Who Will Bill Clinton Vote For?
Commentary by Aslan, 9.25.2008
When John McCain decided to suspend his campaign and go to Washington to help broker a deal in the credit crisis, he had one stop to make: "It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the Administration' proposal. I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time. Tomorrow morning, I will suspend my campaign and return to Washington after speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative."
Of course McCain is playing politics with his maverick return to Washington, but he is also doing what he thinks is correct. That is McCain’s style: showy ethics. But even though "we are running out of time," McCain had a more important stop to make than saving the economy: speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative?? Of all the campaign stops this election season, could there be anything more trivial and worth skipping than discussing global warming with Bill Clinton?
John McCain is no fool. He stopped in New York to pay his respects to the man who is going to get him elected: Bill Clinton.
When Obama threw Hillary Clinton under the bus at the end of the Democrat primaries, does anyone in their right mind think that Bill hugged Hillary and said, "You gave it a college try, sweetie. You should be proud!" No one will ever know what was said behind closed doors in the Clinton house, but there is no doubt it was X-rated and that the profanity was directed at one man: Barack Obama. The Clintons have a long and sometimes frightening history of effective power politics and slinking away in defeat is not part of that history. They are well aware that the ascension of Obama to the presidency would be the sun setting on their tenure as the power in Democrat politics, and Hillary is hardly ready to retire to a junior senator’s pasture in New York.
The Clinton plan to ensure that John McCain gets elected began several weeks ago and will culminate in a public declaration by Bill Clinton in late October that he will be supporting John McCain.
The Clintons despise Barack Obama and very much like John McCain: "I want to say one thing in particular about John McCain in bringing him out here," said Clinton today. "When most people in his party were thinking that global warming was overstated and maybe even admit designed to let people like me who love solar and wind get into it. He decided to look into it and everyone of us by the way with every thorny problem we face need to be in the looking into it business and he and the Junior Senator from New York, with whom I have a passing acquaintance took 2 astonishing trips. One to your state to Point Barrow, Alaska, the northern most community in the United States," Clinton said referring to Palin, "where the Eskimos told them they thought their way of life was coming to an end because of changes in the climate and one to the northern most settlement on Planet Earth."
There can be no clearer sign of the Clintons' support of McCain than their almost gentle treatment of Sarah Palin, someone who is as ideologically opposed to their brand of sprawling central government as exists in politics today. The Clintons do not utter kind words about pro-life, pro-gun, pro-drilling, anti-corruption devout Christians without an ulterior motive.
A steady stream of Clinton insiders have been vocally declaring their support for John McCain. First, John Coale, a lawyer in the inner circle of the Clinton campaign, announced his change of heart in the beginning of September, complaining that the Democrat party was "being taken over by the moveon.org types." He was followed two weeks later by Lynn Forester de Rothschild, an influential Clinton fundraiser, who kept to the script: "I believe that Barack Obama, with MoveOn.org and Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, has taken the Democratic Party — and they will continue to — too far to the left." Tonight on Fox News (Greta Van Susteren), another Clinton fundraiser, Miguel Lausell, declared that he would vote for McCain and that "the people should go with experience." Does anyone believe that if the Clintons desired the election of Barack Obama that they would allow these close associates to systematically and publicly defect to McCain? One characteristic of Clintonites is that they follow marching orders. Just ask Susan McDougall.
More will follow. These Clinton insiders are making the case that Obama is a hardcore leftist (a deadly accusation in any general election), paving the way for Bill to follow suit with an exquisitely timed press conference the week before the election. Bill must do the heavy lifting here, and while Hillary will necessarily be muted in her response to the firestorm of his power play, note that the stream of defectors to the McCain camp are Hillary insiders.
And Bill has been tipping his hand. He has yet to utter a harsh word about McCain, and this morning defended his decision to come to Washington far better than any McCain spokesperson could have done: "We know he didn't do it because he's afraid because Senator McCain wanted more debates…I presume he did that in good faith since I know he wanted -- I remember he asked for more debates to go all around the country and so I don't think we ought to overly parse that."
It makes no sense that Bill Clinton would be defending McCain and Palin today only to turn around and finish hard for Barack Obama in the closing weeks. John McCain’s success means Clinton's return to power in the Democrat party and makes Hillary the Democrat frontrunner in 2012. Obama's success means obscurity. What’s not to like about John McCain?
Barack Obama crossed the wrong people in the Clintons, and he may find out that Arkansas machine politics has a few wrinkles not seen in Chicago.
Copyright © 2008 Dan Hallagan. All Rights Reserved.