So Bill Clinton, on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, tried to rewrite campaign history and simultaneously to get a start on restoring his legacy. That legacy has been severely damaged by his ham-handed efforts on his wife's behalf; so ham-handed that there are those who seriously propose that he is trying to sabotage her campaign. Having spent two years following Bill Clinton's post presidency for my book, Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House, my take is that while he did not believe she could win, that she should stay in the Senate and become Majority Leader, now that she is in it, he desperately wants her to win. Cleansing, promoting and continuing his legacy, as well as paying off his moral debt to Hillary, have a lot to do with it.
That said, because he is Bill Clinton -- "the first black president" (Toni Morrison, 1996) and the "rock star ex-president" (practically everyone left of center 2001 to 2007) -- he continues to believe that life's rules don't apply to him. He is careless, speaking off the cuff, making zany assertions that reporters know off the top of their heads are not true or exaggerated. These assertions -- when he claimed, for example, that Hillary's whopper about being under sniper fire in Bosnia was said once and late at night when she was exhausted; instantly shown to be wrong on every count -- are so careless that one can only conclude he would be more careful were he the candidate.
In an interview on Monday night on the public radio affiliate WHYY, which covers Philadelphia, Bill Clinton claimed that when he compared Obama's win in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson's in 1984 and 1988 he was not playing the race card. Rather, Obama and his operatives played the race card on the former president. Oh.
His explanation is vintage Clinton, full of self-pity and anger. He can be heard using the "S" word after he said goodbye to the WHYY reporter.
"You gotta go something to play the race card on me -- my office is in Harlem."
Again, reporters who were covering him in 2001 or just reading the New York newspapers, know that, yes, his office is in Harlem, a penthouse on 125th St. But they also know that after he left the White House in 2001, his reputation battered by the ill-advised pardons, by alleged thefts of furniture from the White House, etc., his search for office space led him to an ultra-expensive building in midtown Manhattan, the Carnegie Hall Tower on West 57th St., where his neighbors would have included Eddie Murphy, Barry Diller, and Jerry Seinfeld. The space would have cost approximately $811,000 a year, much more than three times the amount authorized by Congress.
The press was horrible and African American Congressman Charles Rangel -- a close friend of the Clintons who had pushed Hillary to run for the Senate in New York, a state in which she had never lived or worked -- persuaded Bill to put his office in Harlem. (Rangel's district includes Harlem.) The former president received ecstatic press--the Harlem rent was $210,000. The office was closer to his home in Chappaqua; it wasn't as if it was less convenient because he'd be taking the subway; his SUV and Secret Service agent could drop him off there more easily than in Midtown. The food was more to his taste too, and the neighbors loved him, greeted him with cheers and hugs and appreciation.
As the race for the nomination began, the African American community was with Hillary. In South Carolina, Bill managed to put 80 to 90 percent of that community in Obama's corner, where it has remained ever since and accounted for some of Obama's biggest margins in the primaries and caucuses.
Calling Bill Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro "racist" is so counterintuitive that it ought to make any fair-minded, moderately rational person pause.
Listen to the very end of the interview, when Clinton thinks he's out of microphone "range" and he says "I don't think I can take any shit from anybody on that, do you?"
The more I hear him talk, the less I like him.
i.e. "Some of my best friends are black"