CONCORD, N.H., Dec. 21 -Washington Post- [1] After months of discussion within her campaign over how heavily she should draw on her husband’s legacy, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton [2] is closing out her Iowa and New Hampshire campaigns in a tight embrace of Bill Clinton’s record, helping fuel a debate about the 1990s with Sen. Barack Obama [3] that she thinks she can win.As part of the Clinton strategy, the former president is playing an increasingly prominent public role as an advocate for his wife. He appears to have overcome concerns within the campaign over how closely she should associate her candidacy with his time in office and over whether his appearances could draw attention away from her.Both Clintons are making the case that theirs was a co-presidency — an echo of Bill Clinton’s controversial statement during the 1992 campaign that voters would get “two for the price of one” if they elected him. At times, the former president has seemed to cast the current race as a referendum on his administration.
So, in short, what this amounts to is a run for a third term for Bill Clinton as president. the reason that they’re doing this now is clear; Hillary Clinton’s camp has been totally unable to make the argument that she could be president herself, on her record. They’ve been trying to suggest for some time now that she has the experience to pull the job off. The people, on the other hand have been saying for some time that she does not. Apparently that message is now getting back to Hillary Clinton’s campaigners, and they’ve decided to retool.
[4]Ed Morrissey points out [5], and I think correctly, that she really didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. This is particularly true given that they were billing themselves as co-presidents, back in the day. But Ed points out the level of cynicism involved in this move:
Only in the Clinton machine could anyone debate whether a wife should embrace her husband, even figuratively.
Ouch!
Did she think that anyone would have separated the two of them in considering her for the Presidency? Of course not; without Billl, Hillary becomes nothing more than a Senator with eight years of experience in public office. Without him, she’s got less experience in that arena than Barack Obama.
Well, in fact,without him she’s not even a senator.
Think about it; everything that Hillary has done for the last 30 years, has been King Midas in reverse, and there is no escaping her own history of failure. While involved with the educational system in the state of Arkansas. She oversaw that educational systems fall from a ranking of #46, to dead last in these United States. her a chance to institute government health care, were similarly failure prone. All this would seem to add up to a situation where Hillary Clinton can not with any degree of sanity claim that we should be electing her to the office of president of these United States based on her experience. (Yes, she did try, and that’s telling.)
So now, having no positive record of her own to run on, she wants us to take her erstwhile husband’s record as her own. Meantime, Bill Clinton, who never tires of talking about his own record, really does want to turn this election into what amounts to a referendum on his administration. I would suggest to you that the Republicans wouldn’t much mind that situation either, given that most of Hillary’s negatives come from Bill Clinton having been elected president.