To be fair, Cory Booker and Deval Patrick were really the ones who killed Obama’s Bain Capital strategy. But last night on CNN, Bill Clinton basically dipped it in cement and threw it in the East River:
Bill Clinton, in an appearance on CNN last night, said that Mitt Romney has a “sterling business career” and that the campaign shouldn’t be about what kind of work Romney did.
“I don’t think we ought to get into the position where we say this is bad work; this is good work,” Clinton said, adding: “There’s no question that, in terms of getting up, going to the office, and basically performing the essential functions of the office, a man who’s been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold.”
Clinton urged the Obama campaign to instead focus on contrasting its vision for the country with Romney’s. His comments came at the tail end of a day in which another Obama surrogate, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D), called Bain a “a perfectly fine company.”
Obviously, Clinton can’t be excused as a political neophyte and probably knew exactly what he was doing when he made that comment. The choice of words — lauding Romney’s “sterling business career” — went beyond what even Patrick or Booker have said about Romney. If Clinton wanted to merely express his disapproval of Obama’s strategy, he could have done it more subtly and without praising Romney’s career. He had to know he was giving Romney a priceless campaign soundbite that it will play on a loop whenever the Obama campaign tries to drag out the Bain attack again, effectively destroying any possibility that the strategy can be salvaged.
The question is, why? In the best case scenario, maybe Clinton was actually trying to help Obama. The former president is extremely well attuned to political trends, and maybe he senses that the Bain strategy will continue to bog down the Obama team if they keep pursuing it. Clinton’s argument that the election has to be about the big picture was similar to an argument his former pollster Douglas Schoen has made: Obama needs a clear, sweeping message for his campaign, a vision for a second term that transcends attack politics. Maybe Clinton was hoping his comments last night would be a sharp nudge in that direction.
Or, more cynically, maybe this wasn’t about helping Obama at all. Clinton has caused some headaches for this White House, and maybe he just doesn’t feel he has much to gain from Obama’s reelection, particularly if he wants Hillary to try again in 2016.
I fail to see how Bill Clinton's defense of Bain Capital helps Obama. The president is not going to win in November with a "vision" strategy. Purple state voters are worried about the economy. They realize the government must be made smaller. Advocating on behalf of a larger public sector will fail miserably.
Well Clinton's political instincts always were and remain better and more attuned to the original elements of the Democratic coalition than the post-McGovern rainbow-coalition new-left class-warfare agitprop of O.
Assume that Clinton is always out to help himself. the way I read his comment is that he is saying that Obama's going to lose, and I want to resume my position as party chief when he does.
Obama has been a disaster for the Democratic Party. Those who care about the party, like Clinton, might see Obama's defeat as a long-term plus.
Particularly when they have a wife who is a viable candidate….
If Barack Hussein Obama had accomplished a tenth of what Romney did in making money for public school teacher union pension funds, he would be talking every day about how he had put money into the pockets of the honorable public servants of America. The fact that he can attack Bain Capital with a straight face while TAKING thousands of dollars of that same "blood money" from Bain partners to fuel his own campaign shows that he is, by his own definition, a second order bloodsucker, a tic on the vampire bats of private equity investors.
I think Clinton is too much a Democrat to let his personal problems with the young Obama, but that he's using his clout to steer Obama away from a cliff.
If Obama implodes at the convention in a couple of months — like LBJ did — who is there to step in and be the viable candidate? HILLARY — and that may well be the motivation here. I do wonder about Deval Patrick though — I really wonder.
The flip side, of course, is what are the Romney people doing and possibly threatening. to release? Deval Patrick may be a personal friend of Obama, but he also left Pepsi under somewhat unexplained conditions and I believe Texaco before that too. Has Bill Clinton kept his pants on — he never could before and maybe being reminded of something was his motivation (or encouragement) and nothing else. n nOn the other hand, the more we discuss Bain, the less we are discussing $4/gallon gasoline, unemployment that in reality is at rates greater than during the First Depression, and a world that is getting more unsafe by the day. In other words, the Bain Distraction.