Hillary Clinton's choice to unleash Bill against Barack Obama still has a lot of people scratching their heads. From Wonkette, for example, we have
Stories about Bill Clinton fighting Barry Obama in his bid for a third presidency were all over the news this week, because people like to get upset. No one’s quite sure why he’s going so "out of control" these days — letting his face change color, composing Dadaist psychodramas about Barry’s past, sneering at reporters...
As a Clinton supporter, I've been a bit perturbed myself, until I recalled a certain brilliant maneuver by John Kerry in September 2004.
During the first Presidential debate in 2004, John Kerry implicitly compared Bush junior unfavorably to Bush senior, knowing full well that this was a sore spot with the Oedipal-ish son. Bush the younger was caught off balance, showed a flare of anger and never really recovered.
From the debate of September 30, 2004:
(Source MSNBC)
LEHRER: New question, two minutes, Senator Kerry.
"Colossal misjudgments." What colossal misjudgments, in your opinion, has President Bush made in these areas?
KERRY: Well, where do you want me to begin?
First of all, he made the misjudgment of saying to America that he was going to build a true alliance, that he would exhaust the remedies of the United Nations and go through the inspections.
In fact, he first didn‘t even want to do that. And it wasn‘t until former Secretary of State Jim Baker and General Scowcroft and others pushed publicly and said you‘ve got to go to the U.N., that the president finally changed his mind—his campaign has a word for that—and went to the United Nations.
And GWB's peevish response:
It‘s the hardest decision a president makes. So I went to the United Nations. I didn‘t need anybody to tell me to go to the United Nations. I decided to go there myself.
This single moment of the debate was widely credited with giving Kerry the tactical advantage which ultimately led him to be declared the winner of the first debate.
Back to 2008...
Originally I thought that Obama made his statements about the relative importance of Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton, not because he really thought that Clinton was an unimportant President. It was just a clumsy way of trying to weaken Hillary's claim to Presidential experience.
However, I'm beginning to wonder if Obama's campaign didn't go through a calculation similar to Kerry's in 2004. They know that Clinton's legacy is a sensitive point with the Man. So they dissed it. Clinton stepped right into the trap: blowing up and making the race about him and his legacy rather than Hillary and her expertise.
Its hard for me to see Reagan as having been more transformative than Nixon in particular. Nixon went to China, Nixon went to Moscow, Nixon turned us all into Keynesians, Nixon concluded the SALT treaty, Nixon drew the whole American south into the Republican fold, Nixon destroyed the Bretton Woods System, etc. etc. etc.
Clinton was no slouch either. He modernized what it meant to be a Democrat. Clinton understands better than any president we have had since FDR what the appropriate relationship should be between the government and markets. He appreciated the subtleties of evolving economic theory during the 1980s and 1990s and what that meant for economic policy. Clinton confronted the American cognitive dissonance in our ever-shifting rationale for the use of military force.
If it hadn't been for Clinton, Obama may not even be in the race. Nixon, and then Reagan after him, launched us into the third racist century. Were it not for the Clinton interlude in 24 years of Republican presidents, its not clear where we would be in terms of race relations these days.
As cleaver as this ploy has been, perhaps it has worked a bit too well. The Democrats are now doing the last thing they should be doing: arguing about race and gender.
Then again, maybe Hillary and Obama are just practicing on each other for the generals. John McCain is willing to say anything to become president and Mitt Romney already has.