One of the trickiest aspects of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is what, if anything, the candidates who aren’t named Clinton do about the Big Dog. Dems can’t praise him too much without helping Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and they can’t criticize him too much without alienating much of the party.
Indeed, by most reasonable measures, Bill Clinton is extremely popular with Democrats. It’s arguably one of the main factors behind Hillary’s success thus far. What are the other Dems to do?
Barack Obama, among others, is trying to thread the needle.
[Obama] said Clinton is running a textbook campaign based on political calculation, rather than a candid explanation of her policy positions. And, he widened blame for the nation’s problems to her husband’s and previous administrations.
The 2008 election is “a chance to come together and finally solve the challenges that were made worse by George Bush, but that in fact existed long before George Bush took office. Challenges like health care. Challenges like energy. Challenges like education.”
It was a subtle swipe at former President Bill Clinton, who campaigned in South Carolina for his wife earlier this week.
A Clinton campaign spokesperson responded, “It is disappointing that as his campaign stalls, Senator Obama is abandoning the politics of hope and launching a negative campaign against both Senator and President Clinton. Most Americans thought Bill Clinton was a good president who moved America forward.”
First, the “abandoning the politics of hope” line has grown very tiresome. Second, and more importantly, the campaign is right about Bill Clinton’s popularity. Obama, among others, seemingly wants to say, “Clinton was good, but we can do better.” It’s a difficult pitch to pull off.
Of course, Bill Clinton, being the political animal that he is, has decided to mix it up with his wife’s rivals.
In fact, yesterday on the campaign trail, Bill Clinton equated the criticism directed at Hillary from her primary rivals with the swiftboat lies against John Kerry in 2004.
The former president had encouraged an audience in Nevada Monday not to let “trivial matters” take away the election from the Democrats as they have in the past. He cited the television ads during the 2004 presidential campaign that questioned Kerry’s patriotism and campaign commercials in 2002 suggesting that Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga. was soft on terrorism. […]
“We listened to people make snide comments about whether Vice President Gore was too stiff,” Clinton said. “And when they made dishonest claims about the things that he said that he’d done in his life. When that scandalous swift boat ad was run against Senator Kerry. When there was an ad that defeated Max Cleland in Georgia, a man that left half his body in Vietnam.”
“Why am I saying this? Because, I had the feeling that at the end of that last debate we were about to get into cutesy land again,” Clinton said.
The other Dems were less than pleased with the comparison. Obama said he was “pretty stunned” with the swiftboat comparison, while Chris Dodd called the Clintons’ response to the debate “outrageous.”
“To have the former president come out and suggest this is a form of swiftboating … is way over the top in my view,” Dodd told the AP, adding, “If elected to the presidency, there will be a lot of tough questions and if you can’t handle it in a debate without accusing everybody who has an issue with you of piling on or a sexist attack, somehow, first of all that’s unwise and, secondly, it’s false.”
It’s a dynamic worth keeping an eye on. I think the evidence suggests Bill Clinton’s presence on the trail is a huge benefit for his wife’s campaign, but it adds a new wrinkle when candidates are engaging in back-and-forth criticism with the frontrunner’s spouse — who happens to be the former president and one of the most popular figures in the party’s recent history.
Stay tuned.