The Vast Clinton Wing Conspiracy

I wrote a few days ago about how if a Republican former-President acted during a campaign like Bill Clinton is acting these days, the Left would be apoplectic over “unseemly” behavior. Well, those chickens are coming home to roost. The Wall Street Journal quotes some Democrats;

The Democratic epiphany about the political tactics of Bill and Hillary Clinton continues, with scales falling from eyes on a daily basis. “I think it’s not Presidential,” said former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, about Mr. Clinton’s steady barrage against Barack Obama. “It’s not in keeping with the image of a former President, and I’m frankly surprised that he is taking this approach.” Mr. Daschle supports Mr. Obama, but how he could be surprised is another matter.

“This is beneath the dignity of a former President. He is not helping anyone, and certainly not helping the Democratic Party,” added Vermont Senator Pat Leahy. On the point of “helping” the party, Mr. Leahy seems to have forgotten that the Clinton Presidency was an era of more or less persistent Democratic losses — except for the Clintons.

Even today’s LA Times expresses some measure of dismay;

He’s scrapping with reporters. Pushing his wife’s candidacy. Lashing out at her top rival in the Democratic presidential race.

Former President Clinton’s recent aggressive tactics in the 2008 campaign have propelled him squarely to center stage — to the dismay of some prominent Democrats who fear he may be damaging the party’s prospects for November.

The vocal role he is carving out also may be a preview, should Hillary Rodham Clinton win in the fall, of how the White House would operate under the unprecedented scenario of a president being married to an ex-president.

Bill Clinton is using both the megaphone he commands and his popularity among Democrats to try to help wrest a victory for his wife in Saturday’s primary in South Carolina, a state where polls show she lags behind Barack Obama.

While touting his wife’s credentials, the former president has tried to redefine Obama as a more calculating politician than voters might suspect. And he makes plain he is nursing grievances about how the campaign has unfolded.

Koolaid drinking Clintonoid Robert Reich complains about Clinton in his own blog;

I write this more out of sadness than anger. Bill Clinton’s ill-tempered and ill-founded attacks on Barack Obama are doing no credit to the former President, his legacy, or his wife’s campaign. Nor are they helping the Democratic party. While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it’s not fair – indeed, it’s demeaning – for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama’s anti-war position is a “fairy tale”) or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it. Meanwhile, the attack ads being run in South Carolina by the Clinton camp which quote Obama as saying Republicans had all the ideas under Reagan, is disingenuous. For years, Bill Clinton and many other leading Democrats have made precisely the same point – that starting in the Reagan administration, Republicans put forth a range of new ideas while the Democrats sat on their hands.

You know when an old Marxist/Clintonist like Reich gets down on the Clintons, something is wrong. However, you and I both know that the Clintons do nothing without checking to see if it works in the focus groups, so it may just work for them. For the time being, though, it looks like the Clintons may do what Gingrich couldn’t do in the 90s – make the Clintons irrelevant.

Category: Politics