October 4, 2016 | No Comments
Just when it seemed Donald Trump had been crowned the undisputed king of saying silly, self-destructive stuff in public, along came the venerable master of talking out of turn – William Jefferson Clinton.
He took a swipe at a certain Vermont senator who is currently trying to help his wife shore up her dismal numbers among millennials. And he made a candid, unsolicited critique of Obamacare — which he described in off-the-cuff remarks as “the craziest thing in the world,” an early Christmas gift to Republicans who have been saying much the same thing for years.
Hillary Clinton might be in strong enough shape that it doesn’t matter. The Democratic nominee has vaulted to a strong position in the presidential race after a bravura debate performance at Hofstra University last week predicated, in part, on her experience in shutting up, smiling, and letting the towering blowhard standing next to her prattle on.
Then, on Tuesday – with poll after poll showing his wife surging in battleground states – Bill got angry and went red-faced rogue, as he did often during the 2008 primaries, attacking two of Hillary Clinton’s most important progressive surrogates, Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama.
When a heckler at Ohio University shouted at Clinton for passing the landmark 1994 crime bill, which included drug sentencing guidelines that resulted in the disproportional incarceration of black offenders, he responded with an attack on the one guy his wife most needs flattered and happy: Bernie Sanders.
“Hillary didn’t vote for the ’94 crime bill, even though Senator Sanders did,” Clinton told the heckler – before clarifying a bit: “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,” he added.
Sanders was in the U.S. House of Representatives when he voted for the bill, which both Clintons now admit is out of date and discriminatory.
After Hillary Clinton’s 2008 primary loss to Obama that left her husband embittered and marginalized, the former first couple decided to make the ex-president a supporting player not a center-stage player time around, the opposite of the “two-fer” strategy Clinton campaigns adopted in 1992 and 2008.
Instead of regularly overshadowing his wife, and occasionally making damaging gaffes that the ‘08 Obama team was able to exploit, the would-be first dude has largely stayed out of the limelight. This cycle, “he’s toned down his speeches, he’s toned down his political insight, he sticks to the talking points — he does everything he can not to make news,” Garry Mauro, a longtime friend of the Clintons and current Texas state director, told POLITICO this fall.
But this backseat role has not always been comfortable one. The former president, according to an ally familiar with his thinking, has become increasingly “frustrated with the fact that the campaign is based on analytics, with not enough attention to message” as the polls tighten. And he’s been a loud – and often unwelcome – critic of his wife’s Brooklyn-based campaign during tough times, including the aftermath of her loss in New Hampshire and early-September swoon in the polls, several campaign insiders told POLITICO.
“He gets angry,” one of them said last month, “and we try to listen, but also to make sure he doesn’t do a lot of damage.”
The problem: Despite his innate political genius, no Hillary Clinton supporter has his head in the 1990s as much as Bill Clinton, who has spent much of the 2016 campaign defending his own presidency as he’s barnstormed in the service of his wife’s historic White House run. At one snowy-day appearance at a rural Iowa firehouse in January, the onetime leader of the free world spent the better part of a half-hour touting economic growth rates under his administration – using impossible-to-read letter-sized charts as a guide. The grown-ups yawned, and the kids played on the parked pumper trucks.
Clinton’s top aides, led by his former chief of staff John Podesta – Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman – have mostly succeeded in keeping the man known affectionately as the Big Dog on his leash. But as the race enters its final month, the former president has increased his schedule, which makes a tired, sometimes cranky and ferociously independent super-surrogate especially hard to handle.
Clinton’s backhanded swipe at Sanders comes at an especially sensitive moment. Trump and his team see a path to victory in wedging the insurgent senator’s army of youthful supporters away from Clinton by accentuating lingering tensions between the two camps.
Sanders’ patience isn’t infinite, but thus far he’s proven to be unexpectedly loyal Clinton defender despite the release of a recording last week in which Hillary Clinton tells a private gathering of supporters that the “children of the Great Recession, and they are living in their parents’ basement,” adding, “If you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista or, you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot and doesn’t have much of a ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing.”
Sanders shrugged it off, saying that a vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson – who serves as an electoral refugee camp for some disaffected Sanders backers – is, in fact, a vote for Trump. And though he acknowledged to CNN’s Jake Tapper that some of Clinton’s comments “of course” bothered him, he commended her for making “a very important point” about the lack of jobs for young people and chalked up their differences to being “in the middle of a campaign” at the time.
Tuesday’s Bill Clinton gaffe may have more lasting consequences.
The former president began with an off-script attack on Obama’s crowning, if teetering, legislative accomplishment – the Affordable Care Act – which his wife has defended and promised to improve. While praising the law for insuring millions of Americans eligible for Medicaid, Clinton questioned its usefulness for middle-class families and promoted his wife’s plan to allow people to buy into Medicare.
“The people who are getting killed on this deal are small business people and individuals who make just a little too much to get any of these subsidies because they’re not organized,” Clinton told an audience in Flint, Michigan. “They don’t have any bargaining power with insurance companies so they’re getting whacked.”
But the word that launched a flotilla of GOP press releases was “crazy” – a gift to an opposition that has had a hard time getting voters to focus on a series of setbacks that have left the future of Obamacare and its jerry-rigged state exchanges in doubt.
“So you’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It’s the craziest thing in the world,” the former president added.
Trump’s team – on the defensive all week – was thrilled for a chance to go on offense.
“Even Democrats like Bill Clinton are coming to realize just what bad public policy Obamacare really is,” said campaign spokesman Jason Miller. “Unfortunately for the millions of Americans struggling with higher health-care costs, all Hillary Clinton is proposing to do is double down on this failed law and reheat unrealistic proposals that were too liberal to pass when Democrats held a filibuster-proof Senate majority.”
Trump could barely contain himself at a rally in deep-red Arizona, where he thanked the former president for his candor.
“President Bill Clinton came out and told the truth about Obamacare,” Trump said. “This was yesterday. He’s absolutely trashed President Obama’s signature legislation. Remember, Hillary Clinton called Obamacare one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama, of the Democratic Party and of our country. Give me a break.”.
“I’ll bet he went through hell last night. Can you imagine? Can you imagine?” Trump went on. “Can you imagine what he went through after making that statement? He went through hell. But, you know, honestly, there have been many nights when he’s gone through hell with Hillary, in all fairness.”
Clinton spokesman Angel Urena, who travels with the former president, and is a veteran of many clean-up drills, said the”craziest thing in the world” crack was being taken out of context.
“President Clinton spoke about the importance of the Affordable Care Act and the good it has done to expand coverage for millions of Americans,” Urena told POLITICO in an email. “And while he was slightly short-handed, it’s clear to everyone, including President Obama, that improvements are needed.”
Nobody disputes that, but the Clinton campaign’s explanation — that he was merely saying “there’s more work to be done to fix it to make it better for people” — didn’t quite capture the vehemence of the former president’s remarks, or the competitive impulses they suggested.
Nor did Hillary Clinton’s own terse answer: “I think he made it clear what he was saying.”
The slam came after he just flew aboard Air Force one with Obama for the funeral of Shimon Peres in Israel, where the president good-naturedly poked fun at his Democratic predecessor’s habit of gabbing long past .
“Come on, Bill, let’s go” Obama shouted as he poked his head out of the door frame of his idling plane. “Bill, let’s go, I gotta get home!”
Brianna Ehley and Annie Karni contributed.