Several weeks ago, Bill Clinton went on national television to offer a concession speech on his wife’s behalf for a primary that she had lost. She wasn’t there with him, and she didn’t give any speech later that night. She merely issued a press release forty-five minutes later.
Bill Clinton’s role in his wife’s campaign has become increasingly public over the past months. Many credit him with injecting racial issues into the race, and spearheading an (hopefully) unspoken effort to label Obama as “the black candidate.” In the days leading up to the Nevada caucuses and the South Carolina primaries, Mr. Clinton ripped into reporters, offered a slew of comments meant to undermine opposing campaigns (like calling Obama’s campaign a “fairy-tale”), and pranced around as the bad cop to Hillary’s good cop.
When Mr. Clinton told a reporter that he wasn’t worried about his wife’s loss in South Carolina because Jesse Jackson had won the state in both 1984 and 1988, critics claimed that that he was adding racist sentiments into the campaign.
For a campaign that has repeatedly said that the focus is on Hillary Clinton, and that is trying to show that she can act without her husband’s support, Mr. Clinton’s increasingly belligerent comments are shameless. After they lost in Iowa, the Clintons put their campaign into full force to try and bring down Obama. In New Hampshire, a momentary glimpse of emotion after a year’s worth of stone-cold stoicism did the trick. In Nevada, they played up falsities that Obama’s supporters were exercising voter suppression. But at least in South Carolina, her winning streak stopped short.
In Nevada, Mr. Clinton was the only person to witness voter suppression in the entire state. The Las Vegas Sun, the Reno Gazette, members of the Teachers’ Union (which unofficially supported Clinton), and even Clinton supporters within the Culinary Union, however, did not witness or report any incidents of voter suppression. It seems a tad fantastical that Bill Clinton just happened to stumble across the one incident of voters being bullied into voting for other candidates, and that there was nobody to verify that claim except Chelsea.
Along the campaign trail, Mr. Clinton also supported Andrew Cuomo and another supporter of Hillary Clinton who referred to Obama’s “shuck and jive” talk and his admitted drug use. Mr. Clinton claimed that neither comment was racially driven, and pressed the line that Obama had used drugs when he was in Chicago. That is a wonderful contradiction from the man who once said “I did not inhale.”
Beyond the fact that Mr. Clinton is being ushered out as a kind of attack dog for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, this is not the way a former president should behave. Rather than unite his party, Mr. Clinton has actively been trying to tear it apart.
Mr. Clinton has become an unnecessary and an irritating distraction. He has tried to label someone within his own party as “the black candidate,” has shown people that his wife cannot handle herself, and has not shown any remorse for his actions.
