COMMENTARY | Former President Bill Clinton appears to be playing a game that is calculated to embarrass the current president, Barack Obama, whom it is reported he has despised since the 2008 campaign.
First, according to Big Government, Clinton appeared on the Piers Morgan show and slammed the Obama campaign's attack on Mitt Romney's tenure as the CEO of Bain Capital. He is just the latest high-profile Democrat to so.
Then, Clinton went to Wisconsin for a get-out-the-vote effort in advance of the recall election, the Chicago Tribune reports. President Obama has studiously avoided venturing to Wisconsin, concluding as have most people that the attempt to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker is doomed to failure.
Clinton has not been so reticent. It is a win/win situation for him. If by some miracle Walker should fall, it will be seen as entirely due to Clinton's last-minute efforts. If Walker prevails, Clinton will get kudos from big labor and other Democrats for at least trying while the president stayed away.
The new book about Obama, "The Amateur," was recently excerpted in the New York Post. The excerpt depicts how Clinton, fuming with rage at Obama since 2008, attempted to persuade his wife, Hillary, to challenge Obama this year. The secretary of state demurred, but the account illustrates the lengths to which Clinton would go to exact revenge on the president.
And well he might. It is not just the humiliations Obama visited on Hillary Clinton during the last campaign that has enraged the former president. While the Clinton presidency was entertaining from a tabloid standpoint, it was mostly a successful one, especially when Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House in the 1994 takeover of Congress and thus provided some much-needed adult supervision. Clinton sees the ruin that Obama has caused the country and the Democratic Party, and must wail and gnash his teeth at night.
Clinton torments himself with the what-might-have-been of a Clinton restoration, with President Hillary Clinton in the White House, advised by her "First Bubba." Both, at least in Clinton's imagining, the economy and the world situation would be better than in the present timeline. Clinton will have been four years as a gray eminence, albeit as far from holy orders as one can get, and confidently looking forward to four more.
