Back off, Bill

The 2008 campaign season certainly isn’t the first time former President Bill Clinton has stirred up a little harsh public criticism and left his wife to bear the brunt of it. We were all there in 1995: the dress, the sexual relations, the impeachment – sound familiar? What about the following 13 years of “why didn’t she leave him?” Still, I can’t yet tell what’s worse – the very public extramarital affair, or the one-man campaign-killing machine that the former president has become. In December, a Fox News article quoted Bill as telling Hillary, “You know, you really should dump me and go back home to Chicago or go to New York and take one of those offers you’ve got and run for office.” If the results from South Carolina had been revealed to her back in those Yale Law days, perhaps Hillary would have taken him up on that offer. \nHow did this happen? Bill was campaigning alongside Hillary from the very beginning, and explaining, like he did in that same December article, how she had always set aside her own political ambitions for him, and this was his turn to do the same. But that was then. Somewhere along the way he seems to have started writing his own script. Either that or he suddenly lost his respect for his own legacy, along with the dignity of his wife’s campaign. And his comments aren’t being ignored.\nMajor party endorsements are dropping like flies. When Ted Kennedy followed Caroline Kennedy into Sen. Barack Obama’s camp, some analysts said he did so partially in response to inappropriate comments Bill Clinton had made about Obama.\nThere have been multiple columns in The New York Times and all over the internet questioning Bill’s rationale for these comments. Headlines like “Bill Clinton’s Temper Negatively Affects Hillary’s Campaign,” “Is the Right Right on the Clintons?” and “Is Bill Clinton Detrimental to Hillary’s Campaign?” have been circling like hawks for weeks.\nFormer Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle stated that the former president’s behavior is “not presidential; it’s not in keeping with the image of a former president, and I’m frankly surprised that he is taking this approach.” Daschle is just another big-name Dem backing Obama.\nAnd what’s worse, the disparity between how Hillary campaigns and how Bill has begun to run his mouth never seems to surface in all this nasty Clinton press. Bill’s comments are only fueling criticism from both parties that Bill and Hill are morphing into some sort of two-headed campaign monster, lending itself rather well to the famous “I’m-running-against-two-Clintons” sentiment Obama has been parading around with. Great. After so much momentum in New Hampshire, Bill sure did kill the mood.\nThis whole mess has even caused me to assume the role of campaign pessimist. If this whole campaign was bound to crash and burn, Hillary could have done a swell job at that all on her lonesome. It’s really quite a shame that Bill should go and mess this one up for her. And considering that this time it’s a campaign for commander in chief, I would much rather be cheated on.