WHAT DOES HE KNOW?:

Savior or Saboteur? (MAUREEN DOWD, 12/23/07, NY Times)

Inside the Bill gang and the Hillary gang, there is panic and perplexity. Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur?

Should Hillaryland muzzle him? Give him a minder? Is he rusty? Or is he freelancing because he relishes his role as head of the party his wife is trying to take over?

“For the first time since the Marc Rich pardon,” said a friend of the Clintons, “Bill is seriously diminishing his personal standing with the people closest to him.”

Whatever else may be true of Bill Clinton and whatever one may think of him as a president or a person, he is a politician of no little ability. Indeed, he is arguably the most able living Democratic politician (which is, admittedly, to damn with faint praise). The notion that his advice is mere interference or sabotage would seem to flow from the backlash that followed the Left's belated recognition that he will be understood by History to have been his era's Grover Cleveland, nearly indistinguishable from his Republican predecessors and successors. They let his acolyte, Rahm Emanuel, run candidates to the Right of the GOP and managed to win the midterm, but seem insistent on forcing Ms Clinton to the Left in this presidential, thereby guaranteeing defeat, in a replay of the insane decision of Al Gore and John Kerry to repudiate Clintonism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 23, 2007 10:49 AM