(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) At their 2020 virtual convention, Democrats were close to permanently casting off former President Bill Clinton, finally relieved to be rid of the disgraced ex-leader whose presidential legacy was marred by his long-simmering reputation for sexual predation.
“Even abbreviated, Clinton’s appearance was tricky for his party,” the Associated Press noted in its writeup of his speech for the COVID-era convention, where Clinton pre-recorded a five-minute presentation that ran after one from former President Jimmy Carter.
The early-evening Tuesday slot “was all the former president was allotted by a party eager to show it is moving out of the politics of the past,” the AP declared.
“… Many Democrats are searching for new leaders, even as they nominate former Vice President Joe Biden, and pushing for a liberal agenda that leaves behind the centrist politics of the Clinton era,” it continued. “Further complicating the moment for Clinton is the #MeToo movement, which has forced some women to reevaluate Clinton’s history of sexual misconduct allegations.”
Just four years later, however, Democrats and their media allies are ready to rethink their priorities—and to reinvent themselves by once again embracing the man whom then-candidate Barack Obama dubbed the “secretary of explaining stuff” in 2012, while memory-holing the inconvenient truths that accompany him.
As for the 78-year-old Boomer ex-president, nicknamed the “Comeback Kid” during his own 1992 campaign, such rebranding has been central to his political career and marks yet another shift of the political tradewinds, propelled largely by the mainstream media’s hot air.
“Clinton’s stature as ex-president has evolved over the years, buffeted both by politics and the evolution of his legacy,” explained the AP in its most recent retrospective ahead of his convention speech.
With President Joe Biden becoming this year’s persona non grata at an opening-night spot that found him taking the stage well past 11 p.m. on Monday, Clinton is enjoying pride of place as a party patriarch.
“I think he’s very much an elder statesman and he’s a beloved figure, with a particular credibility on the economy,” Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and former Clinton adviser, told the AP. “If I were a campaign manager, I’d send him anywhere.”
As one of Wednesday’s top-billed speakers, he will use his gifted oratory skills and record of governing as a center-stradling Southern populist who presided over a robust economy to vouch for the extreme-socialist ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
Clinton’s forked, yet gilded tongue makes him an indispensable salesman for the Harris–Walz ticket, in which the current vice president—a last-minute substitution as the nominee—has already benefited from a whiplash-inducing media makeover of her own but remains untested by actual voters.
“If you give him some time, he can explain damn near anything and can make sometimes unappealing choices seem to be not just logical but inescapable,” said Russell Riley, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
Already, pollsters have used weighting and oversampling to give Harris an air of momentum, not unlike what former first lady Hillary Clinton enjoyed in the leadup to her 2016 race against Donald Trump—who is now the GOP nominee for the third consecutive presidential election cycle.
Meanwhile, dark-money billionaires have employed “smurfing” tactics by allegedly using ActBlue to conceal their contributions, and the leftist press has fallen in line once again, bestowing unprecedented levels of positive coverage for Harris, who was the least-popular presidential candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary and among the least popular vice presidents in modern history.
Undoubtedly, many in the media will attempt to draw parallels between Clinton and Walz—also scheduled to speak Wednesday—who has similarly adopted a folksy persona, although the Minnesota governor’s affectations come off far clumsier—more idiosyncratic and contrived—than those of “Slick Willy.”
Fittingly, both Walz and Clinton have maintained close ties with the Chinese communist government, which is likely to be a major factor in funding the Harris–Walz campaign and, should Democrats be re-elected to the White House, in a future administration, as China grows increasingly aggressive about its imperialist ambitions, both within its own sphere of influence and throughout the globe.
While the China issue—and overall economic policies—thus far have been among the rare liabilities for Walz and Harris, few—if any—have the same level of talent that Clinton does for spinning manure into gold, as Terry McAuliffe—a former Clinton bundler and close confidante who went on to chair the Democratic National Committee and become governor of Virginia—can attest.
“Nobody has the ability to encapsulate very complex issues … and explain it in ordinary terms,” McAuliffe told the AP. “He’s the best at that—on why it matters to you and everybody.”
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
