Josh Marshall has a typically insightful blog post on what's become of Bill Clinton. My favorite part is the following:
The level of his investment in Hillary's campaign (on any number of novel-bearing levels) is palpable and not fully explained by anything as mundane as the hunger for power or as simple as guilt.
It's an interesting issue there - why was Bill Clinton so passionate about this campaign? After all, all the candidates have spouses, but Bill seems to have felt the battle more personally than any of the others. He even showed more of a willingness to practice scorched earth politics this time around than he did in the 1992 primaries when his own name was on the ballot.
Marshall's a Clinton admirer and I'm not, so naturally we interpret his every action a touch differently. I start with the reasonable assumption that it wasn't Clinton's uxorious nature that made him care so much about his beloved little woman's political career. That's never been how Clinton rolled.
It's equally unlikely that Clinton cared so much about the campaign because of a lust for power. I never believed the two-for-the-price-of-one power sharing model the Clintons peddled in 1992, and such an arrangement is even less likely now. After all the Clinton marriage has been through since then, it's virtually unimaginable that President Hillary would have given First Laddie Bill anything like the healthcare reform responsibilities she enjoyed until the whole thing turned into a fiasco in 1993.
The most Bill could reasonably have hoped for in a Hillary White House was the role of trusted advisor who would have always (perhaps) had the ear of the president. But you know what? There's a rich irony there: Bill Clinton could have had the role of trusted advisor with any Democratic president unless he had gone to extraordinary lengths to offend him. Which is precisley what he's done with Barack Obama.
So what drove Bill Clinton this cycle? As always, if you want the answer, you have to look to his monstrous and unquenchable appetite for self-aggrandizement. Bill Clinton knew to be true what I've often written here: If Hillary Clinton weren't his wife, the one-term female senator from New York wouldn't have had a shot at the nomination let alone front runner status. Add into the mix that on the stump and as a politician, Hillary Clinton is no Bill Clinton. If Bill Clinton's legacy and popularity could get his wife into the Oval Office, it would have provided a powerful testimony to how his countrymen viewed him.
At least that's probably how he saw it. And remember, this is a guy who has always thought of himself as the center of all events. This habit led him to reckless extremes; his hunt for a legacy in the final months of his administration left him eager to appease Yasser Arafat on every imaginable issue so that he could be the president who achieved "peace" in the Middle East, regardless of how ephemeral the peace turned out to be.
In Bill's eyes, Hillary's campaign was likely little more than a reflection of him and his presidency. And there's never been anything that he's cared about more.
