Former president Bill Clinton, a shining star in the political-media world as recently as the 2012 Democratic National Convention, has faded.
Clinton surfaced this year to do for his wife what reporters and commentators have said he’s best at: campaigning. But since at least January, the once-glowing coverage of his legendary retail political skills has largely dimmed as well.
“I would vote for sending Bill home, or maybe abroad,” said liberal New York Times columnist Gail Collins, in an interview published Tuesday. “He’s a tremendous politician, but the public needs to be really sure this is [Hillary’s] race, not his. Or theirs.”
A U.S. News and World Report story on April 14 asked, “Is Bill Clinton losing his mojo?”
“[W]hen he defends policies that his administration once embraced, it seems that he hasn’t updated his ideas since he left office more than 15 years ago,” it said. The story said that Clinton has “seemed underwhelming” while campaigning for his wife, and that in recent weeks he “seems to be defending himself more than promoting Hillary.”
An April 8 Vanity Fair headline asked a nearly identical question: “Has Bill Clinton lost his political mojo?” The article cast Clinton as “not quite up on the latest ideological directives from today’s Democratic Party.”
Clinton, 69, has found himself at the center of controversy while campaigning for his wife to fill the job he once had.
In early April, while campaigning in Philadelphia, he clashed with a Black Lives Matter protester and defended a crime bill his administration passed in the 1990s that critics say unfairly targeted black communities.
“You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter,” Clinton said to the protester.
The next day, he offered a semi-apology, saying he wasn’t “most effective” in responding to the protester.
That incident came just a few days after Clinton knocked “the awful legacy of the last eight years,” a comment that many thought was directed at President Obama’s two terms. An aide to Clinton later said the former president was referring to “obstruction” from Republicans that Obama has encountered.
Still, it was see as a flub. “No one is doing more damage to Hillary’s campaign than her husband,” wrote Michelle Goldberg on April 7 at the liberal Slate.
Goldberg noted that “on the trail he looks frail and wan,” and wondered if Clinton “doesn’t really want Hillary Clinton to become president, particularly if she has to distance herself from his legacy to do so. How else to explain why one of the world’s most talented and agile politicians is so consistently flat-footed and destructive when advocating on his wife’s behalf?”
In late December, Clinton took a shot at Republican front-runner Donald Trump when he said past comments the billionaire mogul has made demonstrate a “penchant for sexism.” Trump, never one to shy away from a fight, returned fire, calling Bill “one of the great woman abusers of all time,” referring to his history of sexual abuse allegations.
Liberal Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus took Trump’s side. “Bill Clinton’s conduct toward women is far worse than any of the offensive things that Trump has said,” she wrote in January.
At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Clinton delivered a speech that was heralded as a roaring defense of Obama’s first term, one that delivered a needed boost to the embattled incumbent. But four years later, the national media signaled it had moved on.
As he warmed up on the trail, appearing at rallies in early primary states, the New York Times observed, “It’s still Bill Clinton, but the old magic seems to be missing.”
