Clinton on Obamma: This Guy Would Be Carrying Our Bags

OldRegular · Sep 3, 2012

As the 2008 Presidential campaign took shape, Obama emerged as the leader of a new, anti-Clinton wing. His “psychodrama” argument blossomed into a full-scale criticism of the Clinton Presidency. This time, though, the target was another Presidential aspirant, Hillary Clinton, who, Obama argued, was too polarizing to get anything done in Washington.
Obama soon added a harsher note to the argument: that Hillary, perhaps like her finger-wagging husband, was untrustworthy. On November 10, 2007, Obama’s advisers, in a private memo before a pivotal speech in Iowa, laid out the strategy. “Clinton,” they argued, “can’t be trusted or believed when it comes to change,” because “she’s driven by political calculation, not conviction.”

An Obama Presidency, the candidate suggested in 2007 and 2008, would be much bolder than Clinton’s. “If we are really serious about winning this election, Democrats, we can’t live in fear of losing it,” Obama declared in his Iowa speech, echoing the advice of his pollsters and strategists. “This party—the party of Jefferson and Jackson; of Roosevelt and Kennedy—has always made the biggest difference in the lives of the American people when we led, not by polls, but by principle; not by calculation, but by conviction.”
The Clinton circle blames Obama’s decision to go negative for the subsequent nastiness of the 2008 Democratic primaries. Bill Clinton fumed that the press failed to call out Obama for running on a message of hope and change while attacking Hillary as untrustworthy. In New Hampshire, on January 7th, he made his most famous remarks of the race, calling Obama’s record on Iraq “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen!” He added, “The idea that one of these campaigns is positive and the other is negative, when I know the reverse is true and I have seen it and I have been blistered by it for months, is a little tough to take.” Clinton urged Hillary’s campaign to fire back, and, when it wouldn’t, at least to his satisfaction, he did so on his own.

The result was an internecine war that the two men have struggled to overcome. In South Carolina, Obama’s campaign suggested that Clinton’s “fairy tale” comment had racial overtones. (It was read as a subtle rejection of the idea that an African-American could become President.) A few days later, in Nevada, Obama compared Bill Clinton unfavorably to Ronald Reagan. “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” he said. No doubt the rhetoric was partly strategic. Every Presidential candidate must distinguish himself from his party’s previous President, especially if the predecessor’s spouse is an opposing candidate. But Clinton “didn’t see it as a tactic,” Mark Halperin and John Heilemann write in “Game Change,” their account of the 2008 race. “He thought that Obama might actually believe that Reagan’s tenure had been superior to his own.”

Bill Clinton’s attacks hurt Hillary as much as they did Obama. The Times denounced Clinton’s fairy-tale comment as a “bizarre and rambling attack” and as exemplifying a campaign that was “perilously close to injecting racial tension” into the conversation. At a press conference in South Carolina the morning after Obama won the state, Bill Clinton seemed to dismiss the victory as a fluke of local demography. “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88,” he said. “Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.” Tim Russert told me that, according to his sources, Bill Clinton, in an effort to secure an endorsement for Hillary from Ted Kennedy, said to Kennedy, “A few years ago, this guy would have been carrying our bags.” Clinton’s role in the campaign rattled Obama. He told ABC News in an interview that Clinton “has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling.”
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Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/10/120910fa_fact_lizza#ixzz25S2tAx7y

InTheLight · Sep 3, 2012

I think that the Dems will have a tight leash on Bill Clinton. He's supposed to speak on Wednesday night and I bet they pull him off and send him on his way ASAP. He's the last Democratic president since Kennedy (50 years ago) that had approval ratings over 50% when they left office.

Revmitchell · Sep 3, 2012

InTheLight said: ↑

I think that the Dems will have a tight leash on Bill Clinton.
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Maybe not, he still has not let anyone see his speech yet and it is driving convention planner crazy.

LadyEagle · Sep 3, 2012

And you know what they say about pay back....

InTheLight · Sep 3, 2012

Revmitchell said: ↑

Maybe not, he still has not let anyone see his speech yet and it is driving convention planner crazy.
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That's because compared to Clinton, Obama has the stature of a flea standing on its tiptoes.

OldRegular · Sep 3, 2012

InTheLight said: ↑

That's because compared to Clinton, Obama has the stature of a flea standing on its tiptoes.
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:thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

Clinton on Obamma: This Guy Would Be Carrying Our Bags

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