Back when Teddy Kennedy decided to endorse Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in January 2008, the New York Times reported that part of his decision had to do with an argument Kennedy had on the telephone with former President Bill Clinton:
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, rejecting entreaties from the Clintons and their supporters, is set to endorse Senator Barack Obama’s presidential bid on Monday as part of an effort to lend Kennedy charisma and connections before the 22-state Feb. 5 showdown for the Democratic nomination.
Both the Clintons and their allies had pressed Mr. Kennedy for weeks to remain neutral in the Democratic race, but Mr. Kennedy had become increasingly disenchanted with the tone of the Clinton campaign, aides said. He and former President Bill Clinton had a heated telephone exchange earlier this month over what Mr. Kennedy considered misleading statements by Mr. Clinton about Mr. Obama, as well as his injection of race into the campaign.
Mr. Kennedy called Mr. Clinton Sunday to tell him of his decision.
Ryan Lizza. reporting in The New Yorker, may have more details about what caused the problem between Clinton and Kennedy.
At a press conference in South Carolina the morning after Obama won the state, Bill Clinton seemed to dismiss the victory as a fluke of local demography. “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88,” he said. “Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.” Tim Russert told me that, according to his sources, Bill Clinton, in an effort to secure an endorsement for Hillary from Ted Kennedy, said to Kennedy, “A few years ago, this guy would have been carrying our bags.” Clinton’s role in the campaign rattled Obama. He told ABC News in an interview that Clinton “has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling.”
We don’t need to reopen old wounds on the eve of our convention. I’m just saying, I told you so.
Then why promote or spread this particular story on the eve of our convention.
The fact that WJC has keynote at the convention and has done ads supporting the president suggests that those two Alphas have reached a comfortable detente with each other.
Who cares what motivated Ted Kennedy (or WJC or BHO) in 2008?
Rmoney just bombed in Tampa and somebody’s trying to create, if not from whole cloth then certainly from long discarded cloth, an air of negativity around what is likely to be a real bounce producing DNC. We shouldn’t aid and abet their doomed-to fail effort.
What’s stunning to me is the degree to which Mitt Romney in particular—and the Republican Party in general—has repeatedly conceded to having this campaign run on the terrain that the Obama campaign prefers.
So we have a campaign in which the Republicans spend weeks holding Bill Clinton up as the exemplar of centrist, moderate, getting-things-done politics on welfare reform, balancing the budget and creating jobs, all the while knowing that Clinton is Obama’s #1 (non-spousal) surrogate speaker.
Then there’s the six months Romney invested in framing this as a “referendum on the incumbent” election that’s all about the economy, before spinning 180 degrees and making it a “choice” election by 1) picking Paul Ryan as VP candidate, 2) talking about welfare reform, and 3) trying to make the election about Medicare.
So here’s Pres. Obama running for re-election with 1-2% economic growth and unemployment over 8%…and he gets to run a campaign about who will better carry forward the Clinton legacy?
The beauty of it is that now the Clintons are carrying Obama’s bags for him (SoS, nominating speech) so it’s come full circle.
Who’s the porter now?
Right?
I wasn’t here four and a half years ago.
What did you tell us, so?
The MSM is stirring the pot so they can talk about this 4-year old gossip instead of providing meaningful coverage. There’s no reason for us to help them.
Old news. Doesn’t matter. Let’s move on.
Bill is on board for Obama and Hillary’s supporters are on board too. They know what’s at stake. But I remember all that from before. I think we have moved on.
Close friends of mine who supported Hillary told me earnestly in 2008 that there was no way an African American could get elected, as if some trancendent being had decided that. I only responded “who gets to make that judgment if not the voters themselves”? My friends are now huge supporters of Obama and proud of Hillary’s work as SoS.
“Carry our bags” certainly could be a racial reference. It could also be a reference to Obama’s relative political inexperience. A few years before, Clinton and Kennedy were political giants and Obama was an obscure Illinois State Senator. There is a difference between “upstart” and “uppity”. Maybe I’m sticking my head in the sand, but I don’t see Clinton that way.
Odd how so many on the left missed Bill playing the race card for Hillary in NH and then SC. It was so obvious in NH that I wrote It Worked! But At What Price? after the NH primary. Ted Kennedy and later Jimmy Carter heard those ugly racist dog whistles from the Clinton camp and did what little they could do to respond without directly calling Clinton on it (as few on the left ever did when Bill played that card in the past).
Then again — why bother — since Democrats remain in love with the guy that advocated for and was happy to sign NAFTA, DADT, DOMA, telecom and energy deregulation, welfare “reform,” Gramm-Leach-Bliley, commodity futures “modernization,” etc. Clinton’s eight years made it so much easier for the Bush/Cheney reign of terror to follow.
I don’t get it: told us what?
I’m not much of a fan of Bill, but if all this is meant to suggest some kind of racism, it’s bullshit.
There is indeed bullshit afoot, but it is not those who note the nascent racism in the Clinton’s ’08 campaign…
No, you (Dems) most cetainly don’t.
But Booman…faithful Dem that he is…has just done so. He apparently has no choice in the matter. Not being able to stop performing actions that your so-called “conscious” brain knows to be deleterious to your desires and wishes? That is know as an obsession in some circles.
This is a kneejerk racist post, Booman.
I am not a particularly big supporter of either Clinton…less of Bill than Hillary, in fact. (I personally think that Bill would have degenerated into a fat, coke-snorting, sex-obsessed fool and died at an early age in Little Rock if he had not been married to Hillary Clinton.) She was always the brains of the outfit and he was the front-man.). However, I have no trouble whatsoever visualizing Bill Clinton saying that when in his Foghorn Leghorn populist southern pol persona about any member of any race , sex, age or religion. “Carrying our bags” means being a subordinate. Nothing more and nothing less.
Any “boy” or “girl.” Anyone without his and Hillary’s clout. Carrying their bags or playing with them.
Except to you and a bunch of other neo-racists.
That’s right, Booman.
Neo-racists.
And you don’t even know it.
Here’s the lowdown from another side of the three-dimensional fence. The side where “racism” is just another mistake.
Ron Paul on racism:
The “obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist.”
Think on this, man!!!
Bill Clinton made a statement that says everything about his sense of personal entitlement and nothing whatsoever about race. In fact, savvy pol that he is, I’ll bet he regretted saying it a split second later, once his brain caught up to his mouth and he realized that Obama was brownish rather than just another underling who was in the process of rising above him because Bill couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.
But you?
And the other retrograde inverse racists on the left? (Retrograde inverse. That’s backwards and upside down in plaintalk.)
Ask not for whom the knee jerks.
It jerks for thee.
Bet on it.
AG
So Teddy Kennedy was wrong about Clinton’s remarks and insinuations? James Clyburn too?
Both dedicated neo-racists, Oscar. Not “bad” men necessarily…although Ted Kennedy’s little Chappaquiddick incident and his subsequent undoubtedly heavy drinking did not speak well for his overall character, to say the least…not “bad,” just caught up in a racist time and falling too far on one side just as extremist so-called “normal” racists fell too far on the other side. There was not much choice in the Civil Rights era days, after all. America’s racist past came to a head and everything became two-dimensional. There remained no “normal”…you were either a racist or a neo-racist. This problem has persisted right into the present, with terrible results. There are a several generations of minority people, many of the members of which have grown up under a feeling of entitlement, of being owed something for the terrible crimes committed against their ancestors. They have been taught this by the whole system’s attempts to bend over backwards in order to make up for its own errors, but just because some sort of efforts have been made that doesn’t mean that they have necessarily been eiher the correct ones or in any way successful overall.
That’s what Ron Paul is saying in the excerpt above from his House speech in 2007. Boiled down to its essence, it says “We have to stop injecting ‘race’ into everything that happens in this country and start considering content instead.”
Did the Clintons try to play the so-called “race card” in their campaign for Hillary’s presidency?
More than likely. They’re pols first and foremost, and if they don’t win they lose. Simple as that. I missed it, mostly. I don’t live in a place where that card can be very well played, so it didn’t appear in these NYC parts.
Did Obama play the “neo-race” card?
Bet on it.
Subtly…but very, very well…he ran on a “FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT!!!” platform. Not on his record of achievement, which was nowhere near Hillary Clinton’s, but rather on his youth and his race. His “difference.” And he beat ’em, helped in no small part by the media. Why did the media side with him? Maybe it’s because their corporate owners got backroom promises that he would not go after the Wall St. gang of thieves or the RatPublican war criminals with any more fervor than was necessary to get over, and maybe it was also because of their own neo-racist tendencies. Gotta sell to everybody, now, y’know. May as well make a profit on the situation.
And here we jolly well are, aren’t we.
So it goes.
May you be born(e) into interesting times.
Later…
AG
This anecdote comes from the book Game Change, with one important difference in the alleged quote:
“Recounting the conversation later to a friend, Teddy fumed that Clinton had said, ‘A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.'”
The quote was never confirmed by either Kennedy or Clinton, but came from a Kennedy “friend” who claimed to have heard Kennedy tell the story.
I think there’s an important difference. Junior people at meetings get the coffee. Servants carry bags.
Why did the Times writer feel the need to disort a third hand story to the detriment of Bill Clinton?
Yup.
AG
Nice catch. I remember the “coffee” remark. It doesn’t necessarily mean that Lizza deliberately distorted it, though.
Lizza says Tim Russert told him the “bags” version. Halperin and Heilemann claimed multiple sources for their version but afaik never named them, and in fact said they all recalled the actual remark differently:
Notwithstanding a great deal of difference in “gist” between “getting us coffee” and “carrying our bags,” I’d say chances are Russert was one of those Game Change sources, and either he told Lizza something different than he told Heilemann and Halperin, or the language used in his account differed enough from other sources that they decided against using it in the book–although it’s hard to imagine H & H wanting to do Clinton any favors.
But ultimately, H & H said they didn’t know what actual words were used anyway.