Clinton clones keep Bill out of the frame
Tony Allen-Mills, Charlotte
March 03, 2002
THE magnitude of the problem facing Erskine Bowles, a multimillionaire Democrat running for a US Senate seat in North Carolina, became obvious the moment President George W Bush stepped from Air Force One last week and threw his arms around a tall, glamorous woman dressed in electric blue.
The crowd cheered and cameras flashed as the most popular president in recent American history hugged and kissed Elizabeth Dole, the Republican icon Bowles hopes to beat in one of the most intriguing races in this year’s mid-term congressional elections.
It was bad enough for Bowles that the president’s visit to a fundraising lunch in Charlotte netted $1m for Dole and other Republican candidates; harder still that Bush went on to hail Dole as “a fabulous woman” who would serve North Carolina with “dignity and class”.
Yet the biggest dilemma for Bowles and a group of other high-profile Democrat candidates has little to do with Bush’s record approval ratings.
Waiting in the Democrat wings is the one man with the experience and appeal to counter Bush’s seemingly unshakeable allure. Yet even Bill Clinton’s closest former allies are shying from enlisting his aid.
As a former White House chief of staff, Bowles heads a list of half a dozen senior Clinton aides who are attempting a political comeback a year after their boss left office under a cloud of scandal.
Mocked by Republicans as “poisonous mushrooms” and “Clinton clones”, Bowles and his former White House colleagues are nervously weighing a question that could make or break their campaigns. As William Safire, the New York Times columnist, expressed the dilemma last week: “Is a Clinton connection a political plus, or the mark of Cain?” At Bowles’s campaign headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina’s capital, there is no trace of Clinton in election leaflets. Nor is he mentioned in speeches, which dwell instead on Bowles’s administrative role in formulating the policies that produced the Clinton era’s record economic boom.
Clinton has also been absent from the Florida governor’s campaign, where Janet Reno, his former attorney-general, is running against Jeb Bush, the president’s brother; and from Massachusetts, where Robert Reich, the former labour secretary, is also running for governor and has been publicly critical of his former boss.
In New York, Clinton’s former housing secretary, Andrew Cuomo, has a campaign website showing pictures of himself with Archbishop Tutu of South Africa, the supermodel Christie Brinkley and the actress Susan Sarandon — but not with Clinton.
Democrat officials insist there is no policy of excluding Clinton. But privately they admit their candidates are keeping a distance from any controversy that might be exploited by Republicans.
Despite his virtual disappearance from the domestic political scene, Clinton’s adventures with Monica Lewinsky and other ethical shortcomings continue to be obessively chronicled, notably by Lewinsky herself in television interviews.
In Raleigh, Bowles’s supporters take pains to distance their man from Clinton’s White House antics. “No one was harder on Bill Clinton publicly or privately than Erskine was,” one aide told me. “He was very critical of the president.”
Yet few Democrats doubt Clinton’s continuing political virility. Shunned by the Washington political establishment, he remains a hugely popular figure elsewhere. On the one occasion earlier this month that a former Clinton aide dared invite his old boss to a fundraiser, the occasion proved a rip-roaring success.
Clinton went to Chicago to support Rahm Emanuel, a former aide who was known as “Rahmbo” for his aggressive manner. Emanuel, who once sent a rotten fish to a pollster he disliked, is running for Congress. When Clinton arrived for a day’s fundraising, local reports said the pair received “rock star treatment” and collected more than $100,000.
Democrat candidates across the country may yet have to call on the Comeback Kid.
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