Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself

Nobody loves a rope line, or works one, like Bill Clinton. Face flushed bright red, smiling broadly, he basked in the adulation of the crowd, fans elbowing each other to get near him after a two-hour "Solutions for America" town meeting at Huger's restaurant in Charleston, S.C. Stopping near a NEWSWEEK reporter, he was initially loose and friendly, until she asked how he would respond to critics who say he "tarnished" his legacy by acting as his wife's surrogate and attacking Barack Obama's record. The former president tightened and grew testy. "So should somebody be able to be elected president without answering questions?" he demanded. "Let me just say that I went through a year and all I did was compliment Senator Obama and I continued to compliment him when he said in Iowa that my wife was a dishonest person. An untruthful person." He paused. "A person without character." Dramatic pause. "Repeatedly." Another dramatic pause. "I never said a word. When he put out a sca-a-a-thing attack on me in Iowa, my business practices, I never said a word."

The NEWSWEEK reporter asked if Obama started the whole thing by comparing the ex-president to Richard Nixon. All of a sudden, one of Clinton's frazzled-looking handlers stepped in. "Thanks, you guys," the handler piped up. Ignoring the nervous aide, Clinton asked the reporter, "What?" The reporter repeated the question, referring to an interview in which Obama had said, "I think that Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not." As Clinton began to respond, the handler gamely tried to interject, "Thank you, guys, we're done," and steer Clinton down the line. But 20 seconds later, Clinton turned and fixed the reporter in his gaze and began spouting off again. "This is a media-driven story," he said. "This whole thing … I go to all these meetings and nobody asks about this. This is all driven by you," he said to the NEWSWEEK REPORTER as he became visibly more annoyed, "because you want conflict instead of to deal with what these people are really interested in."

Self-pity aside, Clinton is not wrong about the press's preoccupation. THE 2-HEADED MONSTER, the New York Post dubbed Bill and Hillary Clinton. "Bill's transition from elder statesman, leader of his party and bipartisan ambassador to ward heeler and hatchet man has been seamless—and seamy," wrote New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd last week. Clinton is also right that, for now at least, the voting public seems less interested in the feuding than do the pundits. At his packed campaign event in South Carolina, a woman asked Clinton about the "race baiting" being "pushed by some of the media." (Several politicos have suggested that the Clintons, in a cynical play for white and Hispanic votes, are interjecting race into the campaign—trying to turn Obama into the 2008 version of Jesse Jackson, from a candidate who happens to be black into a black candidate.) But at Huger's restaurant, Clinton was able to smoothly defuse the race question. ("As far as I can tell on our side, neither Senator Obama or Hillary has lost votes because of race or gender.") Soon he had the crowd laughing and chorusing "Yeah!" Though Clinton had crowds in his thrall from the Lowcountry to the backwoods, he was not able to deliver South Carolina for his wife last Saturday night. Obama won in a rout with heavy black turnout and did better than expected with whites—a possible signal that voters there took umbrage to the former president's sniping tone. (He said Obama "won fair and square" at a Hillary event after the results were clear.) But by stumping forcefully in the Palmetto State, Bill Clinton freed Hillary to go West and campaign in California and other delegate-rich states holding primaries on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5.

There's nothing new about presidents trying to poison the cup before it can pass to their successors. In 1968, Lyndon Johnson sought to sabotage the despised Robert Kennedy by leaking how Kennedy, as JFK's attorney general, had authorized FBI bugs on Martin Luther King Jr.Teddy Roosevelt was so vexed about losing the GOP nomination to William Howard Taft in 1912 that he formed the Bull Moose Party and ran against Taft (thereby splitting the vote and electing Woodrow Wilson). But no one has ever been in the position of William Jefferson Clinton, a former president trying to get his wife elected president, in no small measure by baiting and badgering her principal opponent. The remarkable tag team of Clinton and Clinton is much more than political gamesmanship. If the Clintons succeed and win in November, the nation will have something truly unprecedented: an unelected, unofficial, but nonetheless true co-presidency.

Clinton is having some success at getting under Obama's skin, judging from last week's Democratic debate in South Carolina. "There's a set of assertions made by Senator Clinton, as well as her husband, that are not factually accurate," Obama declared. "I can't tell who I'm running against sometimes," he protested. (Thus opening the way for James Carville, the Clintons' longtime adviser and sometime mouthpiece, to go on talk TV and chastise Obama for "whining.") The Obama camp had debated whether to turn the other cheek or push back. Campaign chief strategist David Axelrod finally argued that Obama had no choice, that he had to stand up against the Clinton distortions of his record. (Example: in New Hampshire, the Clintons circulated thousands of fliers accusing Obama of going soft on abortion rights because, as an Illinois state legislator, he voted "present" instead of "no" on an anti-abortion bill. As recently reported, the flier failed to note that Obama had done so at the request of an abortion-rights group, which asked its supporters to sidestep for tactical reasons.) Obama's advisers see a Clinton plot to "grab and pull Obama into the mud," as one put it, speaking anonymously because he did not want to be identified discussing internal campaign deliberations. If Obama takes the bait, he risks losing his aura as a leader who can rise above politics as usual, says this adviser, who tried to joke mordantly about Obama's angry pushback against the Clintons at the South Carolina debate. "Well, at least he didn't say, 'Stop lying about my record'," says the adviser, referring to a sullen outburst by GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole after he lost the New Hampshire primary against George H.W. Bush in 1988.

In his rope-line interview with NEWSWEEK, Clinton shrugged off the bickering as standard politics. "That's what elections are about," he said. "That's not disrespectful." One Clinton campaign adviser, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject, says Bill Clinton's attacks on Obama have not been premeditated or strategic. This adviser did say that the Clinton camp has some concern that the former president's outbursts in the media could hurt the campaign. "I think you'll see him dial it back," says the adviser. But "he's hard to control." Another adviser, who asked not to be named for the same reason, speculated differently: "I think there was a strategic decision made for him to be the attack dog. That, in general, was thought out. There's an occasional loss of control, however." A third adviser said, "This all started because he thought the media wasn't doing its job, looking into Obama's record."