Bill Clinton has been out and about promoting his wife’s candidacy for president. He’s also been promoting comparisons with his own presidency at the expense of the current occupant of the White House.
“If you believe we can all rise together, if you believe we’ve finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us, and the seven years before that where we were practicing trickle-down economics with no regulation in Washington, which is what caused the crash, then you should vote for her,” he said in a campaign appearance in Spokane, Wash.
Look for a moment beyond the self-serving nonsense that “trickle-down economics” — it’s a species of economics known only to its critics and subsribed to by precisely no one — caused the housing bubble or the toxic asset problem that threatened the nation’s financial markets in 2008, and also the preposterous idea that there was no regulation.
When you do, you’ll notice that Clinton’s comment sounds a lot like a sharp criticism of the Obama economy.
When these remarks were noticed and criticized by other Democrats, Team Clinton insisted that the former president had been taken out of context by right-wing news sites. But he hadn’t. It is hard to interpret “the last eight years behind us the seven years before that” as meaning anything other than what he actually said — that George W. Bush and Barack Obama had left apalling legacies.
This isn’t the first time Clinton has done this, nor even the most direct example of it. Earlier this year, he disparaged Obama’s State of the Union address, arguing that the president had painted a false “pretty picture” of a prosperous economy under his watch.
“Millions and millions and millions and millions of people look at that pretty picture of America he painted and they cannot find themselves in it to save their lives,” Clinton said then.
In February, campaigning in Memphis, he offered another clear note in the same pitch. He acknowledged that “the president has done a better job than he has gotten credit for,” but added a critique of both Congress and Obama when he said that the economy remains “rigged … because you don’t have a president who’s a change-maker, who has a Congress who will work with him.”
Clinton doesn’t just keep misspeaking over and over again and accidentally saying the same thing. His wife is the easy favorite for the Democratic nomination, but she is likely to lose several primaries soon, particularly in Washington State, where the former president took his shot at Obama.
Bernie Sanders, her opponent, has enjoyed unexpected success among Democratic voters by telling anyone who will listen that today’s economy is rigged and that capital markets are fraudulent. Clinton probably understands that outside the South, where progressives are less loyal to Obama, it won’t be enough just to rap Sanders for implicitly criticizing the current president.
As for the general election, it’s possible that Clinton will have an easy go of it. But this cannot be taken for granted, and that’s when it could become useful for Clinton to reposition herself as an Obama critic.
How does Hillary tack to the center? One method is to argue from premises that cross ideological lines: The economy has grown only slowly; Americans aged 25-54 are working less than at any time in the past 32 years; The jobs recovery since the recession seven years ago has been disappointing other than in a few high-performing states such as Texas.
What better time to revive the Clinton brand as a mark of prosperity from a bygone era?
