Analysis: Bill Clinton's Lost Legacy

The man crowned as America's first black president for his unprecedented personal connection to the African-American community has abdicated the throne.

By injecting himself into the Democratic primary campaign with a series of inflammatory and negative statements, Bill Clinton may have helped his wife's presidential hopes in the long term but at the cost of his reputation with a group of voters that have long been one of his strongest bases of political support.

Illinois Senator Barack Obama won an overwhelming victory in South Carolina with the support of African American voters who made up 53 percent of the vote, according to CBS News exit polls. Eighty percent of those voters chose Obama.

The rout came after weeks of racial polarization, much of it involving the former president, who thrust himself into the fray in a manner more reminiscent of backwoods Arkansas politicking than conduct befitting a former commander in chief.

Bill Clinton was once seen as a big asset for his wife's campaign, especially among Democrats. After the thrashing Hillary Clinton took in South Carolina, the former president may find himself in the doghouse, if not the bullpen.

It was one phrase that began the racial ball rolling. When Bill Clinton referred to Obama's claims of consistent opposition to the war in Iraq as "the biggest fairy tale that I have ever seen," many blacks heard more than policy criticism. They heard a dismissive attack on the first black with a real chance of winning the White House. They heard echoes of racial battles of the past. And they heard it from someone who was supposed to be on their side.

Bill Clinton has not been the only campaign surrogate to stoke the racial fires. References by at least two Clinton supporters about Obama's past drug use, including a comment from one of the wealthiest African-American businessmen in the country.

E-mails have surfaced, some traced to Clinton campaign volunteers in Iowa, claiming that Obama is a Muslim. Former Senator Bob Kerrey, on the day he announced his support for Clinton, made sure to make a point about how wonderful he thought it was that Obama's middle name is Hussein. A radio ad in South Carolina sought to portray Obama as a fan of Republican policies in the 1990s.

The candidate herself contributed to the furor when she intimated that while Martin Luther King Jr. was a wonderful leader, it took President Johnson to make the Civil Rights Act a reality.

But it has been Bill Clinton who carried the campaign's attacks in the wake of his wife's Iowa loss. The "fairy tale" comment was followed by the claim that he had personally witnessed attempts at suppressing votes (a topic that touches blacks on a personal level) in Nevada by Obama supporters. It was Bill Clinton left to carry the ball in South Carolina for most of last week, while the candidate was in Super Tuesday battlegrounds like California.

When confronted with the rhetoric, Clinton lashed out at the media - and his wife's opponents. "I never heard a word of public complaint when Mr. Obama said Hillary is not truthful about character," he told reporters last week. "When he put out a hit job on me at the same time he called Hillary the senator from Punjab. I never said a word."

South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, the highest ranking African American in Congress, publicly told Bill Clinton to "chill a little bit." Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, speaking with the former president just feet away, rebuked his language, insisting, "this is reality, not fantasy or fairy tales." The shots came from all corners. Writing on his own blog, Clinton's former Labor Secretary, Robert Reich accused Clinton of spearheading a "smear campaign against Obama."

South Carolina voters apparently agreed. The numbers are jarring: Fifty-eight percent said Bill Clinton's involvement was important to their decision and most of them voted for Obama. Seventy percent believed Hillary Clinton had unfairly attacked Obama. As a warning to Clinton, just 77 percent said they would be satisfied with her as the nominee.

"Not presidential" is how former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle described Bill Clinton's behavior on the campaign trail of late. All the same, it may be effective. Clinton's campaign is aimed at capturing voters who make up a huge part of the Democratic demographic: Middle class, white, female, older. Those are the voters who may shy away from backing a "black" candidate, as they have in earlier contests in this race. Despite his huge margin of victory, Obama captured just a quarter of white voters.

And the nasty tactics had another purpose - to knock the candidate of "hope" off the mountaintop and down into the gutters of hardball politics. Forcing the man who has sought to connect himself to the legacy of inspirational leaders of the nation's past (he announced his candidacy in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln) to trade blows and accusations with Bill Clinton on the divisive issue of race only serves to muddy both. And there's some evidence that it worked. Fifty-eight percent of South Carolina voters said they felt Obama unfairly attacked Clinton during the campaign.

Should Clinton win the nomination by marginalizing Obama as a black candidate, she may well end up in the White House. The sign outside should read: Still wanted, the first black president.

Bill you can't quit campaigning for Hillary now. Remember, this is your reelection, your redemption, your legacy—a time to reverse all those bad things that people said and did to you. With JFK’s encouragement, you sought high political office because it makes you a babe magnet. Too bad you married impulsively and prematurely, but that’s history. Old Willard led you down the wrong path, and now you’re stuck.

But, look at the brighter side, you’ve got your “open marriage” arrangement with her—so there’s nothing else to do but stay out there in the public eye. You need to be seen, to be engaged, to present yourself front and center. (Sorry about the military analogy, but this is WAR.) No one can tell an ex-president how to behave. Where’s your self-esteem, man? You owe it to Willard.

Remember one other piece of advice: If she doesn’t win, it is because you f*cked up, sat on your duff, didn’t do squat for her, said the wrong thing, put your foot in your mouth, came off as too aggressive or, alternatively, dumber than shinola, and you will hear about it for an eternity. (Hint: Read the note on the lamp as it sails by.) She won’t be busy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or traveling around the world. She’ll have oodles of time to teach you a few lessons. So get out there and fight! Obama deserves to go down! And you’re just the guy to do it. We’re counting on you. Besides, your Willard wants company.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/greenberg062504.asp
Paul Greenberg
The History of Slick Willie — from the coiner of the moniker
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | The e-mails have been clogging the system, the phone calls have started, Fox News called . ... It’s just like the old days, aka the Clinton Years.

Yep, Slick Willie is back, not that he was ever completely gone. But this time he’s been resurrected by his alter ego, Bill Clinton. While pushing his memoir on “60 Minutes,” Arkansas’ prodigal son mentioned that, of all the nicknames he’s acquired, he likes Slick Willie the least.

I swelled with pride. And sighed at the prospect of having to write still another column on the history of Slick Willie, going into his life and times, his birth and ... apparent immortality.

Just when you think Slick Willie belongs to history, he pops up on “60 Minutes.” He’s like some Golem you’ve invoked for what seemed perfectly good reasons at the time, but who then refuses to go away when his time is over. Kind of like Bill Clinton himself.

This time Slick Willie has drawn fire from Bill Clinton himself, who says there’s “a very good reason” he dislikes the name: “No one could fairly look at my political life and say I didn’t believe in anything.”

Really? And just what political belief wouldn’t he modify if his popularity depended on it? He didn’t specify. He seldom does. It wouldn’t be Clintonesque (another term he inspired) to be specific. If there was a single constant to which he adhered throughout his political career, it was probably triangulation.

Bill Clinton may be confusing the term Slick Willie with Empty Suit. Both might apply in his case, but in addition to equivocation - at which he remains the master - the term Slick Willie implies duplicity. Which is why I used it to describe his political persona.

Back in 1996, a book publisher talked me into putting out a collection of my Clinton editorials and columns over the years. I went though roll after roll of microfilm at the Pine Bluff, Ark., public library to see when I’d first used the term Slick Willie. It turned out to be September 27, 1980. It was in an editorial for the Pine Bluff Commercial that had been inspired by the two-faced attack he made on his gubernatorial opponent that year, Frank White.

On the one hand, Bill Clinton was trying to place himself in the honored tradition of Arkansas’ post-Faubus reform governors when he spoke at his party’s state convention that year - even though he had embraced Orval Faubus himself, literally, at the outset of his first term.

He would also criticize Frank White, quite rightly, for demagoguing the issue of how to handle the Cuban refugees who’d arrived in Arkansas that summer. Then-Gov. Clinton welcomed the refugees at first, but by September of that year he was badmouthing Jimmy Carter for sending the Cubans to Fort Chaffee. In the dishonorable tradition of Orval Faubus, he threatened to defy the whole United States Army if Washington sent any more our way. It was all pretty slick. Hence the sobriquet Slick Willie.

It caught on. Because politicians aren’t just given nicknames. They earn them. At some point, a nickname engages the public imagination with an almost audible click - Old Hickory, The Rail Splitter, Tricky Dick, The Great Communicator ... and, of course, Slick Willie.

Slick Willie had a long incubation period. As early as 1979, I was still trying out nicknames for the state’s new governor. Most played on his youth - Kid Clinton, Boy Governor, Young Smoothie - for he was the youngest governor in the Union at the time. But nothing clicked till Slick Willie, and it would go national when Bill Clinton did in 1992.

By now I’ve seen myself credited with coining the nickname Slick Willie so often that I expect it will be noted on my tombstone. (I should have known that Devoted Husband and Father was too much to hope for.) Databases generations hence will doubtless contain the entry, “Slick Willie - Nickname given 42nd pres. of U.S. by obscure Ark. newspaper editor.”

But history is never simple, and neither is the history of Slick Willie. So I hasten to add that a letter writer to the old Arkansas Democrat -Mr. J.L. Crosser of Calico Rock, Ark. - used the phrase some time earlier in 1980. And wasn’t there also a bar-and-grill, maybe combined with a pool hall, named Slick Willy’s around at the same time?

All I know is that, almost a quarter of a century ago, deep in darkest Arkansas at Pine Bluff, I was blissfully oblivious to all these other Slick Willies. I was having too much fun dreaming up nicknames for our boy governor, scarcely suspecting that one day he would become our boy president.

So who really created Slick Willie? That’s easy: Bill Clinton.

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