APPARENTLY, crippling his wife’s campaign wasn’t enough for Bill Clinton: He wants to drag Barack Obama down, too.
While Sen. Clinton’s been dutifully supporting the winner, her husband reportedly told friends that Obama could “kiss my ass” in return for his backing.
Hillary, as usual, is playing the grownup. Bill, as usual, is acting like a big baby.
The ex-president tepidly endorsed Obama via a spokesperson, but has yet to say anything publicly himself. Various reports have suggested that he’s “miffed” about how Obama treated him and believes that Obama’s campaign cast him as a racist. He wants an apology.
Not surprisingly, there are no reports of Clinton examining his own behavior or considering what’s best for the Democratic Party.
We’ve seen this movie before. Why should anyone be surprised?
Clinton chose – in the most spectacular way possible – to put his own desires ahead of his nation, his party and his family when he had an affair with an intern and then lied to his closest aides and the American people about it. Then, for good measure, he lied under oath.
He tarnished his legacy and mortally wounded Al Gore as Gore headed into an election that should’ve been a slam-dunk.
And that’s just the most egregious example of his pathological narcissism. To Bill Clinton, no suffering is as great as his own.
In his book “The Survivor,” John Harris recounts how Clinton aides during the 1992 campaign “recoiled at the candidate’s bouts of self-pity and flailing anger. Some thought the candidate was clinically depressed. [Clinton pollster Stan] Greenberg had conversations with Arkansas aides to Clinton about whether the candidate was emotionally stable enough to be president.”
Hillary has always been the rock. The lie about her campaign – that she’d be nothing had she not hitched her wagon to his rising star – gets it all wrong. It’s her husband who’d never have made it without her.
In “A Woman in Charge,” Carl Bernstein writes of how, after losing an election in Arkansas, Bill sank into an epic, self-pitying depression and was rescued, as usual, by his strong wife.
This is the eternal Bill Clinton saga.
Losing this election would virtually guarantee for another generation a conservative Supreme Court unfriendly to women’s rights, civil liberties and environmental protection – to list just a few issues that Democrats typically care about. But that’s all apparently less important to Bill Clinton than his ego. (Other things less important than his ego: ending the war in Iraq and universal health care.)
Some Bill supporters have claimed that it’s really not about him – he just cares about how his wife is treated. Well, Obama is treating her pretty well by all accounts. And does anyone seriously believe that Bill Clinton feels more concern for his wife than for his own well-being? When has that ever happened?
On Time magazine’s Swampland blog, Joe Klein recalled that when the shoe was on the other foot, Bill Clinton was less than gracious. Party elder Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had supported then-Sen. Bob Kerrey over Clinton for the ’92 nomination, and Moynihan in ’93 “was looking for some serious ring-kissing from the president-elect, especially since several of Clinton’s initiatives, like health care and welfare reform, resided squarely in Moynihan’s policy bailiwick.”
He didn’t get it. Clinton shut him out completely – and his first-year agenda suffered for it.
This time around, what Bill Clinton did to Obama was a lot uglier than merely endorsing his rival. Imagine what kind of grudge Bill Clinton would’ve held had a party elder said that he was a “roll of the dice” or had mocked his stance in a major policy area – as Clinton did when he called Obama’s anti-Iraq-war record a “fairy tale.”
In other reports, Clinton wants to mentor Obama, to help guide him through the campaign. Why, because he turned out to be so helpful to Hillary’s bid?
Yesterday, Obama and Clinton took the first step toward rapprochement – a phone call that Obama graciously called “terrific.” No word on who placed the call.