Send In Bill Clinton to Save the Democratic Midterm Campaign
Robert Shrum
Months away from Election Day, the Democrats are already cutting and running away from Obamacare. Clinton is the man to help them embrace it, attack obsessed Republicans—and win.
With Democrats facing a daunting midterm season, it’s time to bring in the Big Dawg, not just as a campaigner but as a strategic driving force with the resources to deploy and dominate the message wars from coast to coast. Put him in charge of one of the existing super PACs—which would instantly multiply its fundraising—or form a new one that can operate on a genuinely super scale, with a pervasive reach. Let the Republicans have Karl Rove and Sheldon Adelson, the gambling mogul who in 2012 seemed to have all the electoral magic of a muggle. They, and the Koch brothers, would prove no match in messaging for Bill Clinton—and he’s the best chance to come close to matching them financially by attracting money beyond the Obama true believers among the big givers and the grass roots.
Why Clinton?
First, he has the right instinct about a year in which a platoon of Democrats appear to think—it’s not really thinking but reflex desperation—that they can run by hiding from health-care reform. Clinton has already rebuked that reflex, advising his party’s candidates that they “have to turn in toward all the controvers[y] and embrace it”—just as he did in a spectacular tour de force from the podium of the 2012 Democratic National Convention. He didn’t make what he calls “the terrible mistake” of “shy[ing] away from the health care deal.”
Clinton had to live with the consequences when too many Democrats contrived to flee their own history in the 1994 midterm contest that followed the failure of his health-care plan. So many of them lost that the party lost both the House and the Senate. Clinton understands that the last refuge of Democratic fear and trembling is to pretend you’re not really a Democrat, or not that much of a Democrat—and that the last thing we need, this year or then, is two Republican parties. The real Republicans will win out every time.
Four years later, he learned—or taught—another lesson during another midterm election. In 1998, the Democratic establishment was terrified to confront the GOP elephant stomping down the campaign trail. Democratic candidates were talking about anything and everything—except impeachment. Clinton himself had practiced the politics of triangulation during his reelection, although he prevailed primarily because of a fast-rising economy and the Gingrich-engineered government shutdown. But in 1998, he sensed the urgency and the utility of taking impeachment on directly—and certainly not defensively. Frustrated by conventional wisdom that routinely dismissed the notion as strategic malpractice, he was energized and engaged as an independent expenditure, spearheaded by a major contributor named Danny Abraham, prepared to go on the air just a week before Election Day to indict the GOP for wasting months and millions on their relentless pursuit of political revenge. I was a political consultant then, and my partners and I were producing the ads. The president of the United States was phoning our office with his “suggestions.” He is not only a hell of a speech-giver but a hell of a scriptwriter.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/14/send-in-bill-clinton-to-save-the-democratic-midterm-campaign.html
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Higher than even St. Ronnie's.
Focus on the present.
It won't be the first time that Bill has come to the rescue of the party.
like that kind of save?
He got 5,000,001 votes all by himself. whatta guy. The Obamas should be eternally grateful.
