Yesterday, Bill Clinton finally entered the fray directly on behalf of his wife:
“We listened to people make snide comments about whether Vice President Gore was too stiff,” Mr. Clinton said, “and when they made dishonest claims about the things that he said that he’d done in his life. When that scandalous Swift boat ad was run against Senator Kerry.”
“Why am I saying this?” he continued. “Because I had the feeling that at the end of that last debate we were about to get into cutesy land again.”
However, as Barack Obama and Chris Dodd argued, there’s no comparison between the attacks on Hillary’s position on driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants and the “Swift boat” ads against John Kerry.
The bigger question is how this will play with Democratic primary voters. Back in August, I suggested that Obama and John Edwards were failing to challenge Hillary’s “experience”, which mostly consists of her time as First Lady, for fear of causing Bill to come after them. So far that has largely held up, but now he’s in the mix anyway. So what happens?
On the one hand, Bill is more popular with Democrats than either Obama or Edwards. But his entry threatens to overshadow Hillary and make it look like she is playing the victim and needs to be defended by her husband.
The other possible consequence is that Bill trivializes what happened to Al Gore and John Kerry, which does not help the larger cause of drawing attention to the pattern of character smears against Democratic candidates.
Update 11/8 11:00 AM: The full transcript reveals that Clinton’s comments were directed at the media, not other Democrats — see my new post for more. However, the Clinton campaign is tied up in knots trying to address Bill’s involvement in Hillary’s campaign (via Michael Crowley):
A senior Clinton aide was quoted as saying the former president’s remarks were neither helpful to his wife’s candidacy nor was he speaking for the campaign. Another official later tried to distance the campaign from the suggestion that officials were trying to distance the candidate from her husband.
What a mess.