Bill Clinton is baffled. The former president’s friends say he is in disbelief that in the closing weeks of the midterm campaigns Democrats have failed to articulate a coherent message on the economy and, worse, have allowed themselves to become “human pinatas.”
So Clinton is deploying himself on a last-ditch, dawnto-dusk sprint to rescue his beleaguered party. And as the only president in modern times who has balanced the federal budget, he is maneuvering to become one of the most fierce defenders of President Barack Obama’s economic policies.
“To hear the Republicans tell it, from the second President Obama took his hand off the Bible taking the oath of office, everything that happened after that was his fault,” Clinton said this week at a campaign rally for Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. “I’d like to see any of you get behind a locomotive going straight downhill at 200 miles an hour and stop it in 10 seconds.”
Over the past few weeks, Clinton has packed legions of supporters into basketball arenas, college quads and airport hangars. He is the Democrats’ most in-demand messenger and, unlike Obama, he is summoned everywhere, no matter how hostile the territory.
By Election Day, Clinton will have traveled to more than 100 events.
Some Democrats are troubled that Clinton, who left office a decade ago, is a bigger draw than Obama and the party’s current leaders. “Bill Clinton is not going to live forever, and it’s time for the Democratic Party to develop other voices,” said Bob Rucker, a journalism professor, as he left a recent Clinton rally at San Jose State University.
Sixteen years ago, two years into his presidency, a GOP resurgence cost Democrats both chambers of Congress.
“Look, folks, I’ve seen this movie before, in 1994,” Clinton said at the rally in Everett, Wash. “I called the president the other day, and I said: ‘Relax. They haven’t said anything about you they didn’t say about me. The only reason they’re being nice to me right now is because I can’t run for anything anymore.’”
In Everett, he laid out what he said is the Republican argument: “I know you’re angry. I know you’re scared. ... So let’s make this a referendum on everything that’s bothering you about life right now - take everything that’s not working right now and put Patty Murray’s face on it and make it a referendum.”
“It is not a referendum. It.Is. A. Choice,” he continued, pausing between each word for emphasis, “a choice between two different sets of ideas.”
Clinton exhorted the crowd to “keep on being mad. But concentrate your anger so that it clarifies your judgment instead of clouding it. ... The worst thing you can do right now is bring back the shovel brigade to start digging the hole again.”
Where other politicians speak of the housing crisis in staid terms - “Mortgages? I understand homes are underwater,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a debate last week - Clinton talks about bad mortgages as though his family were shackled with one.
“More than 10 million of us are living in houses not worth as much as our mortgages, and we can’t move like we used to do because our credit would be toast for a decade,” Clinton said at a stop in Espanola, N.M., never betraying that he is a millionaire many times over and the owner of multiple properties.
Clinton connects with “how normal ‘walking-around’ folks are feeling,” said Paul Begala, a confidant and top strategist. “Both the right and the left have mocked that I-feel-yourpain empathy, but Americans have always liked it. It’s the core of him, even more than the brain. It’s real.”
Over the past two weeks, Clinton has had one day off, last Saturday, which he spent in Northern California with his close friend Terry McAuliffe. The two stayed up late, playing cards and drafting new talking points for Democrats to trot out on the trail.
“He literally sat down with a yellow legal pad,” said McAuliffe, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, adding that Clinton told him, “Make sure, Terry, you get these talking points out to every candidate.”
It was then, McAuliffe said, that Clinton confided that he has been frustrated with the Democrats’ message.
“He is just baffled and bewildered about why there has not been a more coherent message talking about what the party has done, why we allowed ourselves to become human pinatas,” McAuliffe said. “I think he is agitated that Democrats haven’t put their best foot forward in explaining to the American public what they’ve actually done.”
Clinton, taking time off from running his global charitable foundation, is in the midst of a two-week swing that has taken him from the Mississippi Delta to the Pacific Northwest and seemingly everywhere in between. It took him across California, where he put old rivalries aside to join hands with Jerry Brown, running to reclaim his old job as governor. Aides said Clinton might return to the road next week to visit the battlegrounds of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kentucky.
Some assume Democratic leaders in Washington are orchestrating Clinton’s campaign activities, but he is deployed by no one but himself.
The White House and congressional leaders do not coach him on what to say. Clinton does not read from a prompter and only rarely refers to his notes at the lectern. He gives no interviews with local or national reporters and on most days races in his motorcade from airport to rally to airport again.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 10/23/2010