Now read:
"Former president settles into low-profile role"
"by Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff | March 9, 2008
.... Not long ago, Bill Clinton was a finger-wagging distraction to his wife's candidacy. If he wasn't challenging a reporter, he was accused of marginalizing Obama by comparing his success to Jesse Jackson's in South Carolina or disparaging as "a fairy tale" Obama's contention that he has been a steadfast opponent of the war in Iraq.
When Obama crushed Hillary Clinton in the South Carolina primary on Jan. 26, the former president shouldered much of the blame after black voters broke overwhelmingly to Obama, shattering any illusion about the Clintons' hold on their allegiance.
But just as Hillary Clinton staged a comeback Tuesday with big victories in Ohio and Texas, so too has her husband, albeit in a diminished role. Staying under the radar, Bill Clinton stumped tirelessly and drew good crowds in the small cities and rural areas of the two states.
While his wife campaigned in larger cities in Ohio and Texas, Clinton barnstormed the way stations and secondary media markets, always in the other state. In a small charter plane with a couple of aides plus Secret Service agents, he flew March 2 into five East Texas cities, and the next day visited six more in heavily Hispanic South Texas. Starting in Corpus Christi at 8 a.m. on the Gulf Coast, the primary-eve jaunt ended 13 hours later in El Paso on the New Mexico border.
On Tuesday, as voters trooped to the polls, he conducted 55 interviews with local radio stations in Ohio, Texas, and Rhode Island, her third big win that day. Hillary Clinton did well in the areas where he campaigned, though they also had favorable demographics. In 30 Texas counties near the Mexican border, for instance, she averaged about 64 percent of the vote. At the end of the day, he was in Austin, Texas, while his wife and daughter, Chelsea, celebrated in Columbus, Ohio.
Bill Clinton declined to be interviewed for this story.... He has campaigned in Wyoming, which voted yesterday, Mississippi, which holds its primary Tuesday, and has already made forays into Pennsylvania, the next big showdown on April 22.
"He's a tremendous asset in southeastern Pennsylvania, where he has deep relationships and helped the city of Philadelphia enormously when he was president," said G. Terry Madonna, a pollster, professor, and director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. The Philadelphia media market, which reaches about 40 percent of the state's electorate, is critical in every election, he said.
"What will be fascinating to watch is where else will they send him," Madonna said, identifying the swing areas of the state as the Philadelphia suburbs, the south-central part of the state around Harrisburg and Lancaster, and the Lehigh Valley cities of Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton.
The Clintons' highest-profile supporter in the state is Edward G. Rendell, the irrepressible governor and former mayor of Philadelphia, who has no doubt that Bill Clinton will be a great asset if he sticks to the current game plan.
"When the president stays positive and his message is upbeat, there's nobody like him in the world," said Rendell, who, at Clinton's request, assumed the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee near the end of the Clinton presidency.
Rendell acknowledged, however, that Bill Clinton's shots at Obama, particularly in South Carolina, were not helpful. "Was it good? No, it was a mistake, and it expanded the margin in South Carolina," Rendell said. Much of the damage, however, he blamed on the media blowing some of Clinton's remarks out of proportion.
While some questioned the propriety of a former president courting voters, most damaging was the criticism of prominent African-American political figures, including Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, who was neutral in the race, and Obama supporter L. Douglas Wilder, who in 1989 became the nation's first elected black governor and is now mayor of Richmond.
After Clinton likened Obama's South Carolina landslide to the 1984 and 1988 victories of Jackson, who had limited appeal to white voters, Wilder said: "He didn't look to the issues, he didn't look to the positions, he looked to the color" of Obama.
Polls conducted by the Pew Research Center indicated there was damage to Clinton's image. While last October, 43 percent of voters said they liked the idea of him back in the White House and 34 percent disliked the prospect, a week after the South Carolina primary, voters were evenly divided, 41 percent to 41 percent.
The Clintons may be victims of their own reputation as clever and calculating political tacticians. Before Bill Clinton drew the Obama-Jackson parallels, two key Clinton supporters caused a furor by raising questions about Obama's past acknowledgment that he experiment with drugs when he was young. One resigned and the other apologized, but some commentators conflated all those remarks to argue that the Clinton campaign was injecting race into the contest.
But they WEREN'T and they AREN'T -- or so this shit-for-brains 'journalist' would have you believe!
The sheer novelty of a former president campaigning for a spouse seeking to be president has resulted in media fascination and the parsing of every word for motive or intent.
Translation: We shovel shit!
Bill Clinton acknowledges and simultaneously struggles to overcome it on the stump, as he did Friday at a rally outside Philadelphia.
"No matter what I say, people will say, 'They're married, he's got to say that; he can't go home tonight if he doesn't say that.' And there's probably some truth to that," he said, drawing laughter. "I would be here for her if we had never been married. . . . I honestly believe she is the best qualified person to be president."
That's what he would have told her to get her in the sack!!!!!!
What a disgusting piece of chauvanistic shit he is, 'eh, readers?
A LECHEROUS LEECH who CRAVES POWER!!!!
