Why is everyone so upset with Bill Clinton? Sure, he made a few stridently negative comments about Barack Obama. Sure, some of those comments were half-truths, or worse. But this is politics. What's the big deal? Doesn't this come with the territory?
Historically, American presidential politics have been riddled with vituperation. Consider the election of 1800 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Congressman Matthew Lyon charged that under President Adams "every consideration of the public welfare" was "swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice." Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of Benjamin Franklin, characterized President Adams as "blind, bald, toothless [and] querulous." In response, Adams's defenders accused Bache of being an "abandoned liar" and suggested that he be dealt with like "a Turk, a Jew, a Jacobin, or a Dog." Adams himself raged that his opponents were deserving of only "contempt and abborhence." Or consider poor Abraham Lincoln, who during his presidency was variously excoriated in the press as a "despot," a "liar," a "usurper," a "thief," a "monster, a "perjurer," an "ignoramus," a "swindler," a "tyrant," a "fiend," a "butcher," and a "pirate."
Compared to those "good old days," Bill Clinton's comments about Barack Obama were tepid, indeed. Of course, one might expect a former president to refrain from personal attack and distortion, even in support of his wife's candidacy. And Democrats are particularly sensitive these days to any conduct that might undermine party unity and lessen the party's prospects for success in November, regardless of who the nominee might be. So, some degree of touchiness about such divisive and destructive behavior is certainly understandable.
But there is a deeper reason for the Democrats' dismay at Mr. Clinton's behavior. The plain and simple fact is that such mudslinging is outside the scope of Democratic Party discourse. Indeed, in recent decades, Democratic Party candidates have for the most part maintained a high level of public debate. In the modern era, it is the Republicans who have pretty much cornered the market on distortion, deceit, and dishonesty. From Joseph McCarthy to Richard Nixon, from Lee Atwater to Karl Rove, from Willie Horton to Swift Boats, it has typically been Republicans who have dragged American politics into the slime.
Whatever else one might think of then, such men as John Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Edmund Muskie, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry upheld high standards of public discourse, even in the midst of often bitter political campaigns. Bill Clinton is a disappointment not because he fell below the contemporary standards of American political discourse, but because he violated the norms of Democratic Party discourse. And for that, shame on him.