Will Bill Clinton Please Shut Up?

Let me say, I like Bill Clinton. Let me also say he also a good president, a greater politician. He never stretched far as he seemed capable of doing. I truly hated his little smirk that he could get - what I call his Baptist preacher smirk. But he was doing such a good job as a former president, particularly as George W. Bush increasingly proved himself not so much Commander in Chief as Bumbler in Chief. Still, I want Bill Clinton to shut up about Obama.

Maureen Dowd agrees with me and does so in much better prose in Two Against One. I say bluntly that Bill Clinton's attacks on Obama are not going to help Hilary if she makes it to the general election and they are not helping party unity. Dowd writes:

Bad Bill had been roughing up Obama so much that Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina suggested that he might want to “chill.” On a conference call with reporters yesterday, the former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a national co-chairman of the Obama campaign, tut-tutted that the “incredible distortions” of the political beast were “not keeping with the image of a former president.”

Jonathan Alter reported in Newsweek that Senator Edward Kennedy and Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman and former Clinton aide, have heatedly told Bill “that he needs to change his tone and stop attacking Senator Barack Obama.”

I never thought that Bill Clinton did as much possible for Democratic Party unity as President. Unity came with the repeated Republican attacks on Clinton with their increasing hysteria. I suspect more than a few Republicans expected to find the number 666 somewhere on Clinton's skin. I strongly suspect that if the Republicans had managed to retain some semblance of rationality, there would have been some Senate Democrats willing to convict William Jefferson Clinton at the impeachment trial.

I am still convinced that Hilary Clinton is not the better choice for president. I also expect not to have any say in whether she is the Democratic nominee or not. Nicholas Kristof crystallized my worries about Hilary Clinton in his column, Hillary, Barack, Experience:

Mrs. Clinton’s strength is her mastery of the details of domestic and foreign policy, unrivaled among the candidates; she speaks fluently about what to do in Pakistan, Iraq, Darfur....

A President has to be more interested in the details than George W. Bush and less obessed with those details than Jimmy Carter. Hilary Clinton has not shown me that she can synthesize details and vision. The better and the greater Presidents have done jsut that. Until she does that, I still think she would be better in the cabinet than as President.

I have said this before and I will say it again: teh Democratic Party and the country would be better off if we could harness Obama and Clinton. As Clinton acts to make this harnessing well-nigh impossible, I opt for Obama.