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Clinton vs. BushWas it smart for Bill Clinton to pick a fight with the White House over Scooter Libby?

By John Dickerson
Posted Friday, July 6, 2007, at 6:02 PM ET
Scooter Libby. Click image to expand.

When Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich at the end of his term, about-to-be-President Bush and his aides didn't make a huge stink. Maybe Bush figured that one day he'd need to defend his own pardons. Maybe he didn't want to start off with a drawn-out political fight. Or maybe he wanted to skirt the inconvenient fact that Scooter Libby, known only at the time as the vice president's chief of staff with the quirky name, was Rich's lawyer.

Now the White House is happy to talk about the Clinton pardon, especially since the former president criticized Bush's decision to commute Scooter Libby's sentence. White House spokesman Tony Snow reacted by saying Clinton had extraordinary chutzpah to make such a claim, given his actions with Rich. Snow also mentioned Clinton's record in an op-ed in USA Today defending Bush's decision.

For Democrats, this little episode highlights the promise and peril of a Hillary Clinton presidency. On the one hand, President Clinton spoke for many in the party who are furious about the Libby decision. As Hillary Clinton's team is quick to point out, she and her husband know how to fight. This is proof of it. On the other hand, Clinton has given the White House and Republicans an opportunity to muddy the issue by dredging up his past. Whatever you may think about the merits of the Rich pardon versus the Libby commutation, the debate is one the Bush team wants. The White House would rather have everyone debating the relative merits of the two than debating the inconsistencies in the Libby decision alone.

If Hillary Clinton is elected president, how often will this phenomenon be repeated? With each piece of legislation Hillary Clinton proposes or each assertion she makes, Republicans will offer an analog from the Clinton years. They'd do the same with any Democratic president, of course, but another Democratic president would have an easier time walking away from such attacks. The Clintons will be compelled to answer them. In some cases, Hillary Clinton's administration would be able to dispatch with these predictable attacks. In other cases, the comparison will favor the Clintons. The question for Democrats is how much of this friction they will want in the machine in the next Democratic administration.

Where Democrats come down on this question is very important to Barack Obama, who is trying to use Bill Clinton to paint Hillary as a woman of the past. Talking about Clinton, Obama said the country needed to move past the "harsh partisanship and old arguments." Though Obama shares the Clintons' view about Libby, his campaign is happy enough for the Rich reminder. It beats talking about the balanced budgets and economic prosperity of the Clinton years. That was supposed to be what Bill and Hillary Clinton reminded voters of this week in their maiden voyage together on the campaign trail, not the rough episodes.

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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at .
Photograph of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. Photograph of Hillary Clinton on Slate's home page by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

While I'm sure this particular skirmish will be forgotten long before election day, I do think this illustrates a Clinton Problem: the tendency to be smug, arrogant, and hypocritical. Of course those adjectives describe just about everyone connected to the Bush administration, but it's precisely because the Republicans are so boorish that the Democrats can't afford to be.

The Democrats are, or should be, the party that's quietly right and straightforward and honest, knows the truth is complicated and doesn't dumb things down or sugarcoat them, and remembers that elected officials are public servants. The McAuliffe/Clinton/Carville brand of politics is divisive and patronizing and out of touch with the present landscape.

Remember that all those guys accomplished is to get Clinton elected in two contests in which the GOP basically rolled over and played dead. The congressional Democrats immediately started losing and didn't come back until Howard Dean took over the party.

--kalaresh

(To reply, click here.)

Fair or not the GOP, particularly the radio haters will use every syllable Hillary or her husband speaks to bring back talk radio's glory days when what everhateful bile was spewed 50% of the American population swallowed it without question. A Hillary candidacy would be hate radio's wildest wet dream. If she managed to win over about 1/3 of the people who hate her she stands a chance to win the general election. Should Hillary somehow become president it would be a public hate-fest from the right like never before witnessed in America.

For the good of America and in the best interests of its people I hope Hillary would reconsider her run. There is no shame in being "just" a Senator and she could do a lot of work there for years to come.

This pardon—excuse me, sentence reduction—is a slap in the face to every decent law abiding citizen on this planet. Only those who have sold their soul to the Republican Party and could care less about anyone or anything else in the world see nothing wrong with this state of affairs

--NickD

(To reply, click here.)

Sure, the Clintons want to criticize Bush on the Libby commutation and sure they opened themselves up to a response from Tony Snow. But the Clintons also want to remind people that they like Bill Clinton and it doesn't particularly matter what Bill Clinton says as long as the Clinton campaign gets him out there a little. Why would the Hillary campaign care about Bush's counter-arguments?

In fact, Bush isn't that much more popular in this country than Osama bin Laden. But Bill Clinton left office with an approval rating over 60% despite the Lewinsky scandal and the Marc Rich scandal. Getting Bill some coverage in the media was going to do the Hillary campaign some good however Bush responded.

--riccaric

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