Bill Clinton: The Bitter Half

By Karen Tumulty

With just over a week to go before the Ohio primary, Bill Clinton's arrival in Chillicothe was greeted as a homecoming of sorts. More than a few in the audience at the college gym could remember the first time he came to the city. It was 15 years before, almost to the day, and the new President was in town to sell his economic plan. The 46-year-old baby boomer had seemed the very embodiment of the freshness and change that the people of this downtrodden burg on the edge of Appalachia had been praying for. They were giddy when he jogged through Yoctangee Park with the mayor in 3F (-16C) weather and dropped by their new McDonald's for a decaf. But it was the hope in his words that thrilled them most of all. "None of us have all the answers," Clinton declared back then. "This is a new and uncharted time. And I want to encourage you to continue to believe in your country."

But today's Bill Clinton after a quadruple bypass has given up jogging in favor of long walks, and his hair is a halo of white. And he had come to deliver a very different message. Don't fall in love, he cautioned, simply because someone tells you that "we need to turn the page in America, and we need to adopt something fresh and new -- whatever that is."

It is hard to miss the irony: the man from Hope is now trying to figure out how to tamp it down. But that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the spot in which Bill Clinton finds himself today, as his wife's presidential campaign fights for its life in Ohio and Texas. What is harder to figure out is how much of the blame for her predicament belongs to him. "I think he just did her such damage," says a friend and supporter, expressing a sentiment that many feel privately. "They'll never see it that way, because they can't. And he has no self-knowledge. This has magnified all his worst traits."

Everyone around Hillary Clinton always recognized that Bill would be a mixed blessing for her campaign. Back in the pre-Obamamania days, her supporters assumed that no one could draw crowds, bring in money or ignite the base like the only Democratic President since F.D.R. to win reelection. Bill was considered the sharpest political strategist of his generation. And as public approval for President George W. Bush sank lower and lower, the Clinton years, for all their drama, were looking better and better. Yet there was always the worry about whether Bill would be able to stay within the constrained, derivative role of the candidate's spouse. The biggest fear was that he would shine too bright, burn too hot, consign the candidate to his shadow.

In a campaign that has turned out to be all about change, however, Bill's presence has become a reminder of the past and of the style of politics that Barack Obama has promised to bring to an end. Even worse, say many Democrats, Bill has put his wife's political career in jeopardy by displaying the same character traits that almost ran his own presidency off the rails -- a lack of self-control and an excess of self-absorption. It hasn't always been clear whether Bill Clinton sees Obama as a threat to his wife's prospects, or to his own legacy.

On the campaign trail, Bill's way of grabbing the spotlight has reminded voters of what they didn't like about the last Clinton presidency and what might be wrong with the next one. Lobbyist and former Texas Lieut. Governor Ben Barnes, long a prolific donor to the Clintons and other Democrats, says the former President is -- as everyone knew he would be -- his wife's most powerful weapon. The problem is, says Barnes, who now supports Obama, "that gun kicks as bad as it shoots."

In Iowa, Bill Clinton shaded his own nuanced record on the war, saying he "opposed Iraq from the beginning"; in New Hampshire, the criticism he got for that didn't stop him from blasting Obama's claim of steadfast opposition to the war as a "fairy tale." He twisted Obama's observation that Ronald Reagan had changed the country to make it appear that the Illinois Senator had praised Reagan's ideas. And Bill churlishly diminished Obama's sweeping and historic primary victory in heavily African-American South Carolina by pointing out that Jesse Jackson had also won the state. Liberal columnist Jonathan Chait wondered, "Were the conservatives right about Bill Clinton all along?"

Nowhere did it get worse than in South Carolina. A Clinton campaign official says Bill "hijacked the candidacy in South Carolina. It was appalling to watch it." In the week before the primary, his attacks on Obama put the former President in the news more times than any of the Republican candidates, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism; during a debate in Myrtle Beach, Obama complained, "I can't tell who I'm running against sometimes."

And yet the person who seemed least aware of the havoc he was causing was Bill Clinton. "He was firmly convinced in his mind that every last thing he did was right," says former Democratic National Committee chairman Don Fowler, a South Carolinian who spent much of that week at Bill Clinton's side. "He wouldn't admit any misjudgments or miscalculations."

But the damage had been done, particularly among African-American voters. Ten days before the crucial Ohio and Texas primaries, Hillary was still on the defensive, saying at a conference on African-American issues in New Orleans, "If anyone was offended by anything that was said -- whether it was meant or not, misinterpreted or not -- obviously I regret that."

It rankles Bill Clinton to see his strong support among African Americans slipping away, but "there's a part of him that understands it, because he understands black people as well as anybody I know," says an old friend who is African American and continues to support him. "He understands it -- doesn't like it -- but he has to understand."

Those close to the former President say that much of what is driving him is frustration and dismay. "In the past, when he was on the ropes, he could get himself off the ropes," says an adviser. But Clinton has begun to accept the fact that there are limits to what he can do when he is not the candidate. He correctly blames the media for uneven treatment -- saying reporters have taken a tougher stance with him and his wife than with Obama. (After Saturday Night Live lampooned the media for their love affair with Obama, Bill telephoned guest host Tina Fey to thank her.)

But he is appalled, friends and aides say, by what he has privately described as "political malpractice" by Hillary's campaign. It spent money with abandon in the earliest primaries and assumed that the race would not last past Super Tuesday, on Feb. 5 -- and failed to prepare for any of the states that followed. Two weeks before the Texas primary, Bill Clinton telephoned Waco insurance mogul and philanthropist Bernard Rapoport, a friend and backer since the 1970s. Rapoport told Clinton that this was the first contact he had had from anyone on the campaign. "He was madder than mad," Rapoport says. "He was right. There was so much we could have done, but we never heard from anyone at headquarters."

That Bill Clinton would be surprised at any of this is surprising in itself, given the wide perception that he is the unseen hand guiding his wife's campaign. But friends and advisers say that was never the case -- in part because he understood Hillary's need to establish her independence, and in part because of long-standing mistrust between his political operation and hers. He deferred to her team and its pseudo-incumbency strategy throughout the fall, friends say, even though his instincts told him that Obama was gaining steam and should be dealt with as a threat. When Bill visited Hillary's Des Moines campaign headquarters a few days before the Iowa caucuses to give a pep talk to her young volunteers, her then campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle didn't come out of her office. Those who were there saw it as an unmistakable snub and an assertion of who was in charge.

While his public profile has been lower lately, Bill Clinton has been getting far more involved in the campaign's inner workings. It was partly at his instigation that Maggie Williams -- who had been chief of staff in his post-presidency office in Harlem, in addition to serving as his wife's chief of staff in the White House -- has replaced Doyle. Some of his former White House aides, including senior adviser Doug Sosnik and deputy chief of staff Steve Richetti, have been brought closer into the campaign fold. And Bill has been more assertive in giving tactical advice -- coaching Hillary's strategists on how to talk about trade in Ohio, for example, and scrutinizing the map for targets of opportunity that the campaign may have missed. It was Bill Clinton, aides say, who suggested deploying himself to campaign in Alabama, even though Hillary was certain to lose the popular vote. Sure enough, Obama won by a comfortable 14 points -- but Hillary came out of the contest with 25 delegates to Obama's 27.

But maybe what's really wrong with Hillary's campaign is something that is simply beyond even Bill Clinton's ability to fix. "It may be," says a friend, "their day has passed." As Bill told the folks in Chillicothe back in 1993, it is simply "a new and uncharted time."