Bill Clinton - The Fox In The O'Bama Re-election Hen House...

[Selene]

Bill Clinton out of control on 2012

By: Roger Simon

June 5, 2012 04:14 AM EDT

Bill Clinton has to be the smartest guy in the room even when he’s not in the room.

Clinton is not on Barack Obama’s campaign staff, is not a trusted adviser, does not set Obama’s strategy.

But Bill Clinton is pretty good at sabotaging Obama’s strategy.

He did so last week when he went on television and said Mitt Romney had a “sterling” record while running Bain Capital.

The Obama message is exactly the opposite. The Obama campaign had just run a TV ad claiming that working Americans had been harmed by Bain Capital and included one man saying Bain had been a “vampire” that “sucked the blood out of us.”

(PHOTOS: A look at Clinton’s career)

Whether you liked or hated the ad (I liked it), it attacked Romney on his strongest point: He is a good businessman who knows how to create jobs and, therefore, will be a good president.

But Bill Clinton did not like that ad.

“I think he had a good business career,” Clinton said of Romney and added that “a man who has been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold.”

Obama does not need Clinton undercutting him. The two are not close, but they are not supposed to be enemies. They have golfed together, they attend fundraisers together, their staffs talk and, oh, yeah, Clinton’s wife is Obama’s secretary of state.

(Also on POLITICO: Clinton: A Romney White House would be 'calamitous')

There are two things going on here. First, Clinton has always been cozier with Wall Street than Obama. In January 1999, I was at a very odd event for then-President Clinton on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center.

Richard Grasso, then-chairman of New York Stock Exchange, stood up and said, “In my little corner of southern Manhattan, the Dow Jones industrial average during the course of President Clinton’s tenure tripled. We have the lowest unemployment in 30 years, and 16 million jobs have been created!”

The crowd, which included a number of financial titans, cheered. This was a year after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and months after Clinton had been impeached, but Wall Street did not care. Bill Clinton had been good for The Street, and The Street liked him.

“I’m not sure I know what to say,” Clinton said in his best “aw shucks” style. “That’s the sort of thing they say for your funeral. I don’t think we’re there yet.”

Times were good, Clinton got the credit and, today, he still has a lot of friends in business and high finance and these friends help fund his philanthropic endeavors.

Barack Obama has fewer friends in high finance. He inherited an economy devastated by a derivative bubble and a housing bubble and ravished by the unbridled greed of some Wall Street firms, which took taxpayer bailouts with one hand and gave themselves huge bonuses with the other.

So the two men have different views of how “sterling” The Street operates.

Second, there is the little matter of the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton was the early favorite, but she lost to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton helped her lose.

He made one of the biggest strategic mistakes of her entire campaign: He insisted she seriously compete in South Carolina. Hillary’s staff wanted to spend its time and resources elsewhere, judging that South Carolina, with its large black electorate, was unwinnable.

But Bill felt that with his Southern roots and proven appeal to black voters, Hillary could beat Obama there. And Bill campaigned all-out. At Dartmouth College in Hannover, N.H., an angry, finger-wagging Bill had called Obama’s campaign a “fairy tale.” Jim Clyburn, a highly respected black congressman from South Carolina, felt insulted and publicly told Bill to “chill a little bit” and “tone it down.”

But Bill wouldn’t listen. And at a primary day rally in Columbia, S.C., he pooh-poohed Obama’s impending win by saying: “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88,” meaning, in other words, that Obama’s South Carolina victory would be as insignificant for him as it was for Jackson.

This was widely viewed as racially insensitive. Jake Tapper of ABC News referred to it as “race-baiting.”

Obama would crush Hillary Clinton in South Carolina by 28.9 percentage points, the first blowout of the primary campaign. African-Americans made up 55 percent of the voters, and 80 percent of them voted for Obama. “There was a recoil of people to Clinton tactics,” Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, told me.

A top Hillary staffer told me: “It was so dramatic a loss for us and so dramatic a win for him that it gave permission for Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy and [then-Arizona Gov.] Janet Napolitano to say with a clear conscience, ‘We are going for him.’”

Moreover, the South Carolina victory made it very difficult for superdelegates to go with Hillary without looking as if they wanted to deny a black man the nomination.

So why would Bill be angry at Obama for Bill’s mistake? Because we never blame ourselves for our mistakes, we blame those who profit from them.

At a fundraiser with Obama in New York Monday night, Clinton said that Obama deserved a second term because “the alternative would be, in my opinion, calamitous for our country and the world.” But that’s the thing about Clinton. When you invite him, you never know if the Good Bill or the Bad Bill will show up.

Some think Bill is trying to undermine Obama’s campaign today because he wants to boost Hillary in 2016. I don’t see that. If Obama loses this time, the Democratic nominee will face an incumbent Mitt Romney in 2016. If Obama wins this time, the nominee will run for an open seat. It’s not certain which would be tougher to win.

Bill Clinton is a genuine political genius. But only when it comes to his own campaigns.

“As the campaign kicked off, there was a conscious effort to not have Bill out there,” Hillary’s campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, told me. “We used him strategically to raise money.”

The Obama campaign wants to use Bill the same way. Raise money, tone it down and chill out.

Roger Simon is POLITICO’s chief political columnist.

© 2012 POLITICO LLC

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77037_Page2.html

[Backlighting]

Aside from Obama, I can't think of another slimebag I loathe more than slick Willy.

[BaalChatzaf]

Aside from Obama, I can't think of another slimebag I loathe more than slick Willy.

From the p.o.v. of the economy Slick Willy had one of the best administrations in recent years.

He is a very base person but he ran a good show.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Selene]

Aside from Obama, I can't think of another slimebag I loathe more than slick Willy.

From the p.o.v. of the economy Slick Willy had one of the best administrations in recent years.

He is a very base person but he ran a good show.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Folks:

He was smart enough to be forced to cooperate with the Gingrich, Kasich, Contract with America Congress. He also had the dotcom bubble at the right time. Finally, he also received the "Peace Dividend" from the Reagan years that flowed from the collapse of the Evil Empire.

Adam

[BaalChatzaf]

Aside from Obama, I can't think of another slimebag I loathe more than slick Willy.

From the p.o.v. of the economy Slick Willy had one of the best administrations in recent years.

He is a very base person but he ran a good show.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Folks:

He was smart enough to be forced to cooperate with the Gingrich, Kasich, Contract with America Congress. He also had the dotcom bubble at the right time. Finally, he also received the "Peace Dividend" from the Reagan years that flowed from the collapse of the Evil Empire.

Adam

Whatever. We had some good times during his watch. Give him credit for not screwing it up.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Selene]

Aside from Obama, I can't think of another slimebag I loathe more than slick Willy.

From the p.o.v. of the economy Slick Willy had one of the best administrations in recent years.

He is a very base person but he ran a good show.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Folks:

He was smart enough to be forced to cooperate with the Gingrich, Kasich, Contract with America Congress. He also had the dotcom bubble at the right time. Finally, he also received the "Peace Dividend" from the Reagan years that flowed from the collapse of the Evil Empire.

Adam

Whatever. We had some good times during his watch. Give him credit for not screwing it up.

Ba'al Chatzaf

I just did.

[Robert Campbell]

Obama thinks Bill Clinton is campaigning for him.

Bill's campaigning for Hillary in 2016.

Robert Campbell

[Reidy]

William Kristol offers several reasons as to why Clinton is behaving this way.

[Brant Gaede]

William Kristol offers several reasons as to why Clinton is behaving this way.

The Clintons cannot be perceived as causing Obama's defeat or pushing him aside or lose too much black support for themselves and other Democratic candidates in 2016. That's one big reason Hillary did not take Obama on this year. There are at least two to three other big reasons. One is the slo-mo economic disaster will be blamed on who wins this year in 2016. There isn't enough time, will, knowledge, and courage to counter its inertia and if there was we'd still all be in a world of pain in four years and incumbents will be run out of office.

--Brant

[Selene]

<p>This video clip of William Jefferson Clinton from 2010 that has just re-burst on the scene is devastating...</p>

<iframe title="MRC TV video player" width="640" height="360" src="http://www.mrctv.org/embed/114004" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

n 2010, former President Bill Clinton spoke at Cuyahoga and told those in attendance to hold tight and give the Democrats a chance to fix the nations problems. He went on to say if they couldn't, to vote them all out in 2012.

Clinton stated:

"And they say they had 21 months put us back in, the Democrats are saying something like this: Look, we found a big hole that we did not dig, and we didn't get out of it in 21 months, but at least we quit digging. So, don't go back in reverse, give us two more years and if it doesn't work you have another election in just two years, you can vote us all out then. But for goodness sakes, we quit digging don't bring back the shovel brigade."