Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Politico:

So maybe Bill Clinton isn’t quite so far off-message as we had assumed.

After two weeks of reports on the former president’s temper, the former first lady’s supposed inability to keep him on script, and the ostensibly dire impact on his legacy, Hillary Rodham Clinton has won two straight primaries.

If there are Democratic voters who share the assessment that he’s a “liability” to the campaign — a term floated by outlets from The New York Times to the London Telegraph — this reporter and many others seem not to have found many of them. And though Clinton’s original, improvised attacks on Sen. Barack Obama discomfited some inside his wife’s campaign, they also seemed to hit their mark.

The campaign has settled on a new strategy: Turn Bill loose.

“There was a recognition that he has a huge megaphone and he can deliver a message in a way that breaks through,” said a Clinton strategist, who insisted on anonymity. “The press corps certainly has Clinton fatigue, but a Democratic primary electorate certainly does not.”

The logic is clear. Bill Clinton’s approval rating stood at 79 percent among Democrats in one CBS poll this summer, and interviews with voters in the early states often find Democrats saying that her access to her husband’s advice is a key reason for supporting Hillary Clinton.

“While some observes have warned the campaign not to allow the former president to ’steal the limelight,’ [Bill] Clinton has the ability to validate the candidate and launch aggressive push backs on [Hillary’s] opponents, including those of us in the media,” said Donna Brazile, a former Clinton aide and CNN commentator who was recently one of his critics.

He’s “a beloved figure in the Democratic party,” she added.

What’s still unclear is whether Bill Clinton’s performances on his wife’s behalf could wear thin over time, either with Democrats or in a general election contest, and possibly amplify complaints that her presidency would reprise the 1990s rather than look forward.

For now, there is one sure sign that his words are having their effect: Now Sen. Barack Obama, after absorbing the former president’s assaults with a sort of bemused silence, has chosen to engage him.

“One of the things we’re going to have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he’s not making statements that are factually accurate,” Obama said Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

The press and the Beltway establishment have famously misjudged America’s view of Bill Clinton in the past, writing him off during the sex scandals of the late 1990s that left his job approval ratings higher than ever. The latest variation on this theme came at Dartmouth College on Jan. 7, when in response to a student’s question Clinton laced into Obama’s record and the press coverage of it.

News media accounts suggested Clinton was becoming unhinged at the prospect of his wife’s defeat. Inside her campaign, there were some who feared the media was right.

“That was decided in his head — there’s no one telling Bill Clinton what he should strategically go out and do,” said a senior Clinton campaign official.

But the former president’s comment — that the media had created a “fairy tale” version of Obama’s record on Iraq — got wide coverage in New Hampshire and around the country, in ways that previous efforts to challenge Obama’s preferred storyline had not.

“It cut to the chase, and crystallized their primary line of attack on Obama,” said Dan Gerstein, a Democratic political consultant who isn’t aligned with either candidate. “They’re doing a little good cop, bad cop routine.”

Clinton has delivered a series of attacks on Obama, beginning when he told Charlie Rose that electing Obama would be to “roll the dice.”

But he has principally been the spokesman for two lines of attack:

That Obama’s record on the war in Iraq is impure; and that Obama’s union allies in Nevada tried to intimidate workers into supporting him.

In Hanover, Clinton said, “It is wrong that Sen. Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year.”

Obama accused Clinton of making statements that “directly contradict the facts,” but Clinton’s words have more often dragged Obama into complicated, nuanced turf and away from big picture clarity. On the question of support for Iraq, for instance, Clinton accurately quoted Obama saying “in 2004 you didn’t know how you would have voted on the resolution” authorizing the invasion.

At the time, as Obama has since explained, he was defending the Democratic nominee, Sen. John Kerry, who had voted for the resolution.

In Nevada, Clinton echoed something that was certainly on the lips of some casino workers: that the Culinary Workers union was improperly pressuring its members to support Obama. No evidence emerged to suggest the union had broken any law, and the union denied anything other than energetic campaigning.

On “Good Morning America,” Obama also complained that Clinton had quoted him saying that “only Republicans had had any good ideas since 1980.”

Clinton had attributed to Obama, in Nevada, the statement that “the Republicans have had all the good ideas” in recent years, citing Obama’s remark that the Republicans “were the party of ideas” for much of the last 15 years. But Obama qualified his words by adding, “in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom.”

“He was making it up and completely mischaracterizing my statement,” Obama complained.

Clinton’s aides, meanwhile, are happy to see Obama debating his own stances with the former president, and say they’re amused by what they see as media handwringing.

“People should take a deep breath here and remember that President Clinton enjoys stratospheric popularity and trust among Democrats, and he’s also a pretty darn talented campaigner, and the campaign couldn’t be happier to have him on the stump,” said Jay Carson, who has been a spokesman for each of the Clintons this year.

There’s no clear polling data on the impact Bill Clinton’s words have had on his wife, or on himself.

But there’s some evidence that he’s beginning to draw down his political capital, noted Mark Blumenthal, the editor of Pollster.com, who cited a CBS survey taken after the New Hampshire primary, which found him a “net positive” for the campaign.

The poll asked voters whether “Bill Clinton’s involvement in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign” makes them more or less likely to support her. Thirty-nine percent said it made them more likely, and just 13 percent less likely — but the group finding it less likely had almost doubled from a survey the previous month.

The shift in Bill Clinton’s role — from silver-haired statesman to attack dog — has drawn warnings that he’s compromising his legacy and his stature. But what better way to defend his legacy, he has apparently concluded, than getting his wife elected president?