What Drives Bill Clinton?

“Is Bill Clinton a worse loose cannon than Joe Biden?” asks Suzy Parker in The Washington Post. The translation of this question into German is not at all easy. Will Clinton’s loose tongue hurt Barack Obama’s reelection chances more than Vice President Biden’s?

We’ll see. At any rate, Clinton is busy trying to weigh in on the re-election effort and Obama will have to deal with it. On CNBC, the former president recently suggested that he would be fine with an extension of the tax cuts that George W. Bush brought to the country since America is again in a recession.

This is problematic, of course, because it is diametrically opposed to what Obama’s people have been trying to sell to voters for weeks: the tax breaks must end for the sake of fairness.

Previously, Clinton publically praised Obama’s challenger, Mitt Romney, for having “a sterling business career.” That was also problematic, since it is the exact opposition of Obama’s assertion that the multimillionaire Romney was a merciless hatchet man who would sell his grandmother for a few cents profit if she were still alive.

Although Clinton’s people were quick to say that his statements had been taken out of context – which always happens in such embarrassing situations — the damage had been done. Even after Clinton himself went on to say that a Romney presidency would be “calamitous for our country and the world.”

This time the confusion was great.

What drives Bill Clinton? William Kristol has an answer: Clinton wants to remain the only Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to have been re-elected. For the history books, you understand. At least two different camps think this way — and it undergirds a huge amount of targeted underhandedness. But that’s just Kristol, the neoconservative journalist, who has been attacking Clinton for almost 20 years.

Leaving aside the conspiracy theory, we ask again: What drives Bill Clinton?

Suzy Parker, who has covered Clinton as a journalist for decades, points to the former president’s ego. “No other politician loves attention more than Clinton, and yes, that’s saying something.”

And now? Now Obama must endure the loose tongue of his predecessor.

Because you can try to tell an ex-president that his ego is so lofty that he could fall off of it and tumble to his death at anytime … you can try to tell him that not every public utterance is a good statement. Just try telling Clinton that in some contexts, he ought to keep his mouth shut. Obama won’t be able to do it. Clinton’s wife, Hillary, couldn’t even do it.