ON THE “PRECARIOUS LEFT EDGE”ON THE “PRECARIOUS LEFT EDGE”
If I don’t have this [economic recovery] done in three years, then it’s going to be a one-term proposition.
—Barack Obama, February 2009
Bill Clinton watched the rollout of Hillary’s campaign from his pleasure dome in Little Rock.
Hillary’s managers had excluded him from their strategy sessions.
He was out of the loop.
“Hillary has kept Bill on the sidelines of the campaign because she’s very adamant about him not being seen as running the campaign,” a Clinton confidant said in an interview for this book. “Hillary is very worried about her campaign being seen as a prologue to Bill’s third term. She and her campaign managers have agreed on a strategy to keep Bill in the background.
“Naturally, he isn’t happy about that,” the source continued. “He wants to be in on everything, and it’s been driving him crazy to be kept out of the mix. It’s a bigger problem than you might imagine. Their marriage is going through one of its periodic rocky periods as a result, and they’re going to have to work it out before the general election.”
Bill had to follow the campaign on television news broadcasts, just the way everybody else did.
And he didn’t much like what he saw.
He cringed at the clumsiness of Hillary’s remarks on the stump when she said that saving the U.S. economy would require “toppling” the richest 1 percent of Americans, and that Americans had to change their “religious beliefs” in order to make abortion legal everywhere.
Bill told his advisers that Hillary’s Scooby Doo van was “amateurish and silly,” and he practically tore out his hair when he heard that the van had been parked in a zone reserved for handicapped people.
When a TV news show ran a grainy surveillance video showing Hillary and Huma Abedin wearing dark sunglasses and stopping for lunch at a Chipotle restaurant in Maumee, Ohio, Bill asked an aide: “What are she and Huma doing? Are they robbing that place?”
But most of all, Bill tried to put a positive light on his status as a virtual nonperson in the campaign. His chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, told reporters that Bill had never intended to hit the campaign trail for Hillary in 2015 or appear with her at fund-raisers.
“If his advice is asked for, he’s happy to give it,” Flournoy said.
But he wasn’t asked.
Which left Bill no choice but to do what he always did when he was ignored—make a commotion and grab the spotlight.
While Hillary was doing her “Silent Cal” routine in Iowa and New Hampshire, Bill granted interviews to three TV personalities—Christiane Amanpour on CNN, David Letterman on the Late Show, and Cynthia McFadden on NBC News.
In the interviews, he came across as cranky, out of sorts, and not at all the master of shuck and jive. But he wasn’t beyond making things up as he went along.
“What does [Hillary] want me to do?” he said, wide-eyed with naiveté. “I have no idea.”
In a gross untruth that ranked right up there with “I did not have sexual relations with that woman . . . Miss Lewinsky,” Bill told McFadden about the Clinton Foundation: “There is no doubt in my mind that we have never done anything knowingly inappropriate in terms of taking money to influence any kind of American government policy.”
“I’m not in politics,” he replied to another McFadden question, apparently forgetting that Charlie Rose had dubbed him “the best political animal that’s ever been in American politics.”
“All I’m saying,” Bill insisted, “is the idea that there’s one set of rules for us and another set for everybody else is true.”
Bill was so off his game that he didn’t recognize that what he said was the opposite of what he intended.
But if Bill was ignored by Hillary’s campaign, his ideas were not forgotten.
As we’ve seen, during a get-together with friends on the eve of the campaign, Bill had listed several items that Hillary had to check off if she hoped to win the White House. She had already staked out positions on many of Bill’s must-do items, especially “Feed the base red meat.”
“Hillary Rodham Clinton,” wrote Anne Gearan in the Washington Post, “is running as the most liberal Democratic presidential front-runner in decades, with positions on issues from gay marriage to immigration that would, in past elections, have put her at her party’s precarious left edge.”
Indeed, Hillary was running to the left—and away from Obama’s record—as fast as she could.
And with good reason.
Obama had presided over the worst recovery from a recession in modern memory. Despite his promise to “heal” America’s political wounds, he bore a great deal of responsibility for making our political system more divisive, not less so. On his watch, the world’s respect for America had plunged to its lowest level since World War II.
Judged by almost any yardstick, Obama was presiding over a failed presidency. Even George W. Bush, who left office with poll numbers in the basement, now enjoyed higher ratings than Obama.
And the negative verdict on Obama’s performance went double for leaders in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, who concluded that Obama was the weakest president since Jimmy Carter.
Here were some of the things Hillary said on the campaign trail to distance herself from Obama:
On stop-and-frisk and mandatory sentencing: “Black lives matter. . . . It’s time to end the era of mass incarceration.”
On amnesty for illegal immigrants: “If Congress refuses to act [on shielding millions of illegal immigrants from deportation], as president I will do everything possible under the law to go even further [than Obama].”
On same-sex marriage, she tweeted: “Every loving couple & family deserves to be recognized & treated equally under the law across our nation.”
On raising the minimum wage, she tweeted: “Every American deserves a fair shot at success. Fast food & childcare workers shouldn’t have to march in streets for living wages.”
On abortion: “Deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
On free speech by political groups: Hillary said that as president she would apply a litmus test to Supreme Court nominees by making them pledge in advance to overturn the 2010 Citizens United decision that allowed corporations and labor unions to spend unlimited funds backing candidates for office.
On income inequality: “The deck is stacked in [wealthy peoples’] favor. My job is to reshuffle the cards.”