Bill Clinton: 5 reasons he is helping Obama

Four years ago, former President Clinton got his knuckles rapped for calling Sen. Barack Obama's presidential aspirations a "fairy tale." Now the 42nd president is appearing on the stump with No. 44. Here are five reasons for Mr. Clinton to go all out for the newest member of the Presidents Club.

2. Clinton loves politics – and he’s good at it

J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File
President Obama listens to former President Bill Clinton speak in the White House briefing room in Washington in this file photo.

Watching Clinton in action, one almost feels he can’t help but get involved in Obama’s reelection effort. Clinton has been in politics almost his entire adult life, and he’s learned a few things along the way. Politico calls him “Obama’s campaign whisperer,” imparting advice on how best to go after Romney.

That advice, the news site reports, was to stop arguing that Romney has no “core” beliefs, and instead say that he has found his core – and it’s “severely conservative,” to quote Romney’s own self-definition at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. Clinton argued that Romney should be portrayed as having embraced tea-party conservatism, which could alienate Hispanics, women, and moderate independents.

By April, Team Obama was employing that line of attack. At the April 29 fundraiser, Clinton himself talked about how Romney is embracing “the policies that got us into trouble in the first place.”

“I mean, this is crazy,” Clinton said. “He’s got an opponent who basically wants to do what they did before, on steroids, which will get you the same consequences you got before, on steroids.”

The only danger for Obama, in joint appearances, is that Clinton takes over and leaves Obama standing in his shadow as a kind of junior partner. Still, if you’re Obama, you want that Clinton candlepower working on your behalf.

2 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.