He's supporting Hillary Clinton. The Washington Post said the same thing weeks ago! Morons.

...he was hiding out in Brazil because he didn't want to deal with the Obama vs. Clinton choice.  Ha.  

after Obama jumped in the race, he essentially de-endorsed Clinton. Shows what I know. :)

But here's an excerpt from a recent Capitol Hill Blue article on Emanuel's choices:

With Hill, he'd be golden for life. With Barack, he'd be little more than one of 435. And for a supersized ego like Rahm's, that would be one bitter pill indeed.

As in both are competing in being the most Polarizing figures in the body politic. And between the two of them it's good cop / bad cop.

The fact that Senator Edward Kennedy has to chide former President Clinton over the crap he keeps slinging is incredible.

But make no mistake, the Clintons want the White House bad .... I just don't trust their motivations ... which apparently leads Bubba to "Say Anything"... Facts be Damned.

you're babbling so incoherently that Teddy the K. has to ask for your car keys.
you're getting more tv face time than Dennis Kucinich's wife.
you're hallucinating about "voter suppression" in a precinct you won.
you think Obama's opposition to the Iraq war is a fairy tale, but you can't determine what "is" is.
political allies are telling you to shut your mouth, even though they never told you to shut your zipper.

You should be writing for Letterman.

He hasn't shown much intelligence of late.  The guy wants back in the White House in the worst way--and will do anything to accomplish that goal.  However, if he continues on his current path of temper tantrums and general nastiness against Obama, he is going to kill any chance of Hillary getting the Democratic nomination.  With Bill in tow, I do not want Hillary in the White House unless she promises to keep Bill locked in the attic for the duration of her term.  This once-respected statesman has turned into a loose cannon.

I have been a Bill Clinton supporter for years and have had a lot of respect for him until now. However, I feel he has gone over the line this time. If he keeps this up, he is going to do the last thing that we need, he is going to energize the demoralized republican base.  

They are doing to Obama what Reagan did to Gerald Ford in 1976, savaging him so badly in the primaries that he was unelectable in November.  By the time Obama gets to the general election as the Democratic nominee, the swing voters will be convinced that the Republican candidate is the lesser of two evils.

Don't count on this changing anytime soon.  Do you really think that Billary will take advice from the likes of Kennedy and Emanuel, who (in their eyes) are not qualified to conduct a presidential campaign?

Some people say Bill should be let loose because other spouses are also campaigning for candidates. The problem is Bill is not just ANY spouse. It makes me feel like he will be running around making policy if he gets back in the White House. I just don't feel like he can play a supporting role.  

I think that you have nailed the reason so many people are uncomfortable with HRC.  There is no reasonable expectation that Bill will graciously accept the role of First Gentleman.  He will be a free-lancer at best and a loose cannon at worst.

There were some good reasons for Al Gore to not to allow Bill Clinton to campaign for him.  Some say that was a mistake.  Personally, I think that Gore understood both the benefits and the risks and made the right decision.

And you can see that by the fact that Gore won so handily. Oh, he didn't.  

Clinton, for good or ill, probably would have won a third term.  As others have pointed out, he left office with a 66% approval rating.  Back in 2000, on his best day, Gore didn't get those kinds of numbers.  And that was largely because of infighting in the Democratic Party too.

By the way, when Obama supporters - not Obama himself - dredge up scandals from 1993 and 1994, and adultery scandals where Hillary was actually the victim, and when those same supporters say that they would not support Hillary if she won the primary, they too are blowing up bridges and inflicting damages that can cost us the election.

When Obama supporters on the blogosphere say, after only three primaries, that they will never support Hillary in the general election, they are setting the stage for HRC supporters to turn their backs on Obama too.

Why pick that fight?  Are Obama's own supporters so secure that they don't need a unified Democratic Party?  Or do they think he's not going to win anyway, so what the hell, let's blow the whole thing sky high and have a temper tantrum.

The truth is, I suspect Obama will win it.  And I think there will be a Bradley effect of people lying to the pollsters and making Democrats over confident.  And the only way to combat that and win is to not take victory for granted.  And to stop ALL the nasty infighting, especially the premature threats to walk away from the general election if Obama doesn't win.

My only example of defeating the Bradley effect, and it's a good one, is that Doug Wilder did win in Virginia even if it was closer than we all thought it would be.

We could repeat that type of victory on a national scale.  But not by being stupidly divisive.

Each voter would be required to swear to vote for the Democratic nominee no matter who wins.

Oops!  The Republicans already thought of that.

Gore lost in 2000 for a myriad of reasons, most of them related to Donna Brazile, who has done for Democratic political strategy what Bonnie and Clyde did for banking.  I contend that Gore would have lost even worse if he had allowed Clinton to campaign for him.  "Clinton Fatigue" was the term that the pundits were using at the time and they were right.  HRC will not win the nomination or the election because of 1) her hugely negative numbers, and 2) swing voters are not interested in a Clinton Restoration.  

Gore lost partly because of a lousy campaign run by Tad Davine and Bob Shrum. Others have been taking the hits for them for too long.  They also blew it for John Kerry.

The press also pathologically hated Gore and that had nothing to do with Clinton.

But he took some mortal wounds from the Naderites.  Gore had to run as a moderate as any successful Democrat must.  But if you listened closely to his speeches, he was moving away from Clintonomics and showing more of a populist streak.  Despite that, Bill wanted to campaign for him and I think it would have helped Gore.  Never mind the press and their Clinton fatigue. They had Clinton fatigue not the general public.  And the mainstream media's role in portraying Gore unfairly was incalcuable.

The image of Gore as stiff and unlikable also hurt him with the general public, and it was promoted by the media.  In truth Gore had a very good sense of humor about the so-called stiffness.  But it got buried by the press.  Why do you think I'm so anti-mainstream meda, by the way?  I thought they were terribly unfair to Gore.

Finally, it came down to a lousy butterfly ballot in Palm Beach.  It was that not the hanging chads that hurt Gore. There were thousands of residents of condos in Boca and West Palm Beach who accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan.  

And before we get any snarky comments on the stupidity of senior citizen voters in South Florida, I saw one of those ballots because I was visting my parents in Florida right after the election and the ballot was reprinted in the newspapers. It was very confusing.

If all those Pat Buchanan votes in the condos (and Buchanan publicly said they were not his votes) could have been counted for Gore, it would not have been close even with the recount in favor of Bush elsewhere in the state.

Unfortunately, the ballots were not designed to deliberately deceive people and there was no legal way to throw them out or redo the vote.

So, I know all the complicating factors regarding Gore's defeat.

But the bitterest irony for me was that there was an intractable section of the hard left in the Democratic Party that refused to support him.  That cost him elsewhere so it had to come down to imperfect Florida.

And that's what I'd like to avoid happening in this election.

Otherwise, we get a divided government with Republicans committed to obstructing anything a Democratic Congress tried to do.  We get the public blaming that Democratic Congress and voting them out at the mid-terms. And we get full Republican control back again.

The best way to end Republican obstructionism in one single swoop is to elect a Democrat, who won't veto everything, as president.  Think what we could accomplish with a Democratic president and a Demcoratic Congress?  Yes, even if it were Hillary, it would be better than the alternative.

But more importantly, if it's not Hillary, we could do so much.  But not if some rash Obama supporters keep irritating Hillary's supporters by refusing to support her should she win.  Her supporters could return the favor in the event Obama wins.

And, loyalty oaths don't work.  They're not binding.  We need a little common sense though.

"The press also pathologically hated Gore and that had nothing to do with Clinton."

"The image of Gore as stiff and unlikable also hurt him with the general public, and it was promoted by the media."

Do you even hear yourself?  You make no more sense than Rush Limbaugh or Fox News when you claim "media bias."  Please don't take this the wrong way, but that's a load of crap.

BTW, just to get a perspective on the MSM, notice that the subject of this very diary was the lead story on NBC Nightly News this evening, right after the Alberta Clipper weather pattern.  Believe it or not, the MSM tends to coincide with the blogs more often than not.    

I think it would be worth while for Americans to think about having a law which would prevent members of the immediate family of a president from running for that office. Just think about it. This would have spared us Bush junior with his insufferable sense of entitlement.  

But I don't think it matters in Hillary Clinton's case, because it's unlikely she'd be elected.  And we are seeing just why this week.

However, that is probably not a good idea.  We have had some pretty good family sucessions in American history.  John Q. Adams, son of John Adams, was an effective president, unless you were a Jacksonian Democrat.  FDR was a distant cousin of Theodore and arguably the greatest president of the 20th Century.  Many people believe that Robert Kennedy would have been an even better president than his brother and, as a minimum, he would have saved us from "our long national nightmare" of Nixon and Watergate.  Bush 43 is actually an anomoly.  

Although I think you're probably right.

At the same time political families are part and parcel of the American political landscape.  John Adams, John Quincy Adams;  the Bushes; the Roosevelts (not immediate family but close); the Kennedy's; as well as other examples at the state level (the Chafee's in Rhode Island; or the Carnahans/Blounts in Missouri).

What's new here is a husband/party leader/spouse weighing in during a party primary the way that Bill has.  I think it would be one thing if he was working in the background raising money and saying things that we'd expect a spouse to say "my wife is the greatest, she'll make an incredible president"; it's entirely different when he enters into the fray in order to do dirty work for his wife in a party primary (I think it might even be inappropriate in the context of a general election).

I voted for Clinton twice, but I wouldn't vote for HRC (well, maybe  I would if Huckabee or Romney was the Republican nominee) for just the reasons you and other posters have stated.

Stop whining and crying every time you get criticized...

I cannot recall an instance where Obama actually took responsibility for one of his goofs. It's always his staffs fault, or Bill and Hillary are being mean to him, or the media is being unfair...

I mean if you think you are getting hit hard now, wait till you see what the Republicans have in store for you...

You just look immature and petulant with the constant whining...

You actually have a point.  For all the finger pointing at Hillary Clinton not being able to take the criticism, she has had far more dealt at her, including a dredging up of Bill Clinton's scandals, as if his adultery were her fault, and this by fellow Democrats who are Hillary haters.

She's taken hits for 15 years.  This is Obama's first really tough campaign and it's mild compared to what the Republicans are going to dish out.  And we can't plead for unity and civility with them.

His supporters, at least, are starting to have a disturbingly whiney tone.  Folks, it gets far nastier and dirtier once it leaves the Democratic Primaries and goes to the real show.

Where do we start?

1. Bill and Hillary whine about the press being "unfair" to them.

2. Bill gets caught lying about his stance on the Iraq war, and instead of owning up to the truth, he whines yet again about the press being mean to him.

3. Hillary says the "boys" are being mean to her after a debate. She played this line time and time again, and to a perverse effect.

4. Her surrogates spread disgusting attacks against Obama, get caught, and cough up their deceit to their 'innocence', "Oh, we didn't mean for it to come out that way". Yeah right. They are always "sorry" when they get caught.

5. The mother of all whining is when Hillary cries on TV about the fact that America doesn't realize how great she would be if she were president, how awesome her being in the Whitehouse would be. Mind you, her tears weren't for the nation, but the fact that the nation rejected her 'gloriousness' in Iowa.

It's a pity party for Hillary and Bill all the time.

And mind you, Barack has very little of the establishment support that the Clintons have. I am truly amazed how far Mr. Obama has come. Kudos to him and his campaign.

 

To pick up on SaveElmer's note, yes I think Obama should define this contest for Democratic voters. He's not running against Hillary Clinton, he's running against coat tail Hillary .... or as one news analyst put it .... Pillow talk Hillary.

And let's face it ... Hillary needs a coach. So why not the former President. The only problem is .... can you always believe what Bill Clinton tells you is the truth? Swear to God?? My hand on the Bible ... swear to God??  How about the next best thing .... how about telling the truth to Jim Lehrer??

If Obama is running against Billary and not Hillary ... then define the debate and run against Bill Clinton... HARD.

It's OK for other candidate's spouses to campaign for them, but you are not merely a spouse.  You are an ex President who left office with a 66% approval rating of the way you were doing your job.  Therefore, it is only right that your right to sing the praises of your wife and tell the truth about her opponent, Obama, should be circumvented and that you should be attacked for calling his lies "fairy tales."

I agree.  It's not like you gave the country unequalled prosperity and growth WITHOUT adding to our debt; it's not like yoy gave the caretakers of the sick and needy a family leave act.  It's not like you, against a totally hostile Congress for 6 of your 8 years in office, managed to instill hope to a public enjoying prosperity and a 4.1 unemployment rate, with kids in the ghettos finding jobs and staying out of trouble through the Midnight Basketball program.  No, Mr. Ex-President, it's not like you left office with the majority of the country wishing you'd reign further (after seeing the Chimp that replaced you when Gore refused to cash in on your popularity); the point here is that you, as the 1st black president, didn't
tell Hillary not to run.  You shouldn't have let that shrill woman with the cackles run solely on the credential that she was a wronged woman.

It doesn't matter that she's fantastically bright, was your helpmeet in your rising career, stuck with you through all, became a U.S. Senator because people felt sorry for--everyone knows that New Yorkers are naive and are totally free of cynicism and will fall for any sob story, and that's why she got elected, not because she's a good campaigner, knows the ins and outs of politics (from hanging around you when Monica wasn't around), and was persuasive because she was one of America's most highly regarded lawyers.

No, you, as unpopular as you are despite the pundits agreeing that you are, on balance, more than helping her run, you should stay out of the race because you are an ex-President and know the most about what Hillary is or isn't and you might influence voters.

Heed me, I know of what I say.  I picked Dewey over Truman and I KNOW, to this day that the Chicago Tribune was right!

Take a page from one of our new Democrats .... pay attention to Claire McCaskill. Her instincts led her to endorse Barrack Obama for President. I personally would like to see whom each Senator stands with .... I know where my Govenor stands. I think I know where Mark Warner stands. Please tell me Senator Webb with whom you stand.

All three candidates supported my favorite Senator when it was sorely needed. I can understand laying back....

But I'm from the Grassroots ... I'm for Jim Webb ... I'm for Tim Kaine.

Resolutely I'm for a new Democratic Party and I am for BARACK OBAMA.