Bill Clinton: “Barack Obama Represents America’s Future”

Bill Clinton is becoming one of the most valuable campaigners for and the most important defender of the Obama presidency. He doesn’t really have to take on that role. Here’s why he does anyway.

He had sufficient reason to stand idly by and watch the disaster unfold. Why would Bill Clinton want to help Barack Obama? Obama, the man who blocked his wife Hillary’s way to the White House. He has little to gain personally by campaigning. The stress aggravates his already damaged heart. The time he spends on the road could be used to raise millions for his foundation that, among other things, advocates for AIDS research.

Nevertheless, he has recently become one of Obama’s most valued campaigners and his most important defender, according to The New York Times, precisely because he isn’t Obama and can score points in those parts of the country where Obama seems to be more of a burden than a help for Democratic candidates.

On Tuesday he was in Nevada helping Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is locked in a dead heat with tea party candidate Sharron Angle. Nevada has the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 14.4 percent. Clinton demonstrated his talent for assuaging the anger. Citizens have every right to be angry with the government, he conceded in his trademark hoarse voice. But wouldn’t it be unbelievably negligent to say, “I know you’re right but I’m just too mad. I’ve got to vote for this woman”? He added that the election was all about badly needed jobs and the future.

A few days earlier, he appeared in Kentucky on behalf of Jack Conway, who is running against tea party candidate Rand Paul for the Senate. Many Kentuckians have an unacknowledged resistance to America’s first black President. Clinton is a southerner himself, hailing from the neighboring state of Arkansas. He won the conservative state of Kentucky in both his runs for President, in 1992 and 1996. “Why does Kentucky love Bill Clinton?” Conway asked as he introduced the former president. “Because he loves us,” someone from the crowd shouted back.

Rand Paul defended himself by awakening old suspicions: a man who seduces office interns and can’t be trusted, he said of Clinton, referring to the Lewinsky affair. But most Americans have long since forgiven Clinton for that. In a recent Wall Street Journal poll, Clinton had the highest approval rating of any living U.S. politician. If Democratic congressional losses are avoided in the coming election, Obama will owe that to Bill Clinton as well.