A $787 billion bailout. A health care “reform” law that could bury the entire nation in debt. And a trillion-dollar deficit that could repeat every year for the foreseeable future.
All that spending means it’s time for the Bill.
Bill Clinton, that is. The media and the left are so intent on saving the Obama presidency from its inner Jimmy Carter that they have brought back the one man they know could keep those evil conservatives at bay. The Big Dog himself has returned for yet another romp in the sun.
Obama supporters called in their last, best hope – a smiling, slimmer William Jefferson Clinton. Leties both in and out of the press want Clinton to pass his mojo onto their new favorite son. They have good reason to believe. Although his presidency was marked by scandal, it was also the first time since FDR that a Democratic president won reelection. The left knows November is coming, but they have given up on 2010 and now fear November 2012.
Of course the press is in full support of the sequel for the man from Hope. Clinton wasn’t just in the news for the ridiculous coverage given to his daughter Chelsea’s wedding. He was there supporting Andrew Romanoff for the U.S. Senate against Obama’s wishes. He was also the UN special envoy to Haiti meeting Haitian officials for the earthquake anniversary.
In all, the president-turned-punchline was on ABC, CBS and NBC more than 140 times in just three months. That’s roughly four times as often as the networks mentioned his successor, George W. Bush, in the same time.
There was Bill Clinton politician, smiling, glad-handing and hoping to rescue the plummeting poll numbers of his amateurish replacement. It was like the millennium never happened. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked the questions about the aging president liberals wanted to know: “Will Bill Clinton be the most effective Democrat this year? Will he be the happy warrior that saves the Democrats?”
To show how desperate the left is, Matthews argued for Clinton to be out on the campaign trail … selling values. “I'd sell Democratic values if I were him.” Presumably not the vows of chastity, fidelity, honesty and poverty, to name just a few.
But Matthews wasn’t the only one remembering past thrills from the Clinton camp. Barron’s Senior Editor Michael Santoli reminded ABC viewers that Clinton won in 1992 “on it’s the economy stupid,” though the recovery had already begun. That was a lesson for current voters, he explained on July 31. “But it doesn't mean the economy is really derailed just because it feels like it's no good.” Yes, that massive unemployment and all the negative economic news are all in the imaginations of voters. Prosperity is just around the corner.
Never fear, Bill is here, or he’s not far away. Even Obama had to swallow his overly large pride and make that happen. As ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, also a former Clinton adviser, told viewers July 15, the White House needed reinforcements. So, “to help him out, President Obama did something he hasn't done all that often. He called in Bill Clinton.”
Since Team Obama wants a return to the Clinton years, it makes sense that we return to Clinton terminology. Cue the media talking “triangulation.” Remember that concept? It was the “third way” pushed by then-Clinton adviser Dick Morris that advocated a mix of leftwing and rightwing policies.
One-time conservative-turned MSNBC talking head Joe Scarborough addressed the issue with the “Morning Joe” audience Aug. 12. Scarborough and crew discussed the chance that Gibbs’s criticism of the “professional left” was a deliberate attempt to appear more moderate. “So now he`s triangulating,” summed up Scarborough.
On ABC’s new “This Week” with silly lefty Christiane Amanpour, they talked about how a loss in the midterms could actually help Obama in 2012 by putting heat on the GOP. According to Thompson-Reuters Global Editor-at-Large Chrystia Freeland, such a result might be needed so Obama “can start to triangulate.”
For all that talk about Obama being more like Clinton, he’s been like Carter – waffling while the economy and the country go decline. On the mosque issue alone he took four separate positions in the space of a week – first he wouldn’t comment, then he was for it, then he backed off and finally he backed off backing off. That’s not leadership, it’s clown college.
The Christian Science Monitor said it well on July 14. “When President Clinton lost control of Congress in his first midterms, in 1994, he was able to regroup and ‘triangulate’ his way to reelection, by finding common cause with conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans. Whether Obama has the skill to do that is questionable.”
That’s OK. Democrats are prepared in case the Clinton offensive doesn’t work. They have another Clinton in mind. Already there’s talk of Hillary taking over at vice president or Hillary running in the primary. The Hill even had Hillary taking over the Pentagon. “Speculation in the nation's capital on who will replace Robert Gates at the Pentagon has centered on an intriguing possibility: Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
So, really, the Democrats only have one seven-letter strategy – Clinton. And they say conservatives are the ones without ideas.
Dan Gainor is The Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture. His column appears each week on The Fox Forum. He can also be contacted on FaceBook and Twitter as dangainor.
