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How Barack Uses BillTurning Hillary Clinton's husband against her.

By John DickersonPosted Monday, March 24, 2008, at 6:26 PM ET

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Jack Shafer deconstructed Barack Obama's thaumaturgy at the podium, while David Greenberg explained why presidential inaugural addresses are rarely memorable. In 1998, Timothy Noah dissected Clinton's famous "meaning of the word 'is' " statement, and in 2001, Jacob Weisberg confronted the paradox of George W. Bush's eloquence in formal setting compared to his spontaneous inarticulacy.

Clinton would want to characterize a Hillary vs. McCain debate as civil and respectful in this way precisely because the Obama campaign has been arguing strenuously that she is so divisive that in a general election, she'd rip the country apart. Bill might just have been saying, Hey, these senators like each other, so don't be worried about the general election. It'll be a civil debate.

Call me a hope-monger, but I tend to lean toward that more generous interpretation in this case. I'm not arguing that Bill Clinton doesn't have the capacity to play the angles or that it's a certainty he wasn't trying to be sneaky here. I'm arguing that in this instance, those facts aren't in evidence. I don't think there's a definitive deconstruction to be done. Given the thousands of words he says every day, you can find something to stuff with meaning every day if you hunt. It's plausible to see Clinton's remarks in another context than the one in which the Obama campaign has framed them.

Perhaps I've been listening to Barack Obama too much. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama argues that "political caricatures and nuggets of conventional wisdom lodge themselves in our brain without us ever taking the time to examine them." As an example of false narratives, he cites none other than those that attach to his challenger: "[A] vote or speech by Hillary Clinton that runs against type is immediately labeled calculating." If I'm inclined to think the worst of Hillary Clinton and her husband, it's the senator who reminds me to recognize alternative interpretations.

Though Bill's remarks are murky, the Obama campaign pronounced judgment by embracing the conventional wisdom that insists the Clintons are always calculating. In recent days, Obama's campaign manager has repeatedly said that Clinton will "say or do anything to get elected," hoping to play on the very caricature his candidate once eschewed.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, so it's probably too much to expect the Obama campaign to match the Obama book (though campaign aides would like us to see no space between). Shouldn't Obama supporters let him off the hook—because politics requires a little trimming of standards now and again, and, after all, doesn't Bill Clinton deserve it for his past wrongs if not this one? If you're inclined to that view, Obama's remarks last week should give you pause. In his speech on race, he renewed his covenant with voters about a new kind of politics. He warned against just the kind of thing his campaign seems to now be doing by linking Clinton and McCarthyism. "We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card," he said. "We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change."

If progress can happen only if we stop pouncing on every little thing, then why is the Obama camp madly pouncing? They obviously think it's a dead certainty Clinton was challenging Obama's patriotism. It's not, and Obama's own call to higher political standards should bias the assessment in Clinton's favor. So, either the Obama campaign is consciously overplaying the moment for political benefit, or it is incapable of seeing anything benign coming out of the mouth of Bill Clinton the evil genius—or the evil machine that is the Hillary campaign. The latter would suggest a weakness in judgment that can't distinguish what's really sneaky from what isn't, and Obama is running on his precise judgment.

You may think I'm being picky for taking all of this so seriously. It's just politics, after all. But if we're not supposed to take all of Obama's speeches seriously, we're stuck embracing the Clinton claim that he offers "just words" and doesn't mean what he says. To believe in the full measure of Obama's words then is, perhaps, to be too hopeful.