Big Dog Bill Clinton Snarls at Pesky Obama: Margaret Carlson
Months ago, a voter explained why he was leaning against Senator Hillary Clinton for president: ``You can't be commander-in-chief,'' he said, ``if you can't keep your dog on the porch.''
He was referring to the specter of another Monica emerging during the Democratic primaries, and this time Hillary being unable to blame a ``vast right-wing conspiracy'' or retreat to Martha's Vineyard behind a pair of dark glasses.
But there's a more immediate problem than a Monica moment. It's that Bill Clinton is unbound, behaving more like a vice- presidential candidate, a Rottweiler attacking a poodle sniffing at his dinner bowl. Even if Hillary wanted to, she would have a hard time keeping her husband on the porch, he's so invested in her campaign.
``I can't tell who I'm running against sometimes,'' Senator Barack Obama said at their Jan. 21 debate. That followed on his earlier remarks on ``Good Morning America'' that the former president had ``taken his advocacy for his wife'' to a ``troubling'' level and had been inaccurate in the process.
With Bill's promise to go ``church to church'' in South Carolina, it seems obvious that the campaign, if not the potential presidency to come, is two for the price of one. The candidate herself left South Carolina to her husband, the ``first black president,'' for three days while she headed to California to campaign.
Hillary, the Spiritualist
It just might help. He gets above-the-fold coverage for his attacks on Obama and her forays into being the first black first lady haven't played that well. Her full-throated, thickly accented rendition of the old spiritual, ``I Don't Feel No Ways Tired,'' at a Selma, Alabama, church last March was widely imitated -- and not as the highest form of flattery.
As for her husband, who would have thought that the silver- haired philanthropist would do more damage as a politician than a playboy? The campaign had discounted the trouble a bimbo eruption could cause. Anything less than sex under the nose of his daughter and wife, and any less proof of it than a stained blue dress, would be overlooked by a public beyond being shocked. A would-be Gennifer Flowers would have to come armed with DNA results or be dismissed as a deluded stalker imagining an affair with Clinton.
Presidential Yelling
There's no plan in hand to deal with a president muttering about unfairness and yelling at the neighbors. As a former president, he doesn't take to handling; he's determined to make good on his debt to his long-suffering wife by making her president. And he's darned sensitive to slights from the impertinent 46-year-old Obama, who wasn't on the horizon when the Clinton Restoration was being plotted.
Rather than model himself after Clinton with his 43 percent win in 1992, followed by an incremental administration that substituted a moral deficit for a budgetary one, Obama aspires to be Reaganesque. He wants to form a new coalition of Americans with as many Obama Republicans as there were Reagan Democrats.
While Obama didn't approve of Ronald Reagan's big ideas, he said the Republican Party was the ``party of ideas'' and that Reagan ``changed the trajectory of America... in a way that Bill Clinton did not.''
Envious Hatemongers
Ouch. Clinton thinks he was Reaganesque, or would have been were it not for the envious Republican hatemongers out to get him. It's personal now and any worry that Hillary could be seen to be hiding behind her husband's pants if Bill was too prominent has vanished. Bill is as ubiquitous as a Head-On commercial.
In New Hampshire, Bill kept a full schedule. But the more he appeared, the less special it was, like having three hot fudge sundaes a day. So he ratcheted up the volume, noting that his wife couldn't be taller, younger, or male, likening Obama's candidacy to ``a fairy tale,'' and ranting against the press for not pointing it out.
Although it was largely women coming home to Hillary after her meltdown in a New Hampshire diner, Bill took his share of credit for making his wife a comeback kid.
So Bill kept at it in Nevada, visiting casinos, dragging Kirk Kerkorian, the billionaire who controls MGM Mirage, out of bed to witness alleged voter intimidation, and charging the Obama campaign with voter suppression. It was a scurrilous accusation that's never been leveled by one Democrat against another.
Dancing Bill
While the debate could hardly have been more acrimonious, there were light moments interspersed between ``you represented a slum landlord'' (Clinton) and ``you sat on the board of Wal- Mart'' (Obama). When Obama was asked about author Toni Morrison's comment that Bill was America's first black president, he said he couldn't call Clinton a brother until he'd investigated his ``dancing abilities.''
In an exit poll in New Hampshire, 37 percent of voters said they would vote for Bill were he on the ticket. Hillary won those folks by 34 points. That's proof to the ex-president that the only impediment to the base falling in line is that they've fallen in love with the upstart, something he can fix by reminding the party of their love for him.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, Rep. Rahm Emanuel and the dean of South Carolina Democrats have all asked Bill Clinton to calm down to no avail.
All this campaigning can tire a fellow. During a speech at a Harlem church commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, Bill fell asleep. The New York Post took note with the headline, ``Bill Has a `Dream.'''
Now if he could just put the Rottweiler to sleep.
(Margaret Carlson, author of ``Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House'' and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
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