Libertarian Leanings

The Clinton Strategy - Revisited

Byron York wonders, is Bill Clinton really trying to help the Democrats?

The problem was, it wasn't entirely clear how much Clinton really wanted to help Democrats, and especially Obama, win next week's elections.

[...]

The event began like any other Clinton appearance: he was late, first a half-hour, then an hour, then 90 minutes. As a crowd of several hundred party activists, volunteers, and labor organizers milled around a ballroom at the posh Palmer House Hotel, a woman in the audience tried to breathe a little life into a group that had nothing to do but wait.

"Fired up!" she shouted.  "Ready to go!"

A few people scattered around the room joined in. "Fired up!  Ready to go!"  After several more turns, perhaps half the crowd was chanting.  But the enthusiasm never spread all around.

Dissatisfied, the woman tried again a few moments later.  "Yes we can!" she yelled.  "Yes we can!"

This time, maybe a half-dozen people joined in before it fizzled out altogether.  Nobody cared; they were too busy with other things.

Update:  I wondered about Clinton's real objectives myself, some time ago.  I thought he was driving the left into the ditch in order to bolster Hillary's chances for a pesidential run in 2016. 

Unhappiness with Obama and the other leading Democrats is so high that a national tea party movement has virtually brought the Republicans back from the electoral grave. The president’s job approval numbers have been in a year-long slide. In almost every election since he took office, Democrats have gotten trounced.

Yet he continues to push extraordinarily unpopular policies. Could it be the advice he’s been getting?

In the face of this disastrous performance by President Obama and the Democrats, the Clinton team has been actively advising that they keep doing what they’re doing. It’s as if Bill Clinton has just discovered that his beloved party is firmly in the clutches of the extreme left, and he’s decided to encourage their leaders to drive themselves into the proverbial ditch.

Today's Wall Street Journal editorial prefers the cliff metaphor.  In the WSJ version the 1960s liberals in congress are behind the wheel.

The larger lesson is that we are learning for the fourth time in 45 years that America can't be governed from the left. Democrats exploited the recession and the accident of 60 Senate seats to push the agenda of their dreams, and the American public has recoiled at the effrontery and the results. Repairing the damage of the 111th Congress will take years, and perhaps decades, but the first step is ousting the liberals who once again drove their party off a cliff.

Ditch?  Cliff?  Who cares!  Hand me my Slurpee, I'm enjoying this!

Update II:  Confirmation of my "ditch theory" comes from Hillbuzz!  Some Hillary Clinton Democrats are waging war on the Democratic party.  

We will not forget those Obamacare votes.  We will not forgive being called a racist because we don’t support this terrible man and his awful agenda.  We will not be silenced.

We will not give up.

It’s going to be years, if ever, before the lamestream media ever catches up to any of this, and realizes that a large swath of people who used to be Democrat loyalists are now doing everything they can to destroy the party.  Some of them are out and open, like me and my friends here at HillBuzz, but many are doing their part quietly.  They just stop writing checks.  Or maybe now they write checks to Democrat opponents.  They might continue to attend events and fundraisers, but now they call up Republican sites and give them all the dirt on what they heard in those meetings.  The Democrat Party alienated so many people who are now working to bring it down that I could go on for pages and pages more on this topic.

It’s very Sidney Bristow, Rush.  And if you watched that show Alias, you’d know she not only won in the end, but looked damn good kicking ass while doing it.

THAT, El Rushbo, is what your “Hillary babes” are up to.

That little excertp is from an open letter to Rush Limbaugh -- a long open letter. 

Update III:  Toby Harndon of The Telegraph (UK) says Bill Clinton is on a 'retribution tour' against Barack Obama. 

My hunch is that the Clintons smell Obama’s blood in the water right now and, political predators that they are, they are positioning themselves to take advantage (and, frankly, who could blame them for doing so?). We know from 2008 what they really think of Obama. Despite Hillary’s loyal service as Secretary of State, her scathing critique of Obama during their bruising primary still stands – and now looks prescient.

The Enthusiasm Gap

With a little more than a week to go until the 2010 midterm elections, Bill Clinton made a campaign stop in Detroit where he implored adoring Democrats to make a strong showing at the polls.  It was a study in wishful thinking, as the former president was unable to fill the high school gym where he spoke. 

Clinton, who campaigned in the battleground state of Florida earlier this week, is popular in Detroit and trying to fire up the party base in Michigan today with stops today in Detroit, Ann Arbor and Battle Creek.

But he began his speech just before 3 p.m. in a high school gym that was less than half full.

The Mark of a True Politician -- Not a Statesman

So we're hearing that Bill Clinton is one of the most popular politicians around. 

One of the most popular politicians in the country right now isn’t even running in this election year. Former President Bill Clinton had by far the highest positive rating when Americans were asked in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll to rate their feelings on political figures.

Fully 55% of respondents had positive feelings about Clinton, compared with 23% with negative feelings. That’s up from a low in March 2001, just after he left office, of 34% positive and 52% negative.

And since he is so much more popular than Obama, Clinton has taken to the campaign trail in his place, recently stumping for Barney Frank.   

TAUNTON, Mass. — A newcomer, Republican Sean Bielat, is waging a strong campaign against Rep. Barney Frank.  Frank is taking the challenge seriously enough that he brought former President Clinton in.

In a roundabout way, Clinton acknowledged that Frank has a tougher race this year than he’s had in a long time. Clinton told the crowd in the Taunton High School gym Sunday that if Republicans succeed in making the election about how Americans feel about the economy, Democrats are in trouble.

Bill Clinton is the first ex-president to my knowledge who has ever gone out on the campaign trail like this.  With Obama and Clinton both, partisan politics trumps all.  A politician not a statesman.

Bill and Hillary

The following post was originally published on Pajamas Media.

It’s bizarre. Why does President Obama insist upon driving public option health care legislation through Congress when voter opposition to it is at an all-time high?

Unhappiness with Obama and the other leading Democrats is so high that a national tea party movement has virtually brought the Republicans back from the electoral grave. The president’s job approval numbers have been in a year-long slide. In almost every election since he took office, Democrats have gotten trounced.

Yet he continues to push extraordinarily unpopular policies. Could it be the advice he’s been getting?

In the face of this disastrous performance by President Obama and the Democrats, the Clinton team has been actively advising that they keep doing what they’re doing. It’s as if Bill Clinton has just discovered that his beloved party is firmly in the clutches of the extreme left, and he’s decided to encourage their leaders to drive themselves into the proverbial ditch.

The one exception has been Lanny Davis, former special counsel for Bill Clinton, who on the day after Martha Coakley lost to Scott Brown in the Massachusetts special election wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the left was to blame for her defeat. What, he wondered, had become of the party of Bill Clinton?

We liberals need to reclaim the Democratic Party with the New Democrat positions of Bill Clinton and the New Politics/bipartisan aspirations of Barack Obama — a party that is willing to meet halfway with conservatives and Republicans even if that means only step-by-step reforms on health care and other issues that do not necessarily involve big-government solutions.

Why is Davis the only former Clintonista to take aim at the left? You might think the others would join in, including Bill Clinton himself, especially since he has so much in common with Barack Obama. But that just isn’t happening.

Like Obama, Bill Clinton won his presidency by campaigning as a centrist. Clinton called himself a New Democrat, but once inaugurated he veered left, and for the first two years of their “co-presidency” the Clintons promoted Hillary’s health care reform plan. That lasted from 1992 until the 1994 midterm elections, at which time voters, for the first time in decades, elected a Republican majority to Congress rather than hold still for nationalized health care.

Those midterm elections were cataclysmic in their impact, causing the Clinton administration to dramatically switch gears. HillaryCare, which had been the primary Clinton administration focus for two years, was shoved aside and forgotten. Bill Clinton turned on a dime, very suddenly becoming the centrist president his campaign promised he would be.

Transformed, he went on to enjoy two very successful terms in the White House as a New Democrat — passing landmark welfare reform, signing the North American Free Trade Agreement, and balancing the budget for the first time in decades.

Sixteen years later, as history stands poised for a repeat, the former president has advice to offer the current president. This time around, it’s ObamaCare that has people so stirred up they put a Republican into the Massachusetts Senate seat that had been held for 46 years by Democrat Ted Kennedy. The irony of it is priceless. Massachusetts voters elected Scott Brown because he promised to be the 41st vote, the vote that torpedoes Ted Kennedy’s lifelong dream of nationalized health care. And in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 3 to 1 margin, it was not a close vote.

In similar circumstances, Bill Clinton listened to the voters. But in late November Bill Clinton paid a visit to Senate Democrats and urged them to pass President Obama’s health care reform bill. He told them the political consequences for Democrats would be grim if they didn’t, and the rewards would be great if they did.

Addressing the Democrats at their caucus luncheon, Clinton noted the grim consequences of his own failed reform effort in 1994: Democrats lost control of Congress in the November midterm elections, health-care costs skyrocketed, and the uninsured rate continued to rise.

The worst thing would be to do nothing, he said. Granted, this was well before Scott Brown rocked the political landscape, but as the dust settled from the Massachusetts aftershock there was no moderation of the Clinton message — and in fact Clinton team members were moving to reinforce it.

Within a few days former Clinton political consultant Paul Begala wrote an article for the Huffington Post that urged Democrats: “Pass the Senate Bill, Please.” It was a challenge. Man up, you wussies.

You’re going to get the attack anyway, you may as well get the accomplishment. I don’t mean to be rude, but if health care is the kiss of death, you’ve already been kissed.

On that very same day the Financial Times carried an editorial by James Carville, chief political strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. He advised Democrats to just blame George W. Bush for all of their problems.

Democrats would not be playing the blame game with one another for the loss or for the health care debacle if they had only pointed fingers at those (or in this case, the one) who put Americans (and most of the world) in the predicament we’re in: George W. Bush.

Blaming Bush is just what President Barack Obama has been doing for his entire first year in office, and it isn’t working anymore. While paying lip service to bipartisanship, Obama has restated his promise to keep pushing his own brand of health care reform — opposite of what Bill Clinton himself had done.

Why? Hillary.

Bill Clinton has been engaged in the kind of politicking that would have been considered unseemly not so long ago. Former presidents just don’t do politics after serving two terms in the White House, but Bill Clinton is not like other former two-term presidents. It’s still possible, though not necessarily probable, that he could be back for another two terms at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this time as first gentleman to the first woman president of the United States.

In the Clinton strategy for getting there, three elements emerge. First is to attack the left. Lanny Davis launched the first wave, blaming the left for Martha Coakley’s defeat in Massachusetts and calling for the more centrist New Democrats to save the party.

The second element of the strategy is to goad the leading leftist Democrats into ramming their policies down American throats. Bill Clinton, Paul Begala, and a host of others are pressuring Obama, Reid, and Pelosi to keep pushing that health care legislation, and don’t worry that the majority of voters oppose it. Those tea party Americans are too dumb to know what’s in their own best interest, and it’s up to the left to impose it on them.

The third piece is Carville’s finger of blame. After more than a year listening to Obama blaming George W. Bush for all of America’s problems, the message is losing its potency. It’s just another way for the left to insist that it bears no responsibility for anything ever. The laser-like focus on avoiding their own blame for past problems convinces more and more people that Democrats haven’t the slightest clue and even less interest in really solving problems. Instead, any legislation to make its way through this leftist dominated Congress is designed first and foremost to strengthen their grip on power.

If Democrat leaders diligently follow the Clinton team prescription, by the time November 2010 rolls around they will be intensely unpopular. The tea party faithful will be incensed and motivated, and the left can expect to get an historic shellacking on Election Day.

But Hillary will have no connection to that defeat. She stands ready to step in as that New Democrat Lanny Davis is looking for. By opposing the far left of her party she might even tap into tea party outrage at the leftist assault on our liberties, our health care, and our free market economy. She could offer herself to tea party independents as the New Democrat alternative to a return to Republican rule.

Hillary Clinton will be running for president. A challenge to Obama in 2012 is not outside the realm of possibility, but it would be very risky. Failing to win the nomination in 2012 would most likely kill her chances for a run at it in 2016. She’ll do it only if Obama’s poll numbers continue to slide.

The Clinton team is helping those numbers along.

Driving The Left Into a Ditch?

My latest article is up on Pajamas Media.

The Clintons' legendary penchant for triangulations takes a Machiavellian turn as the midterms approach.

Read more...

"...breathtakingly ignorant..."

Those words are from an editorial in today's New York Post about Bill Clinton.

"It's like if you know anyone who's ever a POW for any length of time," the former president opined in Aspen, Colo., over the weekend, "you will see that [they] go along for months or even years and then something will happen that will trigger all those bad dreams."

Better keep an eye on those former prisoners-of-war, in other words - you never know when they might snap.

Maybe at 3 a.m., don't you know.

It's a breathtakingly ignorant stereotype, of course - but none too surprising from a man whose chief experience of armed combat consisted of avoiding it.

Or, come to think of it, from a politician whose party's nominee for president happens to be facing just such a war hero in November.

Not that Clinton would ever come out and attack McCain directly over his five-year Vietnam captivity. The ex- president's remark came instead - and somewhat awkwardly - in the middle of effusive praise for former South African President Nelson Mandela.

But Clinton, veteran political animal that he is, knows precisely how to plant a seed.

Clinton on Iraq

As everyone has probaby heard by now, the latest from our former president Bill Clinton is that he now claims he was against the war in Iraq right from the start. Today's New York Post editorial wonders, "it possible that he's never heard of Google?"

Indeed, the former president boasted in a June 2004 interview with Time magazine: "I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq."

True, he thought the invasion was launched prematurely, and said so at the time. But he never disputed the wisdom of Bush's decision to use military force.

For the record, then, here's what Clinton really had to say about the Iraq war.

"We've got the power, we've got the juice. We should do the job," he told students at the University of Florida in an April 2003 speech.

Later that month, Clinton declared in St. Louis: "Saddam is gone and good riddance" - adding: "Bush has done the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein from power."

And just days after Bush's controversial State of the Union Address that year, Clinton said: "It is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted-for stocks of biological and chemical weapons."

What's more, Bill Clinton made a direct link between 9/11 and Iraq: In a 2004 Time interview, the former president stressed that because of 9/11, Bush had an obligation to move against Saddam:

"That's why I supported the Iraq thing," he said. "There was a lot of [weapons] stuff unaccounted for . . . When you're the president, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for."

I've always wondered why the left continues to accuse the Bush administration of misleading the public into believing Saddam Hussein's Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks.  It was Bill Clinton who made that connection.