For the first time in 30 years neither Bill nor Hillary Clinton is on a public payroll somewhere. He was Governor then President, then she was Senator and Secretary of State. He was the Attorney General of Arkansas for a while too.
I stopped betting against Hillary Rodham Clinton 23 years ago when I watched her crush one man’s ambitions to preserve her husband’s career.
Summoned to a Capitol rotunda news conference by Tom McRae, an earnest Democrat challenging then-Gov. Bill Clinton for re-election, I heard the click, clack, click of the first lady’s low-heeled shoes approach from a hidden marble hallway.
“Tom!” the first lady of Arkansas shouted. “I think we oughta get the record straight!”
Waving a sheaf of papers, Hillary Clinton undercut McRae’s criticism of the Clinton administration by pointing to his past praise of the governor. It was a brutal sandbagging.
“Many of the reports you issued not only praise the governor on his environmental record,” she said, “but his education and his economic record!”
McRae’s primary campaign was toast. Bill Clinton was one step closer to the White House.
Wait . . . what?
What a low-down dirty move, confronting a candidate with his own words! What a horrible thing for the wife of a popular incumbent to do!
Seriously, I don’t know what Hillary plans to do next but I wish the best for her and Bill. They’ve earned a break. Maybe Chelsea will give them a couple grandkids to play with.
On this day in 1998, the Drudge Report carried an item on its website alleging that Newsweek magazine was sitting on a story exposing an affair between President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year-old White House intern.
I remember where I was when I heard the news. I had just stopped by my buddy’s house after class when he told me “You gotta hear this” and dragged me in front of his television. My first thought was “They finally got him”.
After five years and $70 million worth of relentless investigation the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy finally had proof that Bill Clinton lied about getting a blow job. Those were uplifting and enlightening times.
Late night comics had a field day. John Goodman played Linda Tripp on SNL. The media was openly speculating what Al Gore’s administration would look like, but when the smoke cleared the only guy who lost his job was Newt Gingrich.
BTW – When the affair took place Monica was no longer an intern.
Though Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s return to work next week will be brief, given President Obama’s nomination of John Kerry to replace her as secretary of State, it comes amid an aura of national popularity, respect, and even fascination.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in December found that Secretary Clinton and her husband, the former President Clinton, are America’s two most popular politicians. At the same time, a Bloomberg poll found that 70 percent of Americans view Secretary Clinton favorably – an astounding number given the country’s hyperpartisan divide.
What explains the high-flying ratings enjoyed by Bill and Hill, as Washington columnists prefer to call them?
Some pundits speculate that Secretary Clinton’s “relegation” to the relatively noncontroversial global stage of international issues has allowed her to win approving nods from Democrats and Republicans alike.
Others say it’s simply because the Clintons are so ubiquitous, with Secretary Clinton traveling up a storm representing America to the world and Mr. Clinton holding court during this past election cycle – first at the Democratic National Convention, then on the stump – on behalf of Mr. Obama.
But as The Washington Post noted recently as it marveled over the “good year” the Clintons have enjoyed: “[U]biquity usually breeds fatigue from the public, not more excitement.”
So why doesn’t America have Clinton fatigue?
In Secretary Clinton’s case, Americans appear to admire her work ethic and her ability to reinvent herself – and not just to make do with the hand dealt her, but to employ it with a flourish.
You can tell this guy is in the media because there is not one word in there about competence, peace, or prosperity. Not only that but it probably helps that for the past four years the Clintons (for the first time in two decades) have been relatively free from media attacks. I can’t remember the last time that Chris Matthews speculated on the air about the distinguishing characteristics of the presidential penis.
I don’t know if Hillary will ever run for office again. If she does run, I don’t know if I will vote for her. It will all depend on who she is running against. But if she does run again you can count on the knives coming out again as well. We will probably see some preemptive character assassination during the next couple years just in case.
Clinton Derangement Syndrome never dies. It’s just in remission right now.
Some Democrats are apparently not waiting for Barack Obama to lose the presidential election before starting the inevitable recriminations about whose fault it was. Whether writing strictly on his own hook or as a result of conversations with campaign officials, New York Times political writer Matt Bai has fired the first shot in what may turn out to be a very nasty battle over who deserves the lion’s share of the blame for what may turn out to be a November disaster for the Democrats. That the Times would publish a piece on October 24 that takes as its starting point the very real possibility that the president will lose, and that blame for that loss needs to be allocated, is astonishing enough. But that their nominee for scapegoat is the man who is almost certainly the most popular living Democrat is the sort of thing that is not only shocking, but might be regarded as a foretaste of the coming battle to control the party in 2016.
Bai’s choice for the person who steered the president wrong this year is none other than former President Bill Clinton, who has widely been credited for having helped produce a post-convention boost for the Democrats. Clinton’s speech on behalf of Obama was viewed, with good reason, as being far more effective than anything the president or anyone else said on his behalf this year. But Bai points to Clinton as the primary advocate within high Democratic circles for changing the party’s strategy from one of bashing Mitt Romney as an inauthentic flip-flopper to one that centered on trying to assert that he was a conservative monster. Given that Romney demolished that false image in one smashing debate performance in Denver that seems to have changed the arc of the election, Clinton’s advice seems ripe for second-guessing right now. But we have to ask why Bai thinks Clinton was the one who single-handedly forced the change, and what is motivating those feeding the reporter this information?
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This is clearly intended to absolve the anonymous Obama aides for making a decision that they — and the president — must have signed off on before it was implemented. Bai goes to great lengths to take them off the hook, and even compares their position to a ballplayer who would reject advice from Derek Jeter. In other words Bai is saying that anyone, even really smart political operatives like those working in Obama’s Chicago headquarters, or the top guys themselves like David Axelrod or David Plouffe, had no choice but to bow to the 42nd president’s wisdom.
[...]
But the idea that it was only Clinton that advocated this strategy or that without his influence the geniuses running the Obama campaign would not have made this mistake is so patently self-serving on the part of his sources that it’s a wonder that a generally savvy observer like Bai doesn’t point this out.
If anything this omission, like the general thrust of his piece, points to an effort by Obama’s chief strategists to get out in front of the story of who led the president to defeat. Moreover, it is hard not to avoid the suspicion that pointing the finger at Clinton is a way of reminding him that if he thinks Obama loyalists owe him for his herculean efforts on behalf of the president he’s got another thing coming. Especially, that is, if he tries to call in IOUs from the Obama camp on behalf of another presidential run by Hillary Clinton in 2016.
But no matter where the Democratic fingers are pointing, the fact that they are already starting to blame each other for an Obama loss has to send chills down the spines of Democrats who are still operating under the assumption that Romney can’t win.
During my lifetime there have been two successful two-term presidents. Okay, technically three but I was a tiny baby during the last few months of Ike’s administration. JFK was killed, LBJ didn’t run for a second term, Nixon resigned in disgrace, Ford, Carter and George H. W. Bush lost their bids for reelection, and George Bush left office with an approval rating of 28 percent. Only Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton completed two full terms and left office with high approval ratings. Both of them remain popular today.
Can you imagine a Republican candidate for president bashing Reagan’s legacy? I can imagine it, but I can’t imagine them ever winning another election. Reagan is treated as a saint by the GOP and every GOP candidate for high office pays homage to him, regardless of what they might think in private.
Democrats must have a suicide wish. How else do you explain bashing the only two-term Democrat since FDR? Bill Clinton oversaw eight years of peace and prosperity and yet the Vile Progs not only despise him but they hate Hillary too.
Instead of trying to build on his legacy they run away from it. Barack Obama ran as the anti-Clinton and his supporters openly crowed that they were going to purge the Clintons and their supporters from the Democratic party.
Now they want to blame Bill for Obama’s failure.
That’s where the schadenfreude comes in. Winners don’t play the blame game. Four years from now there won’t be an “Obama camp”, just like there is no “Carter contingent.”
Don’t know how many of you heard President Clinton’s speech at the World Trade Organization. Except for C-SPAN junkies, I doubt anyone was watching. But it is high time somebody said the obvious out loud: The son of a gun is good.
How long has it been since you heard Clinton make a whole speech? I’ve been catching him on the tube in snippets for so long that I’d forgotten just how effortlessly persuasive he actually is. There he stood, the No. 1 Free-Trader in the Whole World, facing all the opposition. By the time he finished, he was on their side and they were on his side. He is a superb politician.
Anyone volunteering a kind word for Clinton nowadays has to issue the obligatory disclaimer. In my case, it’s easy, since I barely agree with him 50 percent of the time.
He’s not my kind of Democrat and never has been. But at least I have the sense to recognize the man’s merits, whatever his failings.
He is an amazingly skilled pol at the top of his game. I know — everybody hates politicians so much that to say someone is a great one is a form of cussin’ him out. Nevertheless, I do admire real political skill, and Clinton has it in spades.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone better. Maybe Lyndon Johnson on a roll, or Bob Bullock in good health. Too bad that Clinton had to spend most of his presidency on defense. I would have liked to see him quarterback a Democratic Congress for the sheer interest of the exercise.
Don’t ask me to explain what went wrong between Clinton and the Washington press corps. I’ve never understood it. I don’t want to drag anyone through the Late Unpleasantness again, but as near as I can tell, about half the D.C. press corps is totally wiggy on the subject of Clinton. Otherwise rational people — like Chris Matthews, Chris Hitchens, George Will, there’s an army of them — are so obsessed by Clinton’s moral failings that they cannot see his performance, what he actually does with the job.
I’m sorry that Clinton is so flawed. That’s truly a shame. As Mr. Shakespeare said, “… and the elements, So mixed in him.” But I still don’t see why that prevents people who presume to have some grasp of objectivity from seeing what’s right in front of them.
Clinton is such a master that he has played a Republican Congress to a dead standstill for six years now — and often with no cards at all in his hand (mostly due to his own stupidity during the Late Unpleasantness).
And what a set of Republicans. It’s not as though he’s had to deal with constructive citizens who happen to differ with him on the issues — your Robert Tafts, your Bob Doles, your Margaret Smiths or such as that. Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution — God save us.
Lord knows, the Republicans have saved Bill Clinton. Time after time after time, they are so blinded by their hatred of Clinton that they do themselves in. I’m sure it’s a mercy, but it’s also a peculiar phenomenon.
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The best description of Clinton I ever heard was from an Arkansas state senator who said: “He’s like one of those broad-bottomed children’s toys. You tump him over, and he pops back up. You tump him over again, and he pops back up again.”
Given the amount of personal abuse the man has taken, his resilience is just extraordinary. Apparently, he really does get up every day and start over.
Molly wrote that almost 13 years ago. She’s gone now, so we don’t know what she would have to say about the past four years. But I don’t think she would have agreed with the effort to purge the Clintons from the Democratic party. The Democrats should have tried to build on Bill’s success, not attacked it.
So how did that work out for them? This is from today’s White House Insider:
Bill’s speech was double the time they gave him. Had Obama waiting. Kept the current POTUS waiting for almost an hour. Handlers not happy. Jarrett pissed. They do that little shake at the end when Obama walks out. Backstage, Bill says something like, “He wanted to break my hand.” He’s laughing it off. Knows what he wanted to do was done. Obama storms off. The two were all smiles onstage. Backstage, they parted. Bill’s getting congratulated and Obama is gone. Told somebody, was a woman so assume Jarrett but didn’t ask for clarification, took Bill aside and was shaking her finger in his face for a moment. Bill leaned down and whispered something to her and she walks off. He goes back to smiling and the handshakes. Classic Clinton. The smiling assassin. And what is the feedback today? That Obama’s speech was not as good as Clintons. That he isn’t Clinton. Look up the Bentsen reference. That’s what we saw Clinton pull off this week.
The Democratic establishment literally tried to destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama was their tool. For a brief time it looked like they had succeeded.
Now four years later the Democratic establishment is discredited, Obama is going to be a one-term failure and the Clintons are more popular than ever.
The focus of this week’s Democratic convention was President Obama. Lost in the adulation was the diminished state to which he has brought his broader party. Today’s Democrats are a shadow of 2008—struggling for re-election, isolated to a handful of states, lacking reform ideas, bereft of a future political bench. It has been a stunning slide.
[...]
In 2006, Nancy Pelosi muzzled her liberal inclinations to recruit and elect her “Majority Makers”—a crop of moderate and conservative Democrats who won Republican districts and delivered control of the House for the first time in 14 years.
Democrats in 2006 also claimed the Senate, with savvy victories in states like Montana and Virginia. The party thumped Republicans in gubernatorial races, winning in the South (Arkansas), the Mountain West (Colorado), and in Ohio (for the first time since 1991). A vibrant candidate Obama further boosted Democratic ranks in 2008.
By 2009, President Obama presided over what could fairly be called a big-tent coalition. The Blue Dog caucus had swelled to 51 members, representing plenty of conservative America. Democrats held the majority of governorships. Mr. Obama had won historic victories in Virginia and North Carolina. The prediction of liberal demographers John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s 2004 book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority”—lasting progressive dominance via a coalition of minorities, women, suburbanites and professionals—attracted greater attention among political analysts.
It took Mr. Obama two years to destroy this potential, with an agenda that forced his party to field vote after debilitating vote—stimulus, ObamaCare, spending, climate change. The public backlash, combined with the president’s mismanagement of the economy, has reversed Democrats’ electoral gains and left a party smaller than at any time since the mid-1990s.
I have to disagree somewhat – the problem with the Democratic party goes deeper than Obama. He is just an acute manifestation of a chronic disease. That’s why the party needs electoral chemotherapy.
It all started back in the 60′s when the New Deal coalition began to fracture and establishment liberals took control of the party. Even though the Democrats had a solid grip on Congress they began to suffer a series of blow-outs in the Electoral College.
From 1972 until 1988 the Republicans won the White House four out of five times – each time by a landslide. The lone exception was 1976 when Jimmy Carter won, but that was due to the backlash over Watergate.
The Democrats focused on identity politics – putting together a coalition of special interest groups like unions, minorities, feminists, environmentalists and the anti-war movement. This was effective in winning Congressional districts in part because the legacy of the New Deal left them in control of redistricting for another couple of decades. They also kept control of the Senate because seniority rules and the advantages of incumbency allowed Democratic dinosaurs to remain in office even as their states began turning red.
Then came Bill Clinton – a different kind of Democrat. He ran as a moderate and managed to pull off a plurality victory in the popular vote, thus winning a majority in the Electoral College. Establishment Democrats and the DFH wing hated him because he wasn’t a doctrinaire liberal. But the voters liked him, especially after they got a good look at Newt Gingrich.
I never realized until 2008 how much the far left despised Bill Clinton because I live in a red zone where liberals are an endangered species. Even the Democrats here are conservative. Back then there was no blogosphere where people could gather and discuss politics. We had to do that stuff face-to-face and I was always one of the most liberal voices around.
I thought Bill Clinton was a great preezy. Nobody around these parts ever called him a “DINOcrat” or a traitor to the party. What’s not to like about peace and prosperity?
Things caught up with the Democrats in 1994 when their institutional advantages of seniority and incumbency left them too ossified to adapt to changing times. Then the Republicans overreached and Bill Clinton out-maneuvered them, winning a second term in 1996. But the Democratic establishment still blamed him for the loss of Congress.
Al Gore lost in 2000 because the left thought he was too much like Bill Clinton. John Kerry lost in 2004 because the voters thought he was too much like McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis. If it hadn’t been for 9-11 Bush probably would have lost anyway. The voters were so disgusted with Bush and “movement conservatism” that by 2006 they voted the Republicans out of office, handing the Democrats an unexpected and unearned victory.
In doing so they returned to power two old dinosaurs – Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Their goal was to restore the old order, and that included blocking Hillary Clinton from the nomination. It was a power struggle and the Clintons lost. Barack Obama was installed as the nominee and he went on to win the White House.
And that brings us to where the article cited above begins.
Wednesday night Bill Clinton will speak on Barack Obama’s behalf at the Democratic National Convention. He will try to pull at our heartstrings, to pull us back into the D-column with a lot of talk about how good things were when he was in office and promises about how Obama can deliver the same, if only we would come home and help give him a second term. Most of my readers know this an unfortunate bulldozer load of Big Dawg shit and will not fall for it.
We’ve been through a lot. We’ve been called everything under the sun, including racist, traitorous, stupid, selfish, ratfuckers, motherfuckers, and more. Many of the people we used to discourse with daily have be subsumed by the prog-borg, and it’s tempting in our isolation to give these folks we used to respect the time of day and the benefit of our doubt.
I’m here to tell you something: Fuck that shit. You know who you are and what you’ve been through, you know exactly how much or how little your politics have changed or not changed. You don’t need some bullshit artist convinced of their own superiority to inform your mind. You can think for yourself. You remember.
But there are those who don’t know, or who have forgotten. For them, we must remember. There is a case to be made for why President Obama doesn’t deserve reelection. Let us make that case now.
A Day that Will Live in Infamy
You remember it. May 31, 2008 was the day that gave truth to the idea that President Obama is the affirmative action president. To this day the likes of The Atlantic will bitch an moan about this reality and suggest that you are racist for believing it, but you know. You saw. You watched and you walked. So did 4 million of us. We saw the RBC steal delegate votes for Hillary Clinton and bestow them on Barack Obama. If he wasn’t the affirmative action candidate then, he wouldn’t have needed those votes he didn’t earn because he chose not to be on the ballot.
One week after the deal was done Hillary gave her concession speech. I started this blog that same day with a letter explaining how I would not vote for Obama or any Democrat unless she was on the ticket also. As we know, that never came to pass. But just so it is fresh in your mind, here’s her magnanimous speech:
Not since the feud between Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter tore the Democratic Party apart more than 30 years ago have two panjandrums of the party loathed each other quite as much as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
And yet this week, television viewers will be treated to a remarkable spectacle at the Democratic National Convention: Clinton will stand before a cheering throng of delegates on Thursday night and deliver a primetime speech nominating Obama, a man he once dismissed as incompetent, as president of the United States.
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My sources inside the Obama campaign tell me that the last thing Obama wanted to see was Clinton, one of the country’s greatest orators, standing at the podium of the Democratic convention and sucking all the air out of the place.
[...]
Enter Bill Clinton, who presided over boom times and balanced budgets in the 1990s and whose 66% favorability rating outstrips Obama’s job approval rating by 20 points. As the most admired Democrat in the country, Clinton appeals to the very constituency — white working-class voters — that gives Obama the most trouble.
And so Clinton was signed on to remind voters of the glory days of a Democratic president’s economy. Since then, Clinton has been furiously at work writing his speech in longhand, as is his custom. As he’s continued to revise the speech, he has received numerous suggestions from the Obama camp about what they want him to say. This, according to my sources, has made Clinton furious.
The Obama campaign has insisted on seeing the speech before Clinton delivers it, and Clinton has just as insistently refused to show it to them. As a result, no one — not even the president — knows what Clinton intends to say. This has led some Democratic insiders to speculate that Clinton will make not-so-flattering remarks about the last four years of Democratic rule in the White House.
“If I were the president,” one of these insiders told me, “I’d wake up at night in a cold sweat wondering what surprises Clinton is going to come up with.”
It is about 99% certain that Edward Klein is full of shit. But he just guaranteed that I will be watching every minute of the Big Dawg’s speech.
I am a liberal who is still a registered Democrat. I realize that you guys are stinging from this Todd Akin flap and the Democratic party’s “war on women” meme. I don’t believe that your party hates women.
In your desire to push back against the Democrats I see some of you bringing up Bill Clinton. I urge you for your own good – don’t go there.
I realize he’s not one of your favorite people but the last time you went after him it cost you two House Speakers and he ended up more popular than when you started. Bill and Hillary Clinton are currently the two most popular politicians in the country.
More importantly, the Clintons have a very loyal fan base that despises Barack Obama and the current Democratic leadership. (Most of us believe that Bill Clinton shares our feelings.) Many Clinton fans (like myself) voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin four years ago. Some of us will be supporting Mitt Romney this year.
If you start attacking the Big Dawg you run the risk of alienating these Clinton Democrats. There are plenty of sleazy Democrats you can go after instead, like Ted Kennedy, John Edwards and Anthony Weiner.
Keep your eyes on the prize and the best of luck this November.
Chelsea Clinton may follow in her parents’ footsteps after all. After years of shooting down rumors that she may run for office, the 32-year-old Clinton left the door open to having another Clinton on the electoral ballots.
“Before my mom’s campaign I would have said no,” Clinton said in an interview published in the latest issue of Vogue magazine. “And now I don’t know. . .”
“If there were to be a point where it was something I felt called to do and I didn’t think there was someone who was sufficiently committed to building a healthier, more just, more equitable, more productive world?” Clinton continued. “Then that would be a question I’d have to ask and answer.”
Clinton, who married investment banker Mark Mezvinsky in 2010, said that after the media circus surrounding her wedding, she realized that her celebrity was either “something I could continue to ignore or it was something I could try to use to highlight causes that I really cared about,” she told Vogue.
“Historically I deliberately tried to lead a private life in the public eye,” she said. “And now I am trying to lead a purposefully public life.”
The only daughter of former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said people have been pestering her about running for office her entire life.
“It was something I had thought a lot about because people have been asking me that my whole life,” Clinton said. “Even during my father’s 1984 gubernatorial campaign, it was, ‘Do you want to grow up and be governor one day?’ No. I am four.”
At her age, Bill Clinton already held public office, serving as Arkansas attorney general from age 31. But it was not until age 54 that her mom first stepped into elected office as a U.S. senator.
“I believe that there are many ways for each of us to play our part,” Clinton told Vogue. “For a very long time that’s what my mom did. And then she went into elected public life. Her life is a testament to the principle that there are many ways to serve.”
Bill and Hillary have done a lot of good things. Producing Chelsea is high on that list.
I hope she runs and wins. I love watching Obot heads explode.
There is a dead giveaway here that something is missing: Why would Obama be bragging that his plan “worked” when the unemployment rate is still above 8 percent? That doesn’t sound like smart politics.
The reason for Obama’s statement becomes clear when the preceding sentences are read. (The section used in the ad is in bold type.) Remember that he is speaking to fellow Democrats at a fundraising event.
I’m running because I believe you can’t reduce the deficit — which is a serious problem, we’ve got to deal with it — but we can’t reduce it without asking folks like me who have been incredibly blessed to give up the tax cuts that we’ve been getting for a decade. I’ll cut out government spending that’s not working, that we can’t afford, but I’m also going to ask anybody making over $250,000 a year to go back to the tax rates they were paying under Bill Clinton, back when our economy created 23 million new jobs, the biggest budget surplus in history and everybody did well. Just like we’ve tried their plan, we tried our plan — and it worked. That’s the difference. That’s the choice in this election. That’s why I’m running for a second term.
In other words, in an inelegant way, Obama is trying to compare Democratic philosophy (raise taxes on the wealthy — “our plan”) with Republican philosophy (don’t raise any taxes — “their plan”). He also appears to be trying to hitch his presidency to the economic success of the Clinton years. He can rightly argue that he’s never had a chance to do what Bill Clinton did — raise taxes on the wealthy — because Republicans have blocked his efforts.
See? When Obama says “we” he doesn’t mean the royal “me” he’s talking about his BFF Bill Clinton. They are buddies for life. The Big Dawg is his role model and mentor.
Obama really, truly wanted to be the second-coming of Bill Clinton but those mean old Republicans made him be Jimmy Carter instead. But if we reelect him he’ll bring back the peace and prosperity of the golden age of the Nineties.
Former President Bill Clinton will have a marquee role in this summer’s Democratic National Convention, where he will make a forceful case for President Barack Obama’s re-election and his economic vision for the country, several Obama campaign and Democratic party officials said Sunday.
The move gives the Obama campaign an opportunity to take advantage of the former president’s immense popularity and remind voters that a Democrat was in the White House the last time the American economy was thriving.
Obama personally asked Clinton to speak at the convention and place Obama’s name in nomination, and Clinton enthusiastically accepted, officials said. Clinton speaks regularly to Obama and to campaign officials about strategy.
It makes a lot of sense. Bill Clinton is still enormously popular and his eight years in office really were a golden age of peace and prosperity. He is still the only Democrat to win two full terms in the White House since FDR.
I just have one question.
If the Democrats really wanted to tap into Bill’s legacy, why didn’t we just elect another Clinton in 2008? I’m pretty sure Hillary was available and would have accepted the nomination if we would have asked her nicely.
That would have been historic.
It also would have made a hell of a lot more sense than calling the Clintons racists and trying to purge them and their supporters from the Democratic party.
BTW – There are still some mental midgets out there trying to convince people that Bill Clinton was a bad Preezy. I guess theory is more important than results.
Solid majorities of whites, independents, and all age groups view him favorably
Two-thirds of Americans — 66% — have a favorable opinion of former U.S. President Bill Clinton, tying his record-high favorability rating recorded at the time of his inauguration in January 1993. Clinton nearly returned to this level of popularity at two points in his second term, but has generally seen lower ratings, averaging 56% since 1993.
Clinton’s popularity could make him one of the more valuable speakers at the 2012 Democratic National Convention later this summer, where he will reprise his 2008 convention role as booster-in-chief for Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton’s favorable rating was also 66% in Gallup’s most recent measure. Obama himself is viewed favorably by 54% of Americans.
Along with his record-high favorable rating, Clinton now has a near-record-low 28% unfavorable rating, according to the July 9-12 Gallup poll. The only times since 1993 that his unfavorable rating has been lower — 26% and 27% — were in January of his inaugural year.
This is the same guy that Obamanation wanted to purge from the Democratic party. If he could run for a third term he would win in a landslide.
According to a Newsweek/Daily Beast poll of likely voters, Barack Obama now rates behind Jimmy Carter in the pantheon of great presidents. The poll asked likely voters to list the two best and the two worst presidents the history of the United States. Here are the tallies, based on net results:
Voters’ list of the 10 best presidents:
1. Abraham Lincoln, +27 points (28 percent place in top-2, 1 percent place in bottom-2)
2. Ronald Reagan, +25 points (31 percent place in top-2, 6 percent place in bottom-2)
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt, +22 points (23 percent place in top-2, 1 percent place in bottom-2)
4. John F. Kennedy, +19 points (19 percent place in top-2, 0 percent place in bottom-2)
5. (tie) George Washington, +15 points (16 percent place in top-2, 1 percent place in bottom-2)
5. (tie) Bill Clinton, +15 points (28 percent place in top-2, 13 percent place in bottom-2)
7. Thomas Jefferson, +6 points (6 percent place in top-2, 0 percent place in bottom-2)
8. (tie) Teddy Roosevelt, +5 points (5 percent place in top-2, 0 percent place in bottom-2)
8. (tie) Harry S. Truman, +5 points (5 percent place in top-2, 0 percent place in bottom-2)
10. Dwight D. Eisenhower, +4 points (5 percent place in top-2, 1 percent place in bottom-2)
Voters’ list of the 10 worst presidents:
33. (tie) Andrew Johnson, -2 points (0 percent place in top-2, 2 percent place in bottom-2)
33. (tie) Warren G. Harding, -2 points (0 percent place in top-2, 2 percent place in bottom-2)
33. (tie) Calvin Coolidge, -2 points (0 percent place in top-2, 2 percent place in bottom-2)
36. (tie) Lyndon B. Johnson, -3 points (1 percent place in top-2, 4 percent place in bottom-2)
36. (tie) Gerald Ford, -3 points (1 percent place in top-2, 4 percent place in bottom-2)
38. Herbert Hoover, -4 points (0 percent place in top-2, 4 percent place in bottom-2)
39. George H.W. Bush, -9 points (4 percent place in top-2, 13 percent place in bottom-2)
40. Jimmy Carter, -20 points (5 percent place in top-2, 25 percent place in bottom-2)
41. Richard Nixon, -24 points (2 percent place in top-2, 26 percent place in bottom-2)
42. Barack Obama, -25 points (11 percent place in top-2, 36 percent place in bottom-2)
43. George W. Bush, -39 points (4 percent place in top-2, 43 percent place in bottom-2)
I would quibble with some of those rankings but I generally agree with who belongs in the top and bottom groups. As for the worst president ever, I disagree. At least George W. Bush wasn’t a Democrat.
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.”
Damn those divisive Clintons, saying nice things about people!
Now it gets piled higher and deeper:
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.
Funny, I remember the primaries really well, and I don’t remember any discussion that Obama was heavily favored to win South Carolina because he was black. I watched the returns coming in on MSNBC and nobody mentioned that Obama only won because he got 80% of the black vote in a state where blacks make up 55% of the Democratic voters. In fact, I’m pretty sure that even mentioning that fact would have been deemed racist.
SC was one of six early primaries/caucuses and the only officially sanctioned (by the DNC) primary in the South and the last before Super Tuesday. The decision to campaign there was made way before Obama emerged as the front runner.
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 Hanover, 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.”
Angry, finger-wagging Bill? I don’t think so:
If you listen to what he actually said, The Big Dawg said that Obama’s repeatedly changing position on the war in Iraq was a fairy tale. He didn’t say anything about his campaign.
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.”
Let’s check instant replay again:
I didn’t hear anything untrue or offensive, did you?
But wait! There’s more!
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.’”
Wait a second, I thought SC was “unwinnable” in the first place? How did it turn into a dramatic loss? How did a statement made the same day as the primary cause such a huge effect?
I’m sure Roger Simon knows that Ted Kennedy was an early backer of Obama’s, but kept his support secret. Teddy was just waiting for an opportune time to announce his endorsement.
Simon should also be aware that playing the race card was a predetermined strategy of the Obama campaign. They dealt that card from the bottom of the deck.
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.
Koresh knows we wouldn’t want the superdelegates to go with the popular vote and pledged delegate leader. But how come they weren’t worried about looking as if they wanted to deny a woman the nomination?
Last but not least:
“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 name Patti Solis Doyle will always live in infamy with Hillary supporters. It’s on the list right below Donna Brazile.
Bill Clinton is the only living two-term Democratic ex-POTUS. He is enormously popular with the Democratic voters who recall fondly the peace and prosperity of the Nineties. He is currently the second-most popular Democrat politician in the country, behind only Hillary.
Patti Solis Doyle’s brilliant “hide Bill” strategy has a lot to do with why Obama was able to steal the nomination.
My Bullshit Meter gives Mr. Simon 5 steaming turds.
Former President Bill Clinton, a stalwart backer of President Barack Obama who’s already helped the incumbent Democrat raise funds for his re-election bid, said Thursday that Mitt Romney had a “sterling business career” as chief executive of Bain Capital.
[...]
“I don’t think that we ought to get into the position where we say ‘This is bad work. This is good work,’” Clinton said of the private equity industry. Democrats have been hammering Romney for his role at Bain Capital for weeks, painting the GOP presidential candidate as a corporate raider. In justifying their attacks, Democrats point out Romney uses his Bain record as evidence of creating jobs.
On Thursday, Clinton said Romney’s record at Bain was less important than his ideas for the country.
“I think the real issue ought to be, what has Governor Romney advocated in the campaign that he will do as president?” Clinton said. “What has President Obama done and what does he propose to do? How do these things stack up against each other?”
Clinton said there was no question Romney was capable of performing the “essential functions of the office.”
“The man who has been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold,” Clinton said.
Unlike some fellow Democrats, Clinton acknowledged Romney’s time at Bain Capital formed a “good business career.” He also acknowledged that the nature of private equity meant some companies inevitably fail.
“There is a lot of controversy about that,” Clinton told guest host Harvey Weinstein, who has raised millions of dollars for Obama’s campaign. “But if you go in and you try to save a failing company, and you and I have friends here who invest in companies, you can invest in a company, run up the debt, loot it, sell all the assets, and force all the people to lose their retirement and fire them.”
The former president continued, “Or you can go into a company, have cutbacks, try to make it more productive with the purpose of saving it. And when you try, like anything else you try, you don’t always succeed.”
That sound you hear is Obot heads exploding. I knew Obama would come to regret playing the race card on the Big Dawg.
I hope Bill campaigns like this for Obama every single day until election day.
The former president posed for an impromptu photo with two porn stars Wednesday, the celebrity news-gossip site TMZ reported.
He reportedly posed at a casino in Monte Carlo, Monaco, where Clinton attended a “Nights in Monaco” fundraising gala. At least two other celebrities, actresses Diane Kruger and Rose McGowan, were in attendance.
The porn stars with whom Clinton posed were Tasha Reign and Brooklyn Lee, TMZ reported Wednesday night. Lee won the coveted award for Best New Starlet at the 2012 AVN Awards. She shared four other awards, including Most Outrageous Sex Scene.
It’s unclear whether he was aware of the women’s occupation.
This is really a massive nothing-burger. Bill was at a fancy soirée in Monte Carlo and some PYT’s ask him if they can take a picture with him. What’s he supposed to say?
He does have a shit-eating grin on his face though.
“There was a kind of inflection point during the five-year period between 1997 and 2003 — the late Clinton and/or early Bush administration — when all the rules just went away. You went from a period, a regime, where people did have at least some concern about going to jail, to a point where everything is legal, and derivatives couldn’t be regulated at all and nobody went to jail for anything. And looking back I would say that this period definitely started under Clinton. You absolutely cannot blame this on George W. Bush.” – Charles Ferguson of Inside Job
“I never had any money until I got out of the White House, you know, but I’ve done reasonably well since then.” Bill Clinton
On December 21, 2000, as President, Bill Clinton signed a bill known as the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. This law ensured that derivatives could not be regulated, setting the stage for the financial crisis. Just two months later, on February 5, 2001, Clinton received $125,000 from Morgan Stanley, in the form of a payment for a speech Clinton gave for the company in New York City. A few weeks later, Credit Suisse also hired Clinton for a speech, at a $125,000 speaking fee, also in New York. It turns out, Bill Clinton could make a lot of money, for not very much work.
Today, Clinton is worth something on the order of $80 million (probably much more, but we don’t really know), and these speeches have become a lucrative and consistent revenue stream for his family. Clinton spends his time offering policy advice, writing books, stumping for political candidates, and running a global foundation. He’s now a vegan. He makes money from books. But the speaking fee money stream keeps coming in, year after year, in larger and larger amounts.
[...]
Over the course of the next ten years after his Presidency, Clinton brought in roughly $8-10 million a year in speaking fees. In 2004, Clinton got $250,000 from Citigroup and $150,000 from Deutsche Bank. Goldman paid him $300,000 for two speeches, one in Paris. As the bubble peaked, in 2006, Clinton got $150,000 paydays each from Citigroup (twice), Lehman Brothers, the Mortgage Bankers Association, and the National Association of Realtors. In 2007, it was Goldman again, twice, Lehman, Citigroup, and Merrill Lynch. He didn’t just reap speaking fee cash from the financial services sector – corporate titans like Oracle and outsourcing specialist Cisco paid up, as did many Israel-focused groups, Middle Eastern interests, and universities. Does this explain the finance-friendly, oil-friendly and Israel First-friendly policies pursued by the State Department under Hillary Clinton? Who knows? But if you could legally deliver millions in cash to the husband of a high-level political official, it wouldn’t hurt your policy goals.
Speaking fee money isn’t just money, it is easy money. In one appearance, for one hour, Clinton can make $125,000 to $500,000. At an hourly rate, that’s between $250 million to $1 billion annually. It isn’t the case that Clinton is a billionaire, but it is the case that Clinton can, whenever he wants, make money as quickly and as easily as a billionaire. He is awash in cash, and cash is useful. Cash finances his lifestyle. Cash helped backstop his wife’s Presidential campaign when it was on the ropes.
[...]
We don’t call it bribery, but that’s what it is. Bill Clinton made a lot of money when he signed the bill deregulating derivatives and repealed Glass-Steagall. The payout just came later, in the form of speaking fees from elite banks and their allies.
Ironically, Clinton has come to express regret about deregulating derivatives. He has not given the money back.
Some of you may remember Matt Stoller from his days at OpenLeft, a cesspool of Clinton Derangement Syndrome. Matt is living proof that CDS never dies. It is no coincidence that Clinton-hate is prevalent among the Obotians. These days the left hates Bill and Hillary more than the right does.
Stoller doesn’t mention a few things, like the peace and prosperity of the Nineties. He also skips over the fact that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed Glass-Steagall passed in 1999 with veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress.
Sarah Palin has done very well financially since she left the governorship of Alaska. She has sold two books, been on television and gets hefty speaking fees too. So what does Stoller think she is being bribed to do?
But let’s assume that Stoller is correct and politicians are receiving delayed bribes. What can we do about it? Should we pass a law placing a lifetime ban on employment, speaking fees, book deals and other financial gifts and compensation for all former politicians? What about their families?
As WMCB is fond of pointing out, the only way to limit government corruption is to limit the size and power of government. A watchdog media would be helpful, but these days they are feeding at the same trough as the people they are supposed to watch.
Bill Clinton said Tuesday that President Barack Obama’s goal of hiking taxes on the rich alone is not enough to solve the country’s fiscal woes and suggested that middle class Americans must also eventually contribute more.
Clinton, who discussed a number of economic and political issues at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s third annual Fiscal Summit in Washington, D.C., prefaced his comments with the warning that he was giving his personal view and was “not speaking for the White House.”
“This is just me now, I’m not speaking for the White House — I think you could tax me at a 100 percent and you wouldn’t balance the budget,” said Clinton, who has earned tens of millions of dollars since leaving office. “We are all going to have to contribute to this, and if middle class people’s wages were going up again, and we had some growth to the economy, I don’t think they would object to going back to tax rates [from] when I was president” – before the Bush tax cuts.
I know I’m committing blasphemy but government has to live within it’s means. That is not inconsistent with Keynesian economics – I’m talking about over time, not any one single budget. And yes, I realize that the budget of a sovereign government that prints its own money is not the same as a household budget.
But there are basic principles and one of them is TANSTAAFL – There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Sooner or later everyone has to pay their bills. The basic premise of Keynesian economics is deficit spending by the government in slow economic times to stimulate the economy. I agree with that theory.
The problem with the Obama Stimulus was not the idea it was the execution. It was a stimulus that failed to stimulate. The Hicks Rule says that “. . . money poured in at the top of the economic system tended to stay there, whereas money poured in at the bottom tended to rise through all levels of business and to strengthen the economy as a whole.” Guess where Obama poured the money?
The government has always run some deficits, especially in time of war. Running a deficit is simply borrowing money. If you want to pay as you go you either have to make purchases out of your current income or save up your money until you can afford to buy what you want.
Sometimes you can’t wait – you need something now. Sometimes you use credit to cover a temporary shortfall in your income. Other times it simply makes sense to finance your purchase, like when you buy a home. You can pay rent for a few decades while you scrimp and save to buy one, or you can get a loan and move in immediately. That way instead of rent you pay a mortgage and you get the benefit of the home immediately.
The problem with the federal deficit started with Ronnie Raygun. Old Ronnie promised to cut taxes and cut spending too. But he only cut taxes. In the 31 years since Reagan took office the government has run an annual deficit all but 6 years. The exception was during the last 6 years of the Clinton administration.
Guess what Bill did at the beginning of his first term? He raised taxes. Instead of wrecking the economy we enjoyed the longest peacetime period of economic expansion in history. Yes, the rich got richer, but so did the poor. For the first time in decades the gap between rich and poor shrunk.
But for some strange reason the Progs treat Bill like a war criminal (unless he’s campaigning for The Once).
