Eugene Robinson has a very interesting piece in today’s Truthdig that wonders what exactly the deal is with Bill Clinton these days. Clinton, by far the most popular living ex-president, has been joining the attacks on his wife Hillary’s opponent for the Democratic nomination for President, Barack Obama, to such a fierce degree that Obama recently told an interviewer, ‘I feel like I’m running against both Clintons.’ The fundamental problem, Robinson suggests, is that Obama is peddling the message—or more importantly, the Clintons see him as peddling the message—that Bill Clinton’s accomplishments during his eight years of tenure as President were insufficient, or have been reversed by the Bush administration, or never really achieved much anyway in the way of actually uniting people. Bill Clinton seems to be taking this as a personal affront and is responding in kind, going after Obama himself, the media (for what the Clinton camp sees as biased pro-Obama media coverage), and by extension quite a large segment of the American electorate.
Furthermore, at least some of Obama’s appeal is tapping into the feelings of some Democrats that sure, Clinton was great, but do the people of the United States really want another four or eight years of triangulation, centrism, and the appearance of two straight all-in-the-family dynasties? Going a rather unfortunate step further, Republican author and ex-Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan suggested over the weekend that ‘Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton’ is a ’sickness’—a feeling she ascribed to ’so many people’, with no foundation at all. While she may be hyperbolic in her language, I have to wonder to what extent this issue is present and underlying much of what we’re seeing happen in the Democratic primaries, and what impact it will have on the general election come November. Expect more to be made of this as Bill Clinton’s involvement in Hillary’s campaign grows, along with his willingness to play the bad cop.
