For the Clintons Payback Comes Now

Remember this photo? Her smile says "yes we can" but her suit says "not over my dead body".  That was taken the day Hillary conceded the nomination to Obama and they held a "unity" event in New Hampshire.  She was wearing her public humiliation powder blue suit (other examples here).

Now, as Obama seeks help from former President Bill Clinton a lot of people think his purpose is not to praise Obama but to bury him.

This week, a desperate President Obama called on former President Clinton to help him reinvigorate his base. They held a joint fundraiser in New York City that netted the president some $3 million.

It also netted him some good old-fashioned Arkansas ass-whuppin' from the prospective first gentleman. "I care about the long-term debt of the country a lot," Clinton told the crowd. "Remember me, I'm the only guy that gave you four surplus budgets out of the eight I sent." Ouch. The only way the moment could have been more uncomfortable for Obama is if he'd been wearing something low-cut at the time, so Clinton could undress him visually as well as verbally.

Obama should have seen it coming. The week before the event, Clinton completely undercut Obama's central strategy of attacking Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital, calling that record "sterling." "I think he had a good business career," said Bill. "A man who has been governor and had a sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold."

But Clinton wasn't done. He also declared the American economy in a "recession" and suggested that President Obama re-up President Bush's tax rates.

Bill Clinton may be petty and vindictive, but that doesn't mean he's stupid. Backstabbing President Obama is a concerted strategy, not an emotional revenge tactic.

If Obama loses his re-election bid, Clinton will still be seen as the greatest Democratic president since FDR; no one-term president can challenge that title. If Obama loses, Hillary can also claim that he lost because she was isolated from central administration decisions and prepare to run as a moderate in 2016.

If, however, Obama wins, then Clinton's legacy becomes far less stable. So do Hillary's 2016 chances. Joe Biden has already announced his intent to run in 2016. And there are plenty of younger, fresher faces who are closer to the Obama machine than the Clintons. If Obama wins, he will consolidate control over the Democratic National Committee, marginalizing the Clintons even further.

I'm not sure how much longer we'll see Bill on the campaign trail. If Obama needs the money he may let him continue and just hope he can weather the undercutting. If not, he's gone.

Bill Clinton Defends Romney's Business Record

There is weeping and gnashing of teeth in Obama's Chicago headquarters:

Yet another Obama surrogate has joined the chorus of voices warning against attacks on Mitt Romney's experience at Bain Capital.

Speaking on a special episode of CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight hosted by film producer Harvey Weinstein, Clinton said on Thursday that Romney had "a good business career," something that would help him with "some people who relate well to businessmen."

"I don't think that we ought to get in the position where we say this is bad work," he said. "This is good work."

One prominent line of attack launched by the Obama campaign has been on Romney's record at Bain, which they have sought to portray as a private equity firm that laid off thousands of workers while making handsome profits. The attacks came under scrutiny, however, when some Democrats -- most notably Newark Mayor Cory Booker -- disagreed with the campaign publicly.

Clinton had only faint praise for Romney's qualifications for the office he once held. "There's no question that, in terms of getting up and going to the office and, you know, basically performing the essential functions of the office, a man who's been governor and had a successful business career crosses the qualification threshold," he said.

How many of you think Clinton is trying to clear the decks of Obama so Hillary won't have to run on his record in 2016? Killing Obama's big campaign tactic against Romney is a good way to do that.

Hillary Clinton's Biggest Regret

Besides marrying Bill Clinton, that is:

Bill Clinton thought so little of President Obama -- mocking him as an "amateur" -- that he pressed his wife last summer to quit her job as secretary of state and challenge him in the primaries, a new book claims.

"The country needs you!" the former president told Hillary Clinton, urging her to run this year, according to accounts of the conversation included in Edward Klein's new biography of Obama.

The title of Klein's explosive, unauthorized bio of Obama, "The Amateur" (Regnery Publishing), was taken directly from Bill Clinton's bombshell criticism of the president, the author said.

I tweeted this just yesterday:

I wonder how many times a day Hillary Clinton regrets not challenging Obama for the nomination?

Way back in January of 2010 I predicted Hillary would leave the State Department and challenge Obama for president. I'm kind of sorry I was wrong, though I think there's a good chance that she not only would have knocked off Obama but would have won in November too and that wouldn't have improved things much for the country. This was her best chance to become president and she passed on it. Hard to understand given the unrelenting ambition of her husband.

Bill Clinton: If You Go Back 500 Years Surely You Can Find a Recovery Longer Than Ours

That's probably what it would take, too:

Former President Bill Clinton defended President Obama and his handling of the nation’s economic recovery Sunday night, saying “we are beating the clock” historically in comparison to Japan and other economies that have been through similar tumult.

“If you go back 500 years, whenever a country’s financial system collapses, it takes between five and 10 years to get back to full employment,” Clinton said as he introduced Obama at a fund-raiser for his longtime friend Terry McAuliffe.

The former chairman of the Democratic National Committee is now running for governor of Virginia.

“If you go back for the last 200 years, when buildings had been widely owned by individuals and companies, if there’s a mortgage collapse, it almost always takes 10 years,” the former president added as he defended the current one. “He’s beating the clock, not behind it. Don’t listen to those Republicans. We are beating the clock.”

If you have to go back 200 years to find a time worse than this I don't think you're helping the Obama campaign.

Political Photo of the Day

From Facebook:

Secret Serviced

The Secret Service is one of the most professional law enforcement organizations around, but some of their people really blew it:

The dozen Secret Service agents sent home after a prostitution scandal in Colombia were busted after at least one of them refused to pay one of the hookers, sources said.

The scandal — a black eye for the United States’ reputation abroad — was revealed Friday just hours before President Obama arrived in Cartagena for the Summit of the Americas.

The 12 agents were part of an advance team assigned to secure a local hotel before the summit began, yet their attention apparently turned to taking advantage of Colombia’s policy of legal prostitution.

Five American service members were also accused of misconduct stemming from the scandalous incident at the hotel, according to the U.S. military.

“They had arranged to have a bunch of prostitutes come by and one of the agents refused to pay a prostitute,” said author Ronald Kessler, one of the leading experts on the Secret Service.

“Yes, doubly good judgment there.” Kessler, who was briefed on the investigation by his sources within the agency, told the Daily News Saturday that the spurned hooker told police about the lack of payment.

I wonder if any of these guys used to work on Bill Clinton's detail? Sounds like it would be right up his alley.

Energy Graphic of the Day

From Fox News:

Former Secret Service Agent Dishes About The Clintons

It's unusual for former Secret Service agents to talk about protectees, but this guy apparently saw enough that he wasn't content to keep it to himself:

In a breach of tradition, a former U.S. Secret Service agent has self-published a book that savages the Clinton White House staff as arrogant and rude, suggests former first lady Hillary Clinton was aloof and charges that Bill Clinton endangered himself and agents for a “totally pointless photo op” on the South Korea-North Korea border.

In several anecdotes, former agent Dan Emmett revealed that Clinton’s young staff had “fundamental traits of rudeness and arrogance” that teetered on the verge of being dangerous at times. “Most of these youngsters were from wealthy families, and many viewed Secret Services agents as the hired help,” he writes in “Within Arms’s Length,” an autobiography that provides new details of the inner Secret Service.

In one case he told of an unnamed Clinton staffer who challenged a KGB agent during a 1993 presidential visit to Russia “as if he were dealing with a Wackenhut security officer in Toledo.”

In another, he wrote of a female staffer who wouldn’t listen to Emmett’s security advice. “She stared at me with a look as if her father had just told her she couldn’t go to the mall with her friends and get a tattoo or body piercing,” he wrote. “My patient attempts to reason were met with childlike emotion born of a past where no one in authority--probably beginning with her parents--had ever said no to her about anything.”

On the first lady, he describes her as aloof, someone who didn’t say “thank you” to agents while the president and former first daughter Chelsea typically did. He told Secrets, “she was not as out-going or cordial.”

I had a friend who was an agent for 20 years. At one point in his career her served on the team for one of Gerald Ford's kids, he headed up the Los Angeles office for awhile, and near the end of his career was part of the Clinton campaign detail in 1992. After seeing what America had elected he retired from the agency a few months after Clinton took office.

Political Cartoon of the Day

From Facebook:

Bill Clinton: Me, Me, Me!

As Bill Clinton watches another Democrat president completely tank the economy, he thinks he deserves more credit for his time in office:

Bill Clinton thinks he deserves more credit for reforming welfare and balancing the budget.

“I go crazy every time I read the conventional wisdom,” he said Friday night at his presidential library in Little Rock, Ark. “So part of the Republican narrative is that I was ‘saved’ from myself by the election of the Republican Congress [in 1994] that ‘forced me’ to do welfare reform and ‘made the balanced budget possible.’”

Bill Clinton had a relatively successful presidency, accomplishing a balanced budget and welfare reform, because he moved toward the Republican position. They didn't move toward him. Consequently, it was pretty easy to pass those things and get him to sign them.

Obama is such a liberal ideologue he just can't find it within him to move toward the GOP on anything. Consequently, his presidency will be a failure.  The GOP will not sign on to more big spending/big government plans.  They're dead on arrival.  If Obama wants to have any successes in his remaining term he must move toward the GOP.

Bill Clinton Tells GOP to Quit Arguing Against New Taxes...Right Before He Says We Shouldn't Have New Taxes

Bill Clinton's multiple personalities are quite active lately:

Former President Bill Clinton says now is not the time to hike taxes.

“I personally don’t believe we ought to be raising taxes or cutting spending, either one, until we get this economy off the ground,” Clinton told Newsmax in an interview on Tuesday. “This has been a dead flat economy.”...

Earlier this week, Clinton suggested that Republicans should stop arguing against Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on the rich.

“The Republicans in Washington always say the same thing,” Clinton said, accusing the GOP of being locked in to opposing ending the Bush-era tax cuts.

Could Bill be preparing the way for Hillary in 2012? Wouldn't surprise me at all.

Bill Clinton Gives a Fine Speech at the Flight 93 Memorial

Have to give credit where credit is due - Bill Clinton gave a great speech today's Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania:


UPDATE: George W. Bush also spoke at the Flight 93 Memorial. His speech is here.

Unless Something Dramatic Happens Obama is Finished

John Podhoretz in the New York Post looks at the numbers:

Unless something extraordinarily dramatic comes along to change the course of the US economy and the sentiments of the American people in the next six months, Barack Obama is finished.

That conclusion is inescapable from the history of US presidential politics since 1945.

Obama is now below 40 percent in job approval in the Gallup poll. Yes, as the political scientist Larry Sabato points out, almost every president since FDR has fallen to that level. But of those seven presidents, five (Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush) went on either to lose the next election or to not run again.

The Truman story is complex: He was at 35 percent in 1946 yet won in ’48 -- but he fell back into the 30s in 1951 and opted against running for a second full term.

The exceptions are Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. But the essentials of those wins should terrify Obama’s supporters.

Reagan hit 35 percent in 1983. By year’s end, though, the economy had lifted out of a dreadful recession to growth at an annual rate of 4.5 percent. In ’84, it grew at a sizzling 7.2 percent. The unemployment rate fell from 10.2 percent in 1983 to 7.2 percent on Election Day 1984 -- and Reagan won 49 states.

Clinton hit 39 percent in September 1994, and was slammed with a GOP triumph in the midterm elections two months later. But by the end of ’94, the economy had grown 4.1 percent. Growth dropped to 2.5 percent in ’95, but bounced back to a healthy 3.7 percent in ’96. Plus, unemployment on Clinton’s watch fell from 7.5 percent in 1992 to 5.4 percent in ’96.

So how do things look for Obama? Bad -- in every particular.

Growth in the first quarter of 2011 was a shocking 0.4 percent. Second quarter: 1.3 percent. Forecasters are dropping their estimates of growth for the year to 2 percent -- and that seems extraordinarily optimistic.

There's more at the link, and none of it is good news for Obama.

And that's not the end of it. Unemployment is projected to be at 9.5% on election day next year, more than 2 points higher than the highest rate ever for a president winning re-election.  Consumer confidence is likely to still be low, and the rainbows and unicorns index will be about zero.  I'd like to think the voters aren't stupid enough to re-elect a president with those numbers, but with so many people still invested in making the first black president a success, there's no guarantee.

Yesterday's decision to stop deporting illegal immigrants was interesting in a couple of ways.  For one thing it's basically amnesty by fiat, but it also might reflect the thoughts of a president who realizes he's not coming back for a second term and has decided to start enacting everything as much of his agenda as he can while he still holds the office.

Political Photo of the Day

From the NY Times: The Look.

There's one more thing that's needed to complete "the look" - the blue suit on the shamed spouse or other humiliated woman:

Look for Weiner's wife to wear the "suit of shame" the next time she's seen with him in public (assuming she is ever seen with him again in public).

Nancy Pelosi Suffers Rare Attack of Bipartisanship

Given Nancy Pelosi's usual vicious Democrat partisanship, this could be the sign of a minor stroke:

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said she called former President George W. Bush on Tuesday to congratulate him on the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden.

Following a classified briefing on the operation to take down bin Laden, Pelosi told reporters that she called the former president earlier in the day to "congratulate him and thank him for the leadership role he had played in this quest over the years."

Pelosi was Speaker of the House for two years while Bush was in the White House.

Pelosi said she thought Bush appreciated the call.

“I wanted him to know the appreciation that many of us have in a bipartisan way ... that his role was important," she said.

Hard to say what motivated this. Nancy is not known for graciousness and we know Dem operatives were circulating instructions to their politicians to make the entire bin Laden story about Obama.

Bush was always far more gracious to Pelosi then she ever was to him.

Pelosi also reportedly called Bill Clinton, who as far as I know, didn't do a darn thing about bin Laden after numerous attacks on the U.S. and U.S. interests despite having more than one opportunity to take him out.

Unrequited Love Headline of the Day

From Drudge:

PAPER: Monica Lewinsky Still in Love with Bill Clinton...

Ah...love...

MSNBC Declares Bill Clinton "President of the World"

MSNBC and Chris "Tingle Up My Leg" Matthews plan a giant wet kiss to Bill Clinton. From the press release:

There’s not a single political figure today with the global reach and influence of Bill Clinton—a former U.S. President turned humanitarian and diplomat extraordinaire. No one else in today’s political arena has the ability to command the attention of world leaders and organizations everywhere quite like he does. This Presidents’ Day, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews will take viewers behind the scenes of Clinton’s life in the one-hour documentary “President of the World: The Bill Clinton Phenomenon.”

Bill Clinton hasn't been treated that good since Monica Lewinsky in the room off the Oval Office.  I wonder if Matthews will be wearing a blue dress?

First Black President is Accused of Betraying His Race

Bill Clinton was dubbed "The First Black President", but now he's being accused of being disloyal to his race.  Not his actual race, but his pretend race:

The campaign to be the next mayor of Chicago continues to develop largely along racial lines. On Wednesday former Democratic Sen. Carol Moseley Braun said that former President Clinton betrayed minority communities by campaigning for former chief of staff to President Obama Rahm Emanuel.

“For him to come on the day following Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday to insert himself in the middle of a mayoral race,” Braun said in a statement, “is a betrayal of the people who were most loyal to him. It’s a mistake.”

“President Bill Clinton does not live or vote in Chicago,” said Braun. “He’s an outsider parachuting in to support another outsider.” Emanuel was an advisor to Clinton during his presidency.

At an event Wednesday, Braun elaborated to a local NBC affiliate.

“The African-American community if you remember when he was having Monica Lewinsky problems stuck by him,” she said, ”to stay out of it, that would have been the right move.”

Black Democrats are remarkably naïve. They actually believe that when Democrats are pandering to them they're being sincere.  Consequently, they're shocked when a major Democrat figure ignores them and supports the machine candidate like Rahm Emanuel in Chicago.  It happens over and over again and they never learn.

Bill Upstages Barack

Lots of heads shaking after the impromptu White House presser yesterday featuring Obama and Bill Clinton trying to sell the tax package.  The pairing of the two was odd enough, but when Obama abandoned the podium to go to a Christmas party and left Clinton in charge, heads exploded.  Instapundit has a wrap-up:

WHITE HOUSE ADVISERS surprised by Obama’s handoff to Bill Clinton. Ya think?

Related: “This has to be one of the worst PR moves in the entirety of the administration. Obviously, Clinton is probably a more popular Democratic figure right now, but they had to imagine this would hurt Obama. I mean, letting a former president explain your tax bill while you head to a Christmas party? A Christmas party?” Plus this: “I guess it could have been worse. Obama could have left to go play hoops.”

Also: “They told me if I voted for Hillary, that Bill Clinton would basically be a co-president AND THEY WERE RIGHT!” Heh.

UPDATE: Somehow, Bill Clinton Is Now President. “Why did Obama leave himself vulnerable to this grotesque upstaging, and why did Clinton do it? Was Clinton unaware of how this looked? Was Obama? Maybe Obama realized he’d made a mistake sharing the stage with Clinton without any ground rules, and walking out on Clinton was the best idea he had at that point. And maybe Clinton decided to deliberately show off the way a real President talks to the press because he actually wants to weaken Obama and create an opening for Hillary to challenge him in 2012.”

I'm guessing that Bill would do just about anything to appeara diplomatic while subtly weakening Obama in the eyes of the political world.

Bill Clinton Tries to Talk a Qualified Minority Into Quitting

In favor of a rich white (or orange) guy.  If any Republican did this he'd be called "racist" in a New York minute:

Bill Clinton sought to persuade Rep. Kendrick Meek to drop out of the race for Senate during a trip to Florida last week — and nearly succeeded.

Meek agreed — twice — to drop out and endorse Gov. Charlie Crist’s independent bid in a last-ditch effort to stop Marco Rubio, the Republican nominee who stands on the cusp of national stardom.

Meek, a staunch Clinton ally from Miami, has failed to broaden his appeal around the state and is mired in third place in most public polls, with a survey today showing him with just 15 percent of the vote. His withdrawal, polls suggest, would throw core Democratic voters to the moderate governor, rocking a complicated three-way contest and likely throwing the election to Crist.

The last poll I saw showed Rubio over 50% which means even if all of Crist and Meek's voters got together they'd still lose.

This also proves the theory that should Crist win he'd caucus with the Democrats. That fix was already in.

UPDATE:  Crist advisor says he'd caucus with Democrats.  I saw that coming months ago.