The Bill Clinton Timewarp

Ryan Lizza from the New Yorker has a fascinating piece up on a part of the campaign that hasn't really been covered, the Bill Clinton/Obama dynamic, and Bill's inability to adjust to the new media age.

Choice quotes:

What does Bill really think of Obama?

When Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign was launched, in January, 2007, her supporters feared that Bill would overshadow her, as he had when they both spoke at the funeral of Coretta Scott King, a year earlier. Now the constant fear is that he will embarrass her. When he makes news, it is rarely a good day for his spouse. Whether he was publicly comparing Barack Obama’s primary victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s campaigns in the eighties or privately, and apoplectically, complaining that Bill Richardson broke his word by endorsing Obama, every story has seemed to reinforce an image of Clinton as a sort of ill-tempered coot driven a little mad by Obama’s success. "I think this campaign has enraged him," the adviser told me. "He doesn’t like Obama."

Not surprising, given the current position of his wife in this campaign. The following is somewhat surprising:

In private conversations, he has been dismissive of his wife’s rival. James Clyburn, an African-American congressman from South Carolina, told me that Clinton called him in the middle of the night after Obama won that state’s primary and raged at him for fifty minutes.(!) "It’s pretty widespread now that African-Americans have lost a whole lot of respect for Bill Clinton," Clyburn said.

I would guess more quotes like that will further dampen his approval rating among black voters. Speaking of which:

But, as Clinton campaigned in Pennsylvania, he was rarely the cartoon politician portrayed in the press. He still connects better with voters than his wife or Obama. "Hillary is in this race today because of people like you," he told one white working-class audience. "She’s in it for you and she’s in it because of you. People like you have voted for her in every single state in the country." People like you. The phrase hung in the air and the room quieted. Clinton didn’t say what the people who voted for Obama were like, but the suggestion was that they were somehow different.

Perhaps someone should ask him what he means by that. If I were the tin-foil-hat type, I would surely deduce a racially-tinged dogwhistle.

Finally, on his troubles with the media:

At most of his Pennsylvania stops, the national press was represented mainly by a pair of young TV-network "embeds," whom Clinton regards not as reporters but as media jackals who record his every utterance yet broadcast only his outbursts, a phenomenon that has helped transform him into a YouTube curiosity and diminished him—perhaps permanently. "It’s like he’s been plucked out of time and thrown into the middle of this entirely new kind of campaign," the adviser told me. Jay Carson, a senior Clinton campaign official and Bill’s former spokesman, said, "Because of the way he is covered, the only thing anyone ever sees is fifteen seconds that is deemed by the pundits to be off message."

[snip]

The day before the primary, Bill Clinton lost his temper with a radio host who asked about the Jesse Jackson comments. Clinton went on a three-minute rant in which he posited the mysterious theory that Obama had played the race card against him. Then, not realizing that he was still on the air, he could be heard saying, "I don’t think I should take any shit from anybody on that, do you?" The clip was an Internet sensation. You can hear the whole thing in the Bill Clinton archive at YouTube. It’s already been listened to about three hundred thousand times.

Read the rest of the article. It is a fascinating look at Bill Clinton on the campaign trail.