Bill: In From The Cold?

30 June 2008 |permalink | email article

Is an angry Bill Clinton about to stop sulking and join new political allies Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in a Democratic unity campaign for president?

Terry McAuliffe, W42’s courtier and fundraiser, told CNN he thinks so. “We talk every day,” he said, adding that he expects a Clinton-Obama rapprochement to happen soon – perhaps in a “day or two.”

By some accounts the former president wants Obama not only to reach out to him, help reduce his wife’s debt but, more importantly, promise to lift the cloud of alleged racism and exonerate him of the charge that he played the race card in the primaries.

Many analysts believe that Clinton, determined to defend his own two-term legacy while engineering a Clinton Restoration, seriously hurt her opportunity to become the Democratic nominee.

The columnist Maureen Dowd, no fan of Bill Clinton, wrote that “the former president can’t stand being a loser, so he’s taking it out on the winner. When it comes to Bill, there’s a lot of vanity but very little humility in Unity.”

While the waiting game may be ending, blogger Marc Ambinder has been conducting an online poll asking whether 1) Obama should do everything to ensure that Clinton campaigns for him this fall; 2) ignore Clinton entirely or 3) ask Clinton politely, but if Clinton says no, Obama should ignore him. The landslide response was 3) – with 77% of the votes.

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