Former President Bill Clinton is walking a fine line between being an asset and a liability for Hillary Clinton.
The 2016 Democratic nominee’s team has gone into damage control at least three times this election cycle in response to off-the-cuff remarks from America’s 42nd president. The same happened in 2008 when the former president seemed to let his mouth get ahead of his brain during Hillary Clinton’s first and failed bid for the party’s nomination.
And all of this comes on top of the fact that Bill Clinton’s sex scandals from his time as president and governor of Arkansas continue haunt the former secretary of state’s presidential ambitions.
So is he doing her more harm than good?
“Bill Clinton has never been a good campaigner for his wife. He is much better campaigning on behalf of himself than he is for Hillary,” ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd told the Washington Examiner.
“He not only has made mistakes in both campaigns, in a year where folks want something different, he is a reminder of the past, which doesn’t help Hillary,” Dowd said. “Best thing for Hillary is if he would just stay off the trail.”
Republican strategist Rick Wilson mostly agrees, concurring the shine has worn off a bit.
“Bill is still wildly regarded as a singular talent by his core demo: Boomer editors,” Wilson told the Examiner. “His act is still pretty good, but the positives of his era are a little hazy.”
Bill Clinton’s latest mischief is a series of remarks he made regarding the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature health care law.
“It’s the craziest thing in the world,” he said Monday at a campaign event in Flint, Mich., adding that small business people “are getting killed” under the law.
“So you got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have healthcare, and then the people are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half,” Clinton said.
Those comments sparked a three-day news cycle in which he tried on more than one occasion to clarify that he supports the bill — even though he still thinks it has some huge “problems.”
Bill Clinton also turned friendly fire on campaign surrogate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., this week as he attempted to defend his wife’s record on criminal justice reform.
“Hillary didn’t vote for the ’94 crime bill, even though Sen. Sanders did,” he said at a campaign event Tuesday in Athens, Ohio. “And neither one of them were trying to send millions of your people to prison because there were fewer than 10 percent of our entire prison population are in the federal prison system.”
Bill Clinton has stated publicly that he regrets signing the 1994 crime bill, and said recently that it led to several “regrettable” consequences, namely, an increase in mass incarcerations.
Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., vow that they’ll oppose legislation like the 1994 crime law.
The Democratic nominee’s health has also been a source of concern this election cycle, and Bill Clinton didn’t help anything when he suggested in an interview that she is prone to dizzy spells.
“Frequently — well, not frequently, rarely, on more than one occasion, over the last many, many years, the same sort of thing’s happened to her when she got severely dehydrated, and she’s worked like a demon, as you know, as secretary of State, as a senator and in the year since,” he told CBS News in September.
His off-the-cuff response came after Clinton appeared to faint outside of a Sept. 11 memorial service in New York City. A bystander captured footage of the Democratic collapsing as her aides helped her get into a van.
Earlier, in March, the Clinton campaign was left to clean up the former president’s mess after he referred to the past eight years as “awful.”
“If you believe we can 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, then you should vote for her,” he said at a rally in Spokane, Wash.
The Democratic nominee’s campaign claimed he was referring to congressional Republicans’ “awful legacy” and not Obama’s two terms in office.
In May of 2015, Bill Clinton also drew criticism from CNN when he dismissed concerns over his family’s six-figure speeches by saying they have bills to pay.
And, again, this all comes on top of the fact that politicos and activists continue to go after the Clintons for the former president’s many sex scandals.
Bill Clinton has admitted in the past to engaging in extramarital affairs with multiple women, including former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and former model Gennifer Flowers. He has also been accused of sexually assaulting more than one woman.
Supporters of GOP nominee Donald Trump and other political activists are determined this election cycle to remind voters of each of these scandals.
“Bill Clinton has harmed women!” a protester shouted at Bill Clinton during a rally Wednesday afternoon in Canton, Ohio.
“He has raped women!” she continued as he held high a sign reading, “Bill Clinton is a rapist!”
The same exact thing happened to Tim Kaine Thursday evening in Las Vegas when a demonstrator interrupted a campaign event with cries of, “Bill Clinton is rapist!”
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd also said this week that the fight for equal rights for women died during Bill Clinton’s two terms as president of the United States.
“Feminism sort of died in that period,” she said Monday in an interview with Yahoo News’ Katie Couric. “Because the feminists had to come along with Bill Clinton’s retrogressive behavior with women in order to protect the progressive policies for women that Bill Clinton had as president.”
Taken together, these incidents have led some to believe that the former president has lost his edge and that he’s not the political asset to Hillary Clinton that people thought he would be.
But perhaps this could have been predicted considering Bill Clinton’s performance during the 2008 Democratic primary.
First, he drew criticism during the showdown in South Carolina for invoking Jesse Jackson as he dismissed then-Sen. Obama’s success in the state.
A reported asked, “What does it say about Barack Obama that it takes two of you to beat him?”
Bill Clinton called the question “bait” and then said, “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.”
The former president was then accused of suggesting that, like Jackson, Obama would win simply because of the African-American vote and that it wouldn’t translate into real general election support.
“The only possible reason for invoking Jackson’s name was to telegraph the following message: Barack Obama is black, so if a lot of black people decide to vote for him — doubtless out of racial solidarity — it doesn’t really mean squat,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote.
In New Hampshire that same year, Clinton allowed voters to see him frustrated when he tore into Obama for the then-Illinois senator’s opposition to the Iraq War.
“This whole thing is the biggest fairytale I’ve ever seen,” Clinton said, instantly creating a news cycle that the campaign spent days trying to quiet.
Obama was able to play off the incident by taking a swipe at the Clintons while appearing to be the bigger man.
“I understand they’re frustrated right now,” he said. “I suspect that they’ll both try to get back on track in terms of the strategy for them to do better than they feel they’re doing right now.”
Hillary Clinton ended up winning the New Hampshire primary, but it didn’t lead to any sort of lasting momentum.
Though 2008 and 2016 would seem to suggest the former president has lost some of his luster, a few political analysts say it doesn’t really make much of a difference in the end.
“I firmly believe that the only surrogate or endorsement that has ever made a difference in modern politics is Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama during the 2008 Democratic primary election,” GOP consultant Nathan Wurtzel told the Examiner.
“Otherwise, people view it as politicians endorsing politicians and it doesn’t deliver a measurable effect. Bill Clinton has always been alternately brilliant and destructive to himself and his party, so nothing has changed over the past 25 years,” he said.
