Evidently Bill Clinton is so desperate to prevent Barack Obama from going down in history as a more transformative and consequential president than he that he has decided to write a book, Back to Work, trumpeting all of the policies he’d be pursuing if he were president today.
Never mind that almost all of the policies he trumpets – to produce a “smart government for a strong economy” – are the very ones Obama has been trying to implement from day one of his presidency. Which of course is not surprising considering that Obama’s economic team is comprised of many of the same experts who advised Clinton during his presidency.
Meanwhile, Clinton blithely ignores the fact that he did not face a Republican Party being (mis)led by a bunch of jihadists on a political crusade to “make [him] a one term president”.
But nothing demonstrates how congenitally mischievous and self-absorbed this former president is quite like his declaration that the reason Wall Street bankers supported his reelection campaign in 1996 is that he did not demonize them.
For what this declaration conveniently overlooks is that Wall Street bankers did not become the money-grubbing, incompetent and unrepentant shysters they are in public consciousness now until 2008; i.e., 12 years after he went hat in hand to them for campaign donations.
More to the point, not even Clinton could deny that if he were facing the growing tide of (left-wing) Occupy Wall Street protesters that Obama is facing today, he too would be doing all he could to ride that tide – even if it meant demonizing bankers in public while soliciting their cash in private. Nor, by the way, could Clinton deny the inconvenient truth that, despite “demonizing” them, Obama remains on course to collect far more from Wall Street bankers for his reelection campaign than Clinton collected for his.
Frankly, all Clinton is doing in his new book is creating a demonstrably false parallel narrative to Obama’s presidency: one that features him as the nostalgic white knight the country is clamoring for to save it from the ruinous policies of an uppity black president – whose cardinal sin is his failure to accept Clinton as his … savior.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for his sycophantic enablers in the media to challenge him on these points during his celebrity book tour. For if they had any balls, instead of indulging Clinton’s self-serving advice for Obama, they would ask him what advice he has for Herman Cain. After all, no politician is more qualified to dispense advice on surviving a sex scandal than this grey-haired and silver-tongued pecker.
NOTE: I suspect this book is really Clinton’s way of coping with the recurring nightmare of watching Obama’s “fairytale campaign” outwit his and Hillary’s to win the presidency, which they both thought was rightfully “theirs” in 2008.
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