The Left goes after.. Bill Clinton?
Politico published an attack article today attempting to pain former president Bill Clinton as “out of control” and “sabotaging Obama’s strategy”. Has the left gone so extreme as to dismiss it’s former hero and replace him with .. Barack Obama?
“I think he had a good business career,” Clinton said of Romney and added that “a man who has been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold.”
Obama does not need Clinton undercutting him. The two are not close, but they are not supposed to be enemies. They have golfed together, they attend fundraisers together, their staffs talk and, oh, yeah, Clinton’s wife is Obama’s secretary of state.
Independents and center-left moderates love Bill Clinton so it’s difficult to understand why the liberal media would start attacking the left’s version of Ronald Reagan. Despite his fun with a White House intern, lying under oath and other suspicious activities while in office, Bill Clinton was wildly popular and his economic record is often the one spoken of when attempting to show that Democrat policies work. Now, however, it seems more important to get the progressive candidate for President of the United States re-elected than to understand and use President Clinton’s success.
Calling Clinton out on the “sabotage” wasn’t enough for the liberal website. Oh no – they went straight into full-on smear mode:
There are two things going on here. First, Clinton has always been cozier with Wall Street than Obama. In January 1999, I was at a very odd event for then-President Clinton on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center.
Richard Grasso, then-chairman of New York Stock Exchange, stood up and said, “In my little corner of southern Manhattan, the Dow Jones industrial average during the course of President Clinton’s tenure tripled. We have the lowest unemployment in 30 years, and 16 million jobs have been created!”
The crowd, which included a number of financial titans, cheered. This was a year after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and months after Clinton had been impeached, but Wall Street did not care. Bill Clinton had been good for The Street, and The Street liked him.
So now Bill Clinton is a Wall Street insider, a 1%er – the next face on a poster at an Occupy Wall Street protest. The politico can’t stop there, now they blame Bill Clinton for the primary loss of Hillary Clinton:
Second, there is the little matter of the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton was the early favorite, but she lost to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton helped her lose.
He made one of the biggest strategic mistakes of her entire campaign: He insisted she seriously compete in South Carolina. Hillary’s staff wanted to spend its time and resources elsewhere, judging that South Carolina, with its large black electorate, was unwinnable.
Why is it so important for the left to now distance itself from a moderate like Clinton and cozy up to an extremist like Obama? Because the two are incompatible.
Clinton understood that the free market was necessary to get the tax revenues needed to pay for his pet projects and philanthropy. Obama does not. To Obama, the free market is an obstacle preventing him from doing what he thinks is best for all of us.
Clinton moved to the middle when he saw that far left policies were not only unpopular, they were ineffective. As a total opposite, even some on the left are describing Obama as tone deaf and unobservant as demonstrated by his moving further left. This presidency has to have seen the largest number of “doubling-down” references in media reports in American history.
The left must destroy Clinton’s legacy in order to install and grow Obama’s. Both of them cannot be the symbol of the Democrat party and it would seem that liberal media is choosing sides. Watch your back Bill, they have a new favorite son now.