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Bill Clinton has been making the rounds of Sunday and weeknight talk shows, supposedly to promote and support Barack Obama in his campaign for President of the United States. In these public appearances, it seems that his vanity and the bitterness he feels at his wife’s primary defeat restrains his enthusiasm to the point where he often cannot bring himself to speak Obama’s name. And he never mentions Obama by name without praising John McCain, as if some fairness in bloviating law forced him to provide equal time.
Clinton’s appearance on one the night time talk shows was such that it prompted sharp commentary by Chris Rock, who followed him as a guest on that show. His appearance Sunday morning on Meet the Press was perhaps the most obvious of a long string of disrespectful backhand swipes at Obama so far.
After Clinton waxed ecstatic about his belief in the greatness of John McCain, Tom Brokaw asked him directly if he could speak similarly about Obama. His response in part, “…I had my first conversation with him in my entire life in Harlem.” Of course Harlem is where Clinton’s offices are located, but there was no mention of that fact in his response. Instead, he let it hang in the air to allow people who didn’t know better to suppose that the Harlem citation had something to do with Obama’s origins. He’s black, you know.
Clinton ultimately choked out an acknowledgement that Obama might be great someday, but not until giving McCain equal time for what he suffered at the hands of the North Vietnamese while he was starring in movies for them.
Then too, McCain was a featured speaker at Clinton's big do this past Friday morning. Think about McCain's debate performance and decide if you would pick him to be a featured speaker at one of your world saving events.
The truth is that all the while that Bill Clinton has been "campaigning" for Barack Obama, he has been damning him with faint praise. William Jefferson Clinton is, like Joe Lieberman, a McCain partisan.
I do not doubt that William Jefferson Clinton, the man who brought us the International Monetary Fund, the North American Free Trade Agreement, deregulation of communication media that uses the publicly owned airwaves, welfare "reform" and who presided over much of the dismantling of F.D.R.’s post depression banking safeguard legislation and who signed the repeal of the Glass/Steagall Act into law would feel more comfortable with a John McCain administration. However, working from inside the Democratic Party as an agent provocateur, or, perhaps more properly, a quisling, he betrays not only the party and the American People, but also the fact that his every utterance is devoted to self-service. It is a service of self that, as we historically note, tolerates any departure from truth, no matter how transparent.
Although his wife, Hillary, is doing the bare minimum promised, she has not come close to offsetting the damage that her own lies did during the primary campaign. The McCain campaign is still using her losing primary effort as a model for their own losing effort, right down to the incessant lies.
Whether a “good cop, bad cop” routine, or simply a fear on Hillary’s part of what a perception of backstabbing may do to her own electoral future, it is clear that Bill and Hill are watching out for numbers one and two. There is no doubt that she and Bill share the objective of once again hijacking the party in 2012 with undemocratic as well as un-Democratic policies as they did during the 1990's. A prerequisite for that scheme is to make sure that Barack Obama cannot be a factor when 2012 rolls around.
The corporatist Clinton's, like Joe Lieberman and their congressional acolytes, are right wing waste that the Democratic Party must eliminate before it regains its full health and returns to the principles that made it the party of FDR and Kennedy and of the American People.
