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.
We don’t need to reopen old wounds on the eve of our convention. 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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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.
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).… Read more »
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…
We don’t need to reopen old wounds on the eve of our convention. 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,… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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: “Well, we’re just — again, because we knew that that was an important quote, would get a lot of attention, as our sources tried to remember what was said, they didn’t agree on the exact language. They agreed on the gist precisely. But we didn’t want to be… Read more »