Supporters of Hillary Clinton are starting to realize that Bill Clinton isn't the "huge asset" they once thought he would be. Story from the Baltimore Sun:
"When she won New Hampshire, they thought they were back on a roll again, so they decided to send him into South Carolina and try to make a difference there," said a Clinton supporter with high-level experience in national campaigns over the past three decades. "They should have just let Barack win by 12 points, because it would have been nothing, and they would have moved on. Instead, they made 12 points into 28. The strategy all along has been mistake after mistake after mistake."Another supporter said voters had begun to get comfortable with the idea of her as president but "the more [Bill] came into the picture, the more it detracted from that. It also brought up this image in people's minds of a co-presidency, which voters weren't comfortable with."
A Clinton superdelegate who served in Bill Clinton's administration said the former president "has screwed this thing up for her big-time. They need to send him out of the country for a long, long time. I am angry at Bill Clinton and I think there are other Hillary people who are angry at Bill, who felt that she was running a very good, solid campaign - she wasn't the exciting one, but she was the solid one - and then he came in and made it nasty, and single-handedly pushed away black voters."
Bill Clinton certainly appears to have lost his touch politically after spending the last seven years touring the world and pulling down hefty fees for his speaking engagements. Hillary's campaign was much better off when she was the main attraction and he wasn't stealing the limelight from her.
It also doesn't speak well of her ability to manage the White House to see him drowning out her message and angering the key constituency of African-American voters. Hillary can hardly blame the voters if they decide they don't want to spend four years seeing Bill running around the White House like a bull in a china shop.
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2008 Presidential Race
Tags: Bill Clinton, Democratic presidential campaign
Comments (1)
By Bill Clinton's estimati... (Below threshold)1. Posted by Steve Crickmore | February 18, 2008 2:45 PM | Score: 0 (4 votes cast)
By Bill Clinton's estimation, Obama's refusal to do negative attacks, his desire "to turn over a new leaf..It has already taken four candidates out, four good candidates out," he said. "And it would have taken Hillary out if she didn't have so much grassroots support and so much guts in the face of a lot of what has happened here." The new politics of Obama can seem very unfair to such battle scarred veterans of the old politics fights as the Clintons.
1. Posted by Steve Crickmore | February 18, 2008 2:45 PM |
Score: 0 (4 votes cast)
Posted on February 18, 2008 14:45