Bill Clinton was supposed to be Hillary’s secret weapon on the campaign trail, but he’s shaping up to be more of a liability.
The former president looks tired and frail, when Hillary was counting on his energetic charm. Young voters aren’t giving him a pass for his sexual offenses, as elderly feminists demand. He keeps dropping deadly sound bites, such as “Sometimes when I am on a stage like this, I wish that we were not married, then I could say what I really think.”
And when he does say what he really thinks, it’s absolutely devastating for the Democrat Party.
Such was the case during a conversation with NBC’s Kate Show on the morning of the New Hampshire primary, when Bill Clinton groused about how Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) 16% is appealing to young people by tapping into the sense of gloom and despair they’ve developed after seven years of the Obama presidency.
When asked if it bothered him that his wife did not seem to be resonating with young people, Clinton said: “No, it’s all part of the strategy the Republicans have. Keep her tied up for a year.”
He said young voters were “mad because they think their lives aren’t gonna be better than their parent,” adding that “they feel trapped. And her opponent came up with a real catchy answer for that.”
He continued: “What bothers me is … until just the last few days … we haven’t been approaching a real conversation. And I feel good about it. We’re gonna debate the future of the Democratic Party and the future of the country for a couple of months now and I look forward to it.”
Family support on the night before NH votes @ChelseaClinton @billclinton pic.twitter.com/DsrL6PZYNG
— Kate Snow (@tvkatesnow) February 9, 2016
Even his perfunctory attempt to dismiss Hillary’s email scandal as a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy is listless and weak. The Bill Clinton of yore was so much better at distracting from his corruption by attacking the accusers.
Of course, Clinton probably expects his listeners to hold Obama blameless for that sense of despair. Bernie Sanders himself is hesitant to pin too much of the blame on the current Democrat president, although he does have a penchant for claiming the Obama Administration has been hiding the depth of our economic malaise with cooked job reports and political spin. There is a ceiling on how hard Sanders can hit the soft-socialist Obama, when he’s angling to take over as his hard-socialist successor.