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Why Bill Clinton Is Such a Lousy Surrogate

Bill Clinton praised a presidential candidate yesterday. “The American people, for good and sufficient reasons, admire him,” Clinton said on The View. “He’s given something in life the rest of us can’t match.” The problem: He was talking about John McCain.

[UPDATE, Sept. 25: Clinton can't help himself: He praised McCain again today, telling Good Morning America that he understands why McCain wants to delay Friday's debate. ""We know he didn't do it because he's afraid, because Sen. McCain wanted more debates," Clinton said. "I presume he did that in good faith since I know he wanted -- I remember he asked for more debates to go all around the country and so I don't think we ought to overly parse that."]

At the Democratic National Convention in August, Clinton promised that he and Hillary would do everything possible to get Barack Obama elected. Since then, he’s been a nonentity on the campaign trail. He just announced plans to visit swing states with Obama next week, but only “after the Jewish holidays.” (Presumably he’ll wait for Yom Kippur, which is Oct. 9, not Sukkot, which ends Oct. 22.) But his presence won’t necessarily be a boon; even when he’s praising Obama, it sounds tepid.

Bill Clinton is one of the best orators and political talents of his generation. So why is he such a lousy surrogate? Some theories:

It’s always about him. Granted, Clinton’s recent TV appearances were geared to promote the Clinton Global Initiative. So he’s excused for talking about himself there. But even questions that aren’t about him become about him. When a View hostess asked him who he thinks is going to win, he answered the question—“I believe Obama will win”—and then segued into praise for McCain. “If it hadn’t been for John McCain, I’m not sure I could have normalized relations with Vietnam,” he said. When David Letterman asked him what he thinks about Obama picking Biden over Hillary, he described how “Joe Biden was a great supporter of mine when I was president in stopping the genocide in Bosnia, Kosovo, restoring democracy in Haiti, and a lot of things we did together.”

He likes everyone. On Tuesday, Clinton had kind words for the Palin family. “I come from Arkansas. I get why she’s hot out there, why she's doing well,” he told reporters. (He added that voters would think, “I'm glad she loves her daughter and she's not ashamed of her. … I like that little Down syndrome kid.”) On Larry King Live, he called Palin “gutsy, spirited, and real.” As for Obama vs. McCain, “I genuinely like both of them. … We make a terrible mistake believing we have to find something wrong with the people we won’t vote for.” And calling Obama a “good candidate” and a “smart man” sounds pretty weak.

He’s too analytical. Clinton likes to play pundit, explaining why he thinks Obama will win instead of why people should vote for him. On the Late Show, he predicted the election would “break Obama’s way.” Not because of Obama’s message of hope and change and the American dream, but because of election fundamentals. As he said on The View: “Obama will win for the following reasons: Two-thirds of American people are having trouble paying their bills. … America is growing more diverse,” racially and demographically. And “registration is up for Democrats, flat for Republicans in 20 of the most important states.” Inspiring!

He thinks Hillary deserved to win. Clinton doesn’t have to keep arguing that Hillary won the popular vote, as he did on The View. (She did come close.) He also stopped short of telling Hillary supporters who dislike Obama that they’re wrong. “You can’t tell someone else that ground on which they make their voting decision is irrational,” he said. “We can’t tell anybody they don’t know what they’re doing because they vote for candidate X instead of Y.” That’s actually a good description of what campaigning is.

He’s determined to be bipartisan. Since 2000, Clinton has tried to live down his reputation as a polarizing force. The Clinton Foundation combats HIV/AIDS and makes a point of reaching out to Republicans. Laura Bush was the keynote speaker at the foundation’s 2006 conference. After a massive tsunami hit Indonesia in 2005, Clinton teamed up with President George H.W. Bush to ask for donations. Sure, he didn’t seem to mind the rough-and-tumble when campaigning for his wife in the primaries, but campaigning for Obama, with all the mud-lobbing going on right now, could complicate his efforts to reburnish his reputation as an elder statesman.

This doesn’t mean that Clinton won’t campaign for Obama or that he won’t be effective. All he needs, to paraphrase a popular political slogan, is a candidate he can believe in.

UPDATE: Clinton can't help himself: He praised McCain again Thursday, telling Good Morning America that he understands why McCain's wants to delay Friday's debate. ""We know he didn't do it because he's afraid, because Sen. McCain wanted more debates," Clinton said. "I presume he did that in good faith since I know he wanted -- I remember he asked for more debates to go all around the country and so I don't think we ought to overly parse that."

Calling Burkle and Bing!

When we saw this New York Times headline (since changed), we thought it could mean only one thing: Barack Obama was planning to recruit Bill Clinton buddies and all-around bad influences Ron Burkle and Steve Bing. Because if there's anything missing from the Obama campaign, it's fun. Namely, barely legal women, out-of-wedlock children, and trans-Atlantic trips aboard "Air F*** One."

Best Spin of the Day

So a Clinton campaign office in Terre Haute, Ind., goes up in flames last night, and reporters ask Bill Clinton, fresh off his Bosnia revival tour, whether he thinks it's a bad omen. He was ready for it:

“No, I think this is a good omen. We’ll rise from the ashes like the Phoenix.”

The Bill/Hillary Gap

For all the talk about how Mark Penn undermined Clinton’s credibility on free trade by advising the Colombian government, there’s been less attention to how Bill could be doing the exact same thing.

Today, Ben Smith and Sam Stein fleshed out Bill Clinton’s longtime endorsement of the Colombia free trade deal. Short story, he gave several high-paid speeches throughout Latin America advocating for the agreement and accepted an award from Colombian president Uribe for his help.

Clinton spokesman Jay Carson dismissed the Bill/Hillary divide in a statement as old news:

"Senator Clinton is the candidate for president and she is a clear and firm opponent of the Colombian free trade agreement. Like other married couples who disagree on issues from time to time, she disagrees with her husband on this issue. President Clinton has been public about his support for Columbia's request for U.S. trade preferences since 2000,” Carson said. “Yawn.”

Not sure about you, but I’m wide awake. Given the degree to which Hillary participated in her husband’s administration, shouldn’t we expect Bill to be as (if not more) influential in hers? Also, there’s a difference between a wanton adviser and a contradictory spouse. You can’t fire your husband. As someone who would arguably be more powerful than any Cabinet member, shouldn’t Bill’s lobbying matter as much as Mark Penn’s?

Then there’s the China issue. Hillary made news yesterday by urging President Bush to boycott the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. She was smart to get out front on the issue—any chance to relive her 1995 “women’s rights are human rights” moment is worth taking. But if this issue grows as August approaches, her hawkishness will begin to clash with the Clinton administration’s soft China policy. After slamming China for human rights violations in his 1992 campaign, Bill removed human rights standards from China’s Most Favored Nation status requirements for the sake of economic relations. He later became the first president in the world to visit China since Tiananmen Square. (See Peter Baker’s write-up of Bill’s China reversal.)

No doubt Hillary disagreed with her husband’s policy toward China in the 1990s, as she claims to have done on NAFTA, and his actions on behalf of Colombia. But their divergence of opinion now suggests more than a little campaign posturing. No one really believes a President Clinton or a President Obama would be nearly as protectionist as they now claim. “Renegotiating” trade agreements is their blanket term for reform, but that could mean merely adding environmental and labor standards, with little effect on outsourcing. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine either one endangering our cozy relationship with China to make a symbolic statement about human rights, especially with the economy lagging. Once in office, Bill Clinton advocated a "principled, pragmatic approach" to China, which could just as well describe his stance on Colombia and NAFTA. The notion that Hillary or Obama would do anything different will likely vanish at their inauguration.

More "Judas"

In yesterday’s Washington Post, Bill Richardson offered his best retort yet to James Carville’s comparison of Richardson to “Judas”:

Carville and others say that I owe President Clinton's wife my endorsement because he gave me two jobs. Would someone who worked for Carville then owe his wife, Mary Matalin, similar loyalty in her professional pursuits? Do the people now attacking me recall that I ran for president, albeit unsuccessfully, against Sen. Clinton? Was that also an act of disloyalty?

Bill Clinton reportedly flew off the handle in a meeting with superdelegates last weekend when the subject of Richardson came up. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Five times to my face [Richardson] said that he would never do that,” a red-faced, finger-pointing Clinton erupted.

He should have said three. Then he would have had the Peter parallel, too.
 

The M-Bomb, Finally

Perhaps the most shocking thing about Gordon Fischer’s Monica joke is that it didn’t happen until now.

A key Obama organizer and adviser in Iowa, Fischer posted an item on his blog over the weekend slamming Bill Clinton for his comment late Friday that many interpreted as an attack on Obama’s patriotism.

“Bill Clinton cannot possibly seriously believe Obama is not a patriot, and cannot possibly be said to be helping—instead he is hurting—his own party,” Fischer wrote. “B. Clinton should never be forgiven. Period. This is a stain on his legacy, much worse, much deeper, than the one on Monica's blue dress.”

Cue outrage. On a conference call this morning, Clinton spokesman Phil Singer called it the “most personal attack yet” and an indicator of the Obama campaign’s harsh new strategy. Fischer took down the post and replaced it with a two-part apology. The Obama campaign reiterated its line that “comments like this have no place in our political dialogue.”

So far in this campaign, we’ve seen some liberal umbrage-taking. But now it’s official: The Monica scandal is off-limits too. It’s still unclear, though, to what extent the ban applies. The scandal was a defining moment of her husband’s administration, after all. Is any reference to Monica considered unfair? If anything, the Clinton campaign is lucky the blue dress hasn’t resurfaced until now. Be sure that in a general election, Clinton's Republican opponents would not exercise the same restraint.

Also, here’s an idea. For one day, each candidate allows their surrogates to say all the hateful, inappropriate, uncalled-for things they can think of about their opponent. All the hurled insults would instantly cancel one another out. That way, they can get it out of their systems and bring the umbrage war to a stalemate. Or so we hope.

Who's Injecting Race?

As long as we’re dissecting telling Bill Clinton moments, here’s one more. Heading out the door of a Charleston bar and grill Wednesday, the former president heatedly responded to reporters asking about race on the campaign trail:

"This is almost like once you accuse someone of racism and bigotry the facts become irrelevant. Not one single solitary citizen asked about any of this and they never do.” [More context here. Video here.]

Fast forward to Clinton’s Kingstree event that evening, where an audience member asked a long question about Hillary and Obama and race. “We know you sound polite when you talk about Obama,” he said. “But black America is voting for Obama because he’s black.” The man went on to claim that America isn’t ready for a black president and that Obama would lose to a Republican in the general election. “I’d love to see a black president,” he said, adding that he thought Obama would do a good job. “But America, it still has racist problems.”

The questioner said he's a minister from a nearby town but refused to give his name. When reporters pushed, a policeman who was escorting him--and inexplicably wearing a Department of Corrections uniform--waved them away.

Bill Clinton On Marriage

At the same Kingstree event, Bill Clinton called on a small girl and was thrown a curved: “What do you do when you get married?”

Clinton laughed, maybe a little nervously. “See the press people back there?” he said, pointing to the back of the room. “They put me through the ringer this morning.”

“When you get married, if you’re really lucky, then your husband or wife becomes your best friend,” he said. “And you get to live with your best friend for life. Like, Hillary’s my best friend.” 

He continued: “The best moment of my life is I was in the hospital with my wife when our daughter was born. ... The best thing about being married is having kids. … Those are the two best things about being married.”

Bullet ... dodged.

Bill's Peace Offering

“If [Barack Obama] wins this nomination, I’m going to do what I can to help him become president.”

The promise comes after a week of bitter exchanges between the former president and the Obama campaign. "After all the mean things they said about me, I can’t believe I’m saying this," Clinton said.

Clinton was responding to an audience member's question--well, more like a statement--about how "black America is voting for Obama" even though "America is not ready for a black president." "I hope you're wrong about that," Clinton said, adding that he thinks Hillary is the best candidate for reasons other than gender or race.

The Reagan Fallout

In the same way that Hillary's waterworks dominated the last news cycle before the New Hampshire primary, it looks like Obama's comments about Ronald Reagan are dominating the pre-Nevada airwaves.

Both Hillary and Bill went all out today criticizing Obama for his suggestion that Reagan "changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not" during an interview with the Reno Journal-Gazette Monday. Obama also recently called the Republican party the "party of ideas" for the past fifteen years.

"I don't think it's a better idea to privatize Social Security," Hillary told an audience in Las Vegas. "I don't think it's a better idea to try to eliminate the minimum wage. I don't think it's a better idea to undercut health benefits and to give drug companies the right to make billions of dollars by providing prescription drugs to Medicare recipients. I don't think it's a better idea to shut down the government, to drive us into debt."

For Bill Clinton, of course, the attack was more personal. Not only did Obama call him out by name -- he basically said Bill was a lesser leader than Reagan. The former president's reply was blunt: "I can't imagine any Democrat seeking the presidency would say they were the party of new ideas for the last 15 years. But it sounded good in Reno I guess."

Obama's defenders say he wasn't praising Reagan's policies, but rather Reagan's crossover appeal. "What Reagan did is he created Reagan Democrats," said Rep. Robert Wexler during a campaign conference call today. "What Obama is creating is Obama Republicans and Obama independents."

Whatever Obama's intentions, he should have seen this coming. For Dems, praising Ronald Reagan is as anathema as insulting Him is for Republicans. You just don't do it. Unless, of course, you're campaigning on a message of bipartisan cooperation and long-view political landscape shifting. In that case, you just might take the risk of praising Reagan. Sure, it could hurt you in the short term, but down the road it might help Democrats appropriate Reagan's legacy in the same way both parties have tried to appropriate Lincoln's. In the end, that could be a much more devastating blow to Republicans than shying away from Reagan. Maybe that's what he was thinking. Or maybe he just wanted to make Bill mad.

Bill Clinton Supports Obama

Are Bill and Hillary in a lover’s spat? A visit to presidentbillclinton.com or williamclinton.com redirects right to Barack Obama’s homepage. This is the same Obama that Bill Clinton hasn’t been too fond of recently. We’ve heard rumors of dissention within the Clinton ranks, but has it really gotten this bad?

No. Those Clinton domains were registered in 1998 by Joseph Culligan, a private investigator and part-time domain squatter based in Miami. Last week, after ABC News discovered Clinton was readying an Obama attack site, Culligan was inspired to drum up publicity for his own private investigation Web site, webofdeception.com. He redirected the Clinton domains, which had lay dormant for years, to Obama’s site, hoping that somebody would take the bait.

Well, it worked. Wonkette published a post on the redirects today, which piqued our interest on an unsurprisingly slow news day. I tracked the domains back to Culligan, who also owns domains based on the names of Barack Obama and Patti Solis Doyle, Hillary’s campaign manager.

Domain-name trickery is nothing new on the Internet. Just last week somebody tried to convince journalists that Hillary Clinton registered BarackOsama2008.org. But Culligan’s antics are an avoidable headache for the Clinton camp. Culligan says he doesn't hold any animosity toward the Clintons and that 42 “was a great president.” (He wouldn't say which candidate, Democrat or Republican, he supports.) He has offered to give Clinton the domains every year since '98, free of charge, but he’s never heard a response. “When Clinton is ready for his name, I’m ready to give it back."

Why Bill Clinton Lashes Out

Here’s an interesting bit from Matt Bai’s upcoming New York Times Magazine article (not online just yet) on how Bill Clinton’s legacy has shaped Democratic politics and the current presidential race. Over the past few weeks, Bill has been a bit more aggressive than usual, most recently telling Charlie Rose that electing Barack Obama would be like “rolling the dice” on America’s future. Here’s one reason why:

As he doused his fries in ketchup, Clinton told me that he was generally more inclined to want to ‘‘pop back’’ at Edwards or Obama than his wife was, but he had to remind himself that Hillary was plenty capable of defending herself. There have been reports in the last few weeks about Clinton’s lashing out at strategists and meddling in his wife’s campaign; insiders say this has been exaggerated, but some of Clinton’s friends and former advisers told me that the attacks from rivals irritate Clinton a lot more now, when they are directed at his wife, than they did when he was running. (‘‘As a candidate, he was absolutely bulletproof — it never bothered him,’’ says Paul Begala, one of Clinton’s 1992 advisers.) What he takes even more personally — and should, really — is the unmistakable premise that underlies the sniping, that somehow his own presidency was bad for the country and the party.

It's true: Every time Obama talks about a new generation of leaders or "moving on" or overturning "textbook" Democratic politics, Bill must feel it. That's why Clinton's best defense so far has been to say that he was a young upstart once, too: “I was, in terms of experience, was closer to Senator Obama, I suppose, in 1988 when I came within a day of announcing,” he said in an interview in September. He said he chose not to run that year because “I really didn’t think I knew enough, and had served enough and done enough to run.”

In other words, Clinton was the party's great new hope, too -- but he was smart enough to wait. It sounds like he's defending Hillary. But really, he's defending himself.