Obama has taken up a theme helpfully advanced on nearly every Sunday talk show — Bill Clinton is butting into his wife’s campaign far too much and hurting her.
Talking Points Memo is generally inclined to reflexively resist the conventional wisdom of the Sabbath gasbags, but he says he tends to agree in this case.
I’m conflicted. On the one hand, why shouldn’t the greatest campaigner of modern times put his skills to work for his wife? On the other, I, too, find his competitiveness and anger not so attractive on-screen at times, if understandable. Still, I’m a whole lot more interested in what average voters think about it than what the media pack thinks about it. They don’t like either Clinton. If he weren’t out front, they’d be criticizing THAT.
So far, I’ve seen scant evidence that Bill Clinton’s intervention has prompted voters otherwise inclined to vote for Hillary Clinton to move to other candidates. I’m inclined to think Bill Clinton is generally a positive force in a Democratic primary, except perhaps with the sort of Democrat who thinks the Reagan years were better than the Clinton years.