Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself

Whether Clinton's attacks are part of some grand campaign strategy is almost beside the point. Clinton is an unstoppable force of nature, a keenly intuitive politician who is not going to be part of someone's strategic plan unless it's his own, and even then he'll roar off in a different direction if his mood or his instincts move him. Clinton may be honored around the world as a statesman. But to say that he misses the raw power of the presidency is an understatement. He doesn't really attempt to hide his yearning. In Aiken, S.C., last week he waxed on to a group of adoring supporters: "Think what being president's like. They play a song every time you walk into the room." His presidency over, Clinton mourned: "Nobody played a song anymore. I didn't know where I was."

There was a time, about six months ago, when Clinton could afford to float above the fray and play the grand old man of the party. In September he told Larry King, "I like having a field of people running for president where I don't have to be against anybody, you know, where I can admire these people and appreciate what they bring to the race and trust the voters to make the right decision." But that was when his wife led in the national polls by 19 points. Now, as Dana Milbank pointed out in The Washington Post, "he sounds as if he's campaigning for a third term." In Aiken, Clinton "tried mightily to talk about Hillary," Milbank wrote, "but he kept lapsing into the first person."

It is hard to know exactly when Clinton set his sights on Obama as a genuine threat to the Clinton restoration, but the most visible moment came during the course of an interview the former president gave Charlie Rose on Dec. 14. Voters, Clinton said, would "roll the dice" if they chose Obama instead of his more experienced wife. Rose tried to point out that JFK had been only 43 years old (and Clinton himself, 46) when he took office and that Washington experience was not necessarily a virtue. But, his face turning red, Clinton went on to attack Obama long after Rose seemed to want to change the subject. Waiting in the greenroom, Clinton's aides began agitating to bring the interview to an end. They got a producer to tell the host to wrap it up, that Clinton was late for his next appointment. (Clinton aides dispute this story, noting that in fact Clinton did arrive late to his next event.) But Clinton's "roll the dice" comment, along with his crack that Obama is engaging in a "fairy tale" when he talks about his stance on Iraq, are now deemed to be shrewd attacks by Hillary's campaign. They have served to sharply highlight Obama's lack of experience and make it stick as a campaign issue.

Clinton has an uncanny ability to spot turning points and weak spots. "It's a preternatural talent," says one former adviser, who asked not to be named discussing the former president. "He can detect mood changes before they turn up in the polls." On Jan. 15, as Clinton traveled to an event in Nevada before the Jan. 19 caucuses, he was flipping through a stack of news clips and noticed some comments that Obama had made the day before to the conservative-leaning editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal. Clinton expressed astonishment that Obama was on the record appearing to recognize Republicans for being the "party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom." Clinton looked up and scoffed: "What ideas is he talking about? Torture? That a new idea? Privatizing Social Security? What the hell is he thinking?" The Clinton campaign is now trying to cast Obama as a closet Reaganite. (Never mind, as columnist E. J. Dionne pointed out, that Clinton himself, running for president in 1991, had praised Reagan to a Washington Post editorial board for pushing for change and new ideas.) A radio spot accusing Obama of embracing such Reaganite positions as holding down the minimum wage was widely jeered as an outrageous stretch —and the ad was pulled after 24 hours. But not before it had helped cast doubt on Obama as a true Democrat.

Clinton undoubtedly knows that he is paying at least a short-term price for his role as his wife's attack dog. But his supreme confidence allows him to believe he can regain any lost ground (after all, he was impeached for lying to a grand jury about his affair with an intern and went on to become a global hero for his work on AIDS and poverty). "He's deliberately sacrificing his stature as senior statesman in order to help her win," says an adviser who declined to be identified discussing Clinton's motivations. "He thinks he can get it back later."

The Obama camp gloomily warns that by dividing the Democrats in an "old politics" party squabble, the Clintons threaten to bring New York CityMayor Michael Bloomberg into the race as an independent candidate. Other party elders have been wagging their fingers at the Clintons. Clinton has chosen to "reduce himself," says former Democratic Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, "to minimize his postpresidency in a very dramatic way, and I think to lower himself in ways that I would not have expected … It's his competitive juices," suggests Daschle, a member of a self-styled Obama "truth squad" pushing back at the Clintons. "It's demeaning," blogged Clinton's former Labor secretary and Oxford roommate Robert Reich, "for a former President to say things that are patently untrue (such as Obama's anti-war position is a 'fairy tale') or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when the former President is himself doing it."