Bill Clinton always leaves political destruction in his wake.
And Barack Obama will wake up today, after the former president’s speech the night before, knowing that his nomination acceptance speech will be all the more challenging because of Clinton’s bull-in-china-shop routine during this whole convention week.
Obama is hardly the first Democratic politician to struggle against Clinton’s legacy. The Clinton yoke was famously heavy for Al Gore in 2000, and for U.S. Democratic House and Senate members in 1994. And then there was the terribly hobbled Arkansas Democratic Party in the 1990s.
In late 1997 while working for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, I found myself discussing education policy over a private lunch with former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, who was under house arrest after a conviction related tangentially to the Clintons’ Whitewater scandal.
Tucker struck me as thoughtful, even wonkish. And, so bare was the Democratic Party’s cupboard a full five years after Clinton left Little Rock for the White House, Tucker even as a convict with a serious liver illness remained the state party’s most prominent and dynamic figure.
Republican Mike Huckabee, still fairly new to the governor’s office he inherited from Tucker – and showing his inexperience with a series of small stumbles – nevertheless had no seriously effective challenge from a Democratic Legislature devoid of star power. Clinton never nurtured any real successors (Tucker had been more rival than protégé), and a number of his cronies were, like Tucker, embroiled in legal trouble.
On Fox News Channel Wednesday morning, Clinton’s ubiquitous former consultant Dick Morris insisted that Clinton wants Obama to lose so Clinton can claim the Democrats can’t win without him. Morris can be tiresome with his frequent psycho-analysis of his former client, but his insights on Clinton nevertheless ring loudly of truth.
But whatever the reasons, the record is clear: Following Clinton is a dicey proposition. Obama clearly has the “star power” to emerge from whatever shadow Clinton has created this week – but will he have the staying power?
