Putting Out The Fire With Gasoline?

Victor Davis Hanson, over at Real Clear Politics, takes a look at exactly the same issue that the Washington Post did in my previous post: Bill Clinton charging to the rescue of the Hillary campaign and claiming that theirs was a "co-presidency." Hanson thinks this is an enormous mistake for a number of reasons.

Hillary's campaign is so stalled that her advisers have tried dredging up Obama's kindergarten essays and his admitted drug use. And now they're resorting to flying in Bill Clinton to save the day. Some polls and conventional wisdom suggest he may yet restore his wife's fortunes.

But Bill's not exactly a fireman. He may instead throw gasoline on the fire.

First, his vote-getting abilities are suspect. He never won 50 percent of the vote in a presidential election. That fact and the embarrassment of his impeachment were why Vice President Al Gore kept him away from his 2000 campaign. True, Bill's presence is said to resonate with African-American voters, but most may prefer Obama anyway, as polls now show in South Carolina.

Second, Bill Clinton often comes across as a narcissist. He talks the longest and loudest about himself. It is almost impossible for first-person Bill to praise Hillary without adding, "When I was president" or "I had a vision." Third, Bill cannot always distinguish truth from fiction. In his rescue mission for Hillary, he has already weighed in on the Iraq war — in which he falsely claimed that he was against it from the very beginning.

Most recently, in a dig at Obama's lack of experience, Bill claims that he nixed an earlier run for the presidency in 1988 because he saw that he wasn't yet ready for the job. But the real reason more likely was worry about the less-than-desirable and now well-known aspects of his personal life. That tendency to dwell on — and fudge — his own past earns splashy headlines but takes attention away from his wife.

Do read it all, Hanson has still more reasons why he thinks having Bubba on the trail this way may actually end up hurting Hillary – potentially very badly hurting her. The more Bill Clinton talks, the more it looks like he is angling to get a third term in office and is just using his wife's candidacy as a vehicle to do so. He has always come across as self-centered, so he doesn't play altruistic well at all. There's always a "what's in it for me" quality to anything Bill Clinton does. This is no exception. Go read it all, with Hanson it is always worth reading the entire piece.