Listening to Bill worth a shot
“This is one of Trump’s unique political gifts: He inspires such visceral hatred in his opponents that he pro- vokes them to self-destruct.” — from a column by Elie Honig this week in the daily online Intelligencer political-coverage section of New York Magazine.
Ihappened to be on the New York Magazine website only because someone had urged me to read the feature posted there Monday morning on the Clintons.
It turns out that Bill and Hillary have been poking around national politics a bit more actively than usual. It’s from proper concern for the strengthening Donald Trump menace.
Clinton-Clinton is trying to help Biden-Harris, the article reported.
Once on the site, I read a column—an instantly written one upon the morning’s U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling, meaning with the liberals on board.
The court ruled in the Colorado case that states can’t throw Trump off the ballot under the 14th Amendment on account of the version of an insurrection that happened Jan. 6, 2021.
The columnist wrote that anyone could have told you the ruling was coming. He said liberal elitist academics, in advocating the action, had led with their noses once again.
By harassing Trump on a dubious legal argument and handing him an easy victory, they punched the mad man’s ticket for the next leg of his return trip to the White House. And that, as the adjoining article reported, was what had Bill cajoling Joe Biden and Hillary counseling Kamala Harris.
I had thought the disqualification effort was doomed for practical reasons. One was that you really need a formal court ruling of Trump’s committing an insurrectionist act before you ask the high court of the land to throw him off the ballot for insurrection. The other was that disqualification, even if allowed by state choice, would take place by chaotic patchwork and likely only in a few Democratic states that Biden would win anyway. That, in turn, would strengthen Trump in swing states.
The Supreme Court said the case was simpler than that. It said that the 14th Amendment specifies no state-by-state power to enforce sedition-based disqualification, but reserves enforcement to Congress, which has never passed any authorizing law.
Either way, we can surely agree Biden needs help.
While Hillary of that famous political tin ear isn’t likely to be of much use to Kamala, whom she has been counseling according to the article, Bill has a rich history of offering good advice to Democratic presidential candidates.
In 1984, Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, dropped by a legislative committee meeting at the state Capitol, sat down beside me and asked whom I thought Walter Mondale should pick as his Democratic running mate. When I said I had no earthly idea, he said he thought Mondale needed strategic desperation. He wanted Mondale to select Lee Iacocca, then the chairman of Chrysler, which had paid back early a government bailout. At that time, Iacocca was amid a high-profile television advertising campaign thanking the people on Chrysler’s behalf and expressing pride in the early payback.
Mondale indeed acted imaginatively but went left and historic with the first female running mate, Geraldine Ferraro. Nothing would have saved Mondale, but it’s interesting that Clinton would have gone not to the left and history, but to the center and swing and pro-business voters.
Four years later, when Democratic vice presidential nominee Lloyd Bentsen campaigned at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Clinton handed him a handwritten text for a TV spot offering a direct response to Republican attacks on Michael Dukakis for the weekend furlough of Willie Horton. The Dukakis campaign ran instead an ad with the candidate helmeted in a tank.
If I were Biden, I’d listen, so long as Clinton can keep his advisory profile lower than is the case with this New York Magazine article. He’s damaged goods from sexual misbehavior. His “third way” centrist politics are wholly unacceptable to the contemporary intolerance of illiberal liberalism.
But Clinton can be helpful. The magazine piece points out that Biden recently went on Seth Meyers’ latenight show and said the issue is not the age of the candidates but the age of their ideas.
In 1996, Clinton said he would never attack his opponent, Bob Dole, on his age, but only on the age of his ideas.
The article said that, on the Air Force One flight to Rosalynn Carter’s funeral, Biden sat in a corner with Clinton, who told Biden he wasn’t getting the credit he deserved for accomplishments and offered ideas on how to seize more credit.
Trying to find a way to persuade people they’re doing well economically when they don’t feel it, and that their president is doing well when the world is in grave turmoil … that would have been tough for Clinton in his prime.
Still, it will be interesting to see what ideas he has for making an 81-year-old man the Comeback Kid II.