Washington Backlash For Clinton
The Politico is casting Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Barack Obama as part of a Washington liberal establishment backlash against the Clintons and their vitriolic politics.
In September 1998, Greg Craig, a lion of the Washington legal community, left a top job at the State Department to go to the White House to help Bill Clinton fight impeachment during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
One of his first stops was to an old Democratic friend, Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, who warned him what he was stepping into: “You’re about three days away from a delegation of senior Democrats coming up there to ask the president to resign.”
That anecdote, recounted in Peter Baker’s history of the impeachment saga, came echoing back to mind in recent days.
Washington’s liberal establishment — members of Congress, fundraisers and commentators — has coalesced around the view that Bill Clinton is soiling his legacy and wounding Hillary Rodham Clinton’s prospects as he rambles around the country in a peevish, piece-of-my-mind monologue ostensibly devoted to helping her win the Democratic nomination.
Conrad was one of the first Democratic senators to endorse Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). Craig, who once worked for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), is now a senior adviser to Obama. Over the past week, he played an important behind-the-scenes role in facilitating the Democratic race’s latest thunderclap: Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama for president.
Kennedy has been supportive of both Clintons in the past. But, according to advisers who have spoken with him, Kennedy was motivated to publicly bless Obama in part because he was offended by what he regarded as Clinton’s divisive and distorted arguments against his wife’s chief rival.
I do not recall anyone predicting the kind of divisions that are now showing up in the Democratic party. The conventional wisdom was that the monolithic Democrats would beat heck out of the fragmented Republicans. But that was before the Clinton's unleashed their viciousness on one of the Democrat's own. The game has changed and some of these divisions will be deep and lasting. The Politico reports that anti-Clinton rhetoric is escalating in Washington liberal circuits and becoming increasingly bitter.
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Public Secrets: from the files of the Irishspy — January 29, 2008 @ 10:16 am
By Sam Wah, January 29, 2008 @ 9:41 am
I……..am desolate. My sadness knows no bounds. (Not exactly a quote from Capt. Reynaud, Prefect of Police.)
By Anthony (Los Angeles), January 29, 2008 @ 10:08 am
Interesting. I didn’t know the Democrats were close to asking Bubba to resign in 1998.
By martian, January 29, 2008 @ 12:46 pm
Now if they can just keep it up all the way to the nominating convention………………………
By Jim, January 29, 2008 @ 4:23 pm
The democrats may hate the Clintons but always remember, they hate the republicans more and will turn-out enmass to vote for Hillary when the time comes.
By Gaius, January 29, 2008 @ 4:46 pm
But every vote that is split off from a candidate with the high disapproval rate that Clinton has counts. It doesn’t take much.