I don’t really know what to say about Alex MacGillis’s long piece on long-time Clinton right-hand man Doug Band. It’s a great work of journalism. It’s quite interesting. I’m just not sure what it means or quite why it matters.
I didn’t really get much of a feel for who Mr. Band is as a person. He doesn’t appear to be a liar or a scoundrel. He’s made some enemies, but not particularly dedicated ones, and not for anything particularly deplorable. He’s ambitious, possible more ambitious than is healthy. Maybe he’s walked along some precipitous ethical lines, but he hasn’t wandered right off the cliff. It’s possible that he abused President Clinton’s trust, but that’s between the two of them.
I’m not sure why so much attention is suddenly being paid to Mr. Band. He also comes up in Joe Hagan’s big Hillary profile in New York magazine. It seems like he’s being set up as the Fall Guy in case anything unseemly comes out of his time running the Clinton Global Initiative. We are to understand that Chelsea is in charge now, and she is none too happy with the mess she’s inherited from Mr. Band.
Whatever the case, he doesn’t seem like a guy who we should be worried about. I have always been concerned about some of the characters in the Clinton entourage. People like Dick Morris and Lanny Davis don’t inspire confidence. I never liked the Carville/Matalin schtick, and Terry McAuliffe makes my skin crawl. What can we say about characters like Doug Schoen and Mark Penn?
In comparison, Mr. Band seems somewhat better than average. He can probably take credit for getting Bill Clinton to function at a passable level. The one thing that actually concerns me is that this is just one more example of how much drama comes with the Clinton package. People occasionally try to make the Obama operation dramatic by saying that people were unhappy with Stephanie Cutter or that David Axelrod lacked confidence in Jim Messina, or whatever. But that kind of stuff seems like manufactured drama. It’s like people have to seek it out and amplify it to make it into anything at all. In Clintonworld, the drama is real, and it is everywhere.
And I am not looking forward to version 4.0, or whatever it is up to by now.
