Bill Clinton: Dividing the Democratic Party?

“Were the conservatives right about Bill Clinton all along?” asked Jonathan Chait in the Los Angeles Times. For the best part of two decades, the former president’s character, or lack thereof, has been a point of sharp division in the culture wars. Liberals could never understand what it was about this charming, brilliant man that made the Right so apoplectic—unless it was the fact that he kept beating them. But in the past few weeks, ever since Barack Obama trounced his wife in the Iowa caucuses, we’ve begun to understand their revulsion. “The Clintons don’t much like losing,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post, and with the impertinent Obama threatening to deny Hillary Clinton the nomination she and her husband think is rightly hers, Bill has become a “cold-blooded political hit man.” He has belittled Obama’s qualifications, distorted his words, and last week, in South Carolina, even played the race card. His tactics have left even his staunchest supporters wondering, “What’s gotten into Bill?”

Something very ugly, said The San Diego Union-Tribune in an editorial. Anticipating Obama’s landslide win in last week’s South Carolina primary, Bill Clinton told reporters that voters were making their decisions based on “race and gender.” Translation: Obama only won because of South Carolina’s large black population. It got worse, said Michael Tomasky in the London Guardian. After the votes were counted, Clinton shrugged off his wife’s loss by pointing out that “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88.” What does Obama have in common with Jackson? Nothing, except skin color. The Clintons are clearly attempting “to pigeonhole Obama as ‘just the black guy,’” a particularly distasteful tactic from a man once dubbed the “first black president” on the strength of his supposedly deep affinity for African-Americans.

“Can I have an apology?” said Peter Wehner in National Review Online. Before Bill Clinton ever set foot in the White House, we conservatives were warning that he and Hillary were a “deeply unprincipled couple who destroy their political opponents” by any means necessary. Liberals scoffed, accusing “Clinton haters’’ of engaging in personal attacks on these fine public servants only because we couldn’t beat them in the “war of ideas.” There’s a certain satisfaction to watching the Left find out “we were right all along.” Barack Obama is in the process of learning “what everyone else already knows about the Clintons,” said The Wall Street Journal: They will stop at nothing in order to gain and retain power. Seven years after leaving office, Bill Clinton has finally united the nation, as “even Democrats now say the Clintons don’t tell the truth.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

It’s not their fudging of the truth that most troubles me, said Gail Collins in The New York Times. It’s that Bill has taken such a highly visible role in Hillary’s campaign, sometimes eclipsing the candidate herself. “The central selling point” of Hillary’s campaign was supposed to be that she’d be the first female president, not merely her husband’s surrogate. Now it sure looks as if the two of them will have a co-presidency, and “re-create the old Clinton chaos.” Bill just can’t help himself, said William Greider in The Nation. “He is pathological about preserving his own place in the spotlight,” and one way or the other, he will always find a way “to make himself the story.” And please don’t feel sorry for Mrs. Clinton: In order to win this election, she’s perfectly willing to let her egomaniacal husband off his leash and sink his teeth into Obama’s leg.

Criticize that strategy if you like, said John Brummett in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, but it is fiendishly brilliant. By double-teaming and baiting Obama, they’ve turned “this supposedly transcendent and transformational political figure” into just another “bickering politician,” whining that his opponent isn’t playing fair. The Clintons know they can’t hope to match Obama’s idealism, said Nicholas von Hoffman in The Nation, or his soaring, inspirational oratory, or the fervor of his supporters. So they’re sowing rancor and bitterness, knowing that in such an environment, the old political warriors from Arkansas will thrive, while Obama cannot. It may well work, for now. But if the Clintons think they can achieve their restoration by crushing the hopes of young Democrats and embittering African-Americans, they are mistaken. “They will find that the cost of destroying Obama and the dream in the spring is their own destruction in the fall.”