Hillary is not the only Clinton to have lost out in the Democratic contest of 2008. The campaign just concluded has also extracted a heavy cost from husband Bill. Indeed, viewed one way, his loss might turn out to be the greater.
Hillary Clinton emerges with her stock enhanced. She proved that she could be a powerful, tenacious candidate with the ability to energize millions of voters, inculcating in them a fierce loyalty. Compared to the wonkish, cold figure she cut back in the 1990s, the Hillary of 2008 has been a revelation.
The Bill Clinton of 2008 has been a revelation too — but not in a good way. Since 2000, he had painstakingly rebuilt his reputation after the Monica scandal that led to his impeachment in 1998. His personal charm ensured he won adoring audiences the world over; but his work on AIDS and Africa brought respect too. And the contrast with his successor made Clinton look better every day. The former president settled into a comfortable identity: A warm and genial variation on the international statesman.
But the efforts he made for his wife these last five months have undone all that. No one can say the big dog has not been dogged: He campaigned relentlessly, in tiny towns in far-flung states that had not seen a president or ex-president for a century, if ever. He did eight or nine meetings a day in high school gyms and church halls, often speaking to less than 200 people.
And yet, he often hurt his wife — and himself. His visible resentment toward Barack Obama, wagging his long finger and complaining of the media bias in the young senator’s favor, branding his position on the Iraq war a “fairy tale” and, most famously, belittling Obama’s victory in South Carolina by comparing it to that of Jesse Jackson in 1988 — it would have jarred in any former president and especially this one.
First, most former occupants of the Oval Office stay out of primary contests — maintaining an above-the-fray dignity. Everyone understands why Clinton had to campaign for his wife, but by letting the big dog become an attack dog, as if he were no more than Hillary’s yapping running mate, the campaign diminished Bill Clinton.
But it was particularly painful to watch Clinton go after Obama given the former’s relationship with black America. The old Bill Clinton would surely have delighted in the prospect of an African-American Democratic nominee. Yet the Clinton of 2008 never hinted at that, never couched his opposition to Obama in terms that suggested he regretted the notion of standing in the way of the man who could truly be America’s first black president. Instead he took on Obama as ruthlessly as he used to take on Newt Gingrich’s Republicans.
The style of it counted too. The red-faced rants, the reports of shouting at superdelegates, the bollockings delivered on the end of the phone — it should have been beneath a man of his standing.
This week, the Washington Post quoted a member of the Clinton camp saying the former president became “unhinged” in the last hours of the campaign, shouting again, desperate to see if there was a way to fend off defeat. Earlier Vanity Fair had published its hatchet job profile of him — prompting Clinton to call the author a “scumbag” — arguing that the former president was now “private-jetting around with a skirt-chasing, scandal-tinged posse.”
Perhaps the true significance of that piece, full of blind quotes and hints, was that it appeared at all. A year ago, few outside the perennially Clinton-hating right wing would have wanted to take such brutal aim at him. That Vanity Fair would do so now is a mark of how much his stock has tumbled.
Had Clinton simply lost his touch? Had too many years cocooned in the suites of the superrich dulled his once-uncanny feel for the political mood? Or was this old-school, 20th-century campaigner simply unable to cope in the age of YouTube and the blogosphere? Some of my colleague Richard Adams says watching Bill Clinton this campaign season was like watching “Bjorn Borg trying to make his comeback with a wooden racket”.
Hillary Clinton may well be back; she has certainly risen in the esteem of the American public. But the same is not true of her husband. He has been reduced by this: The big dog now looks like a smaller man.
