As dana noted earlier this week, I wrote a comment at Cogitamus wondering:
I’m not sure why nobody’s writing about how the Clintons have been, at best, neutral parties in this campaign. Their proxies and surrogates keep saying crappy things about Obama, and Senator and President Clinton haven’t been that much better. Yes, they were both great at the convention, where, had they been less than great, it would have hurt them personally. But since then, my sense is that they’ve done next to nothing useful for the Obama campaign and lots that has been, as I said above, somewhere on the spectrum between neutral and counterproductive.
The Clintons’ commitment, or lack thereof, to the Obama campaign wasn’t really the point of dana’s post. And the comment thread on that post ended up going in several screwy directions as people, including me, mashed up a number of different ideas. Given that, I’d like to revisit the issue laid out in my comment above.
First, in the wake of President Clinton’s and Chris Rock’s appearance on Letterman, and now that Pres. Clinton has followed up that performance by suggesting that we should all take at face value Sen. McCain’s claim that he’s suspending his campaign for patriotic reasons, people are writing about this issue (here, here, here, and here). Second, I now agree with Scott Lemieux that Sen. Clinton has, on balance, been much more supportive of Sen. Obama than has Pres. Clinton. I’m not sure the difference is as clear as Lemieux suggests. But certainly my statement above cast the two Clintons as walking in lockstep. And that was a mistake on my part.
Moving on to third — this is getting to be a long list; sorry — because they’ve spent most of their adult lives trying to win elections, it’s unsurprising to me that the Clintons, who, you might recall, lost a pretty rough primary to Sen. Obama, would have a hard time sublimating their hunger for victory to the needs of the Obama campaign. Fourth, I have no idea if Sen. Clinton plans to run again in 2012 if John McCain wins this election. Despite what you may have heard, I’m not a member of the Clintons’ inner circle. Fifth and finally, I stand by my statement that Pres. Clinton especially, and, in some instances, Sen. Clinton as well, are conflicted about Sen. Obama’s candidacy, and that Pres. Clinton is doing everything he can to have it both ways: appearing to work for Obama while subtly undermining him.
The Edge of the American West 
5 comments
September 25, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Tyrone Slothrop
I am not lately inclined to defend the Clintons. However, if Clinton wants people to support his Global Initiative, that means not subordinating the forum to partisan politics, which means that when John McCain comes to speak, Clinton can’t use the occasion to trash him or push Obama. He’s the host, after all.
September 25, 2008 at 12:30 pm
SomeCallMeTim
That still doesn’t explain his GMA comments, TS.
September 25, 2008 at 1:09 pm
kid bitzer
and clinton could have said:
“i cannot subordinate my forum to partisan politics. in order to respect the mccain campaign’s announcement of a suspension of all activities, and in order to facilitate mccain’s plan to return to d.c., i have canceled the session at which mccain was going to speak.”
there has never been a time in bill clinton’s weasely life when he would not sell democrats down the river in order to advance himself or his own interests (including hrc in the second).
his entire career consisted in crawling over the backs of democrats and keeping himself afloat by making them drown–his entire “triangulation” consisted in his egging on hatred of the democratic brand, in order to be able to distinguish himself from the democrats.
his lack of coat-tails in office was no anomaly or mistake: he has been pure poison for democrats at every turn. gore was not even his first victim.
so it’s not just his bitterness at losing to obama, or his inability to reconcile himself to the loss; this back-stabbing of obama is part and parcel of the slimey, dishonest sack of shit that has always been william jefferson clinton.
(and i say that having voted for him twice, having agreed with 90% of his policy stances, and looking back on his time in office as a relative golden age in light of what has come since).
September 25, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Ben Alpers
Amen, kb (though I’m proud to say that I only voted for Bill Clinton once)
Clinton has been very lucky that few people are pointing out his own role in laying the foundations of our current financial crisis by reappointing Alan Greenspan and signing into law Gramm-Leach-Billey and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, among other things.
Quite aside from his views on Obama, Clinton finds himself in a similar position to McCain, hoping that nobody forces him to honestly account for his personal responsibility for this mess. No wonder he’s saying nice things about the Senator from Arizona!
September 26, 2008 at 9:04 am
politicalfootball
Yeah, Bill has jumped the shark. I thought his “open-mindedness” on The View – talking about how we ought not criticize women for supporting Palin – was reasonable and okay. I’d give him a pass there just because I agree with him, though I grant it wasn’t a particularly helpful thing to say.
But this business of giving McCain political cover for trying to hide from the debate – there’s just no excuse.