Obama loses, make another run for the White House with lessons learned.
It’s going to be tougher for her husband. The most talented and resilient politician of this generation has damaged his standing with gaffes, political miscalculations and a series of paranoiac, volcanic eruptions.
A common question these days among political heavyweights—including longtime Clinton devotees—is this: How can a guy this smart act so dumb ?
Since January, he has been a regular feature on YouTube, face flushed, finger wagging and veins pulsing as he lashes out at some reporter or voter. He has accused the Obama campaign of putting out “a hit job on me,” of playing “the race card” to “breed resentment” against him, and most everyone this side of Mark Penn engaging in one “cheap shot” after another.
BITTER ABOUT MEDIA This is the stuff of a Philadelphia ward leader or troubled adolescent, not a former president respected worldwide. Three people who have spent time around him in recent months, all of whom insist on anonymity, describe him as irrationally angry and extremely bitter about the media.
The latest episode was on Pennsylvania primary day when he blew up anew, expletives and all.
In this, as in most of other cases, the record suggests Clinton, 61, is more the cause of the problem than the victim.
The genesis of the April 22 outburst was the simmering controversy over the comment he made the day of the South Carolina primary in January when it was clear Obama, 46, an Illinois senator, was going to score a big victory. Bill Clinton discounted it; after all, Jesse Jackson won twice in South Carolina, he said.
BLAME THE PRESS When a furor ensued over his suggestion that Obama’s appeal, like Jackson’s, was essentially racial, he at first insisted it was the press that had raised the issue. A transcript revealed otherwise.
Moreover, as Clinton knew, any parallels were a reach. Jackson didn’t win South Carolina primaries, they were basically low-turnout caucuses. By contrast, Obama, Hillary Clinton, 60, and John Edwards waged a huge battle in this year’s South Carolina primary and produced a record number of voters, more than 10 times as many as 20 years ago.
To be sure, the old Clinton political magic is still there. The campaign now uses him more in small towns and secondary markets away from the media limelight. In economically strapped Ohio and Pennsylvania, voters responded to his message that things were better in the 1990 s when he was in charge.
ROCK STAR He’s treated like a rock star in places that rarely, if ever, have seen a president. A few weeks ago in Laurinburg, North Carolina, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian College suspended all classes for his appearance, and he got a rousing welcome. (My severely disabled son, a student, was in the front row at that rally, and Clinton, who didn’t know who he was, gave him a warm greeting. It’s one of the former president’s very attractive traits: He instinctively seeks out those most vulnerable. ) This has been much more of mixed blessing for his wife’s campaign than some recent adoring profiles suggest; polls show his standing has plummeted. Especially grating is the alienation of blacks, a group that was the biggest source of support during his presidency and who he thought would follow his political guidance this year. Last week, U. S. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the House majority whip and the nation’s top-ranking black politician, charged that the former president’s “bizarre” behavior might be causing “an irreparable breach between Clinton and an African-American constituency that once revered him.”
TOLD YOU SO His performance has also afforded political conservatives an opportunity for a we-told-you-so moment, that Clinton is behaving as disreputably as they always claimed.
That, of course, ignores the reality that special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, surrounded by partisan zealots, conducted a political witch hunt against Clinton. And there were lavishly funded and surreptitious “hit jobs” against him.
Bill Clinton is a survivor. He endured an embarrassing sex scandal and left office as popular as ever. He took another hit when he unconscionably pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive crook. A few years later, Clinton was acclaimed across the globe.
Still, he pays a price for these transgressions. Before the Rich pardon, he had planned to serve on some bluechip corporate boards, and discussed this with his former Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin.
BILL THE UNTOUCHABLE After the pardon, he became an untouchable in prestigious circles and instead has spent much of the last seven years cavorting with ethically challenged billionaire sycophants. Before this campaign, he was an international statesman extraordinaire and the guru for ambitious Democratic politicians. In recent months, he has devalued himself and his future by his conduct. Although he has a decent relationship with John McCain, given the continuing partisan resentment of Bill Clinton, he would remain largely in exile under a Republican president. If Hillary Clinton upsets the odds and wins the presidency, it’s likely to prove an unhappy time for her husband. He would be scrutinized, politically and personally; political strains between the president and first spouse would emerge. A President Obama would drive him crazy. If not irrelevant, it would make Clinton a secondary figure within his own country and party. There is little that would make him more frustrated or angrier. Albert R. Hunt is the executive editor for Washington at Bloomberg News.