Republican propaganda will portray this as an attempt to smear John McCain as unstable and therefore unfit for the Presidency.

Doncha just luv general election campaign season??

No explaining Wild Bill, but it's provocative. Who knows how that will shake up. If anyone is listening, he just put the idea out there in that not-so artful fashion that seems to reach the less contemplative minds, that McCain is a time bomb. Maybe he knows what he's doing. ???

My explanation:

He was up way too late the night before watching Manchurian Candidate and eating Cheetos.

It's weird that it should be the case, but Bill C. is probably one of the few Democrats who can say offensive things without Obama taking the blame for them. At this point, everyone knows he's a loose cannon.

Weird role for an ex-prez.

Well, if he's all the things you say (which we can leave to history to decide) and he has recently said how very IMPORTANT it is to elect Barack Obama and if his wife has said how very important it is, then I would expect someone as smart as you say he is to know the limits of what is going to help and what is going to look like help but actually hurt.

I believe this is an ultimately destructive statement. Look what happened with Clark regarding a non-controversial if awkward statement. This is taking a swipe at McCain's war record AND his sanity and war record at the same time. -- If Obama takes him to task he ticks off Hillary's still adamant supporters; if the doesn't take him to task, he ticks off the independents and progressive Republicans.

So I find it very hard to believe that such a smart man was truly intendeing to help Obama - at all. "Hey, man, I was only trying to help. How was I to know that little comment of mine was going to upset McCain supporters and energize all those veterans and people who, up until then, weren't real enthusiastic about supporting him." --

Sounds to me like another version of the South Carolina response-that-had-nothing-to-do-with-the-question about Jesse Jackson. Neither of these are things he was backed into saying by some insistent reporter, so it's very likely something he came up with earlier and stored away for use when he could find a place to sneak it in.

I've never figured out which way he was going with the Jackson remarks:

"Hey, I know it will upset the blacks, but see I don't really want Hillary to win - I'm the president in this family."
- or -
"Hey, I know it will upset the blacks, but who else are they going to vote for in Nov. and right now they're votin' for Obama, so I've got to give a good loud dog-whistle to all those racists in those swing states coming up."

Probably the latter because I do think he wanted Hillary to win .... (and it almost worked) .. but I am not so sanguine about his desire to see Obama elected.

Whether it's to have her run again in 2012 or simply for "I told you so" rights or just because he's PO'd. (Hmmm.... maybe Hillary prefers the respect she gets from Obama to the patronizing she gets from her husband. I sure would.) Whatever the reason, I really have to question his ultimate motive. One thing we do know about Bill Clinton's time in the White House: ethical standards are not a great impediment on his behavior.

What msa3 said...

In addition, with regard to what Clinton said, he made the statement at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The Aspen Ideas Festival for chrissakes! He was speaking for himself. Bill Clinton isn't a fully owned subsidiary of Barry Obama Enterprises and isn't required to get clearance from the BOE campaign before he speaks. I'm not sure what your outrage regarding the statement entails unless it's...

...and in his entire talk he never mentioned the name of Obama.

Is that the problem you see? Clinton has pledged to support the campaign to elect Obama and he will be a great asset to the campaign. But it's foolish to expect his every breath will be devoted to Obama between now and the election. That kind of devotion is left to the Obama fanboys and groupies.

Hey, we all know McCain has a temper.

I, too, have come to the conclusion that Hillary's downfall in the primary, which she otherwise might have won, was her implicit trust in the flawed opinions (even when they contradicted one another) of her male advisors: Bill first among them, and then Penn, Ickes, Wolfson, McAuliffe, etc.. This opinion seems to be supported by Gail Sheehy's piece in the August Vanity Fair, in which she describes watching Hillary changed her pitch on the campaign trail depending upon which strong man in her organization was recommending which approach most emphatically -- Bill, of course, foremost among them. (And it was Bill, by the way, according to Sheehey, who pushed the VP by acclamation idea)

I also think that, even after losing the nomination, the odds that Hillary might break out of this entrenched habit are slim, although it might make all the difference in her future endeavors. Because, if Sheehy is correct, the flip side of her observations is that Hillary never -- not once -- decided in favor of a woman's recommendation; furthermore, when a head had to roll, it was a woman's she put on the block.

If so, she came by this perspective naturally. I've read that Hillary's father was mecurial and, domestically, a control freak. And that her mother acquiesced in letting her father rule the roost, often tyrannically, an acquiescence she encouraged Hillary to follow, "for her own good."
So how could Hillary, even as an adult, ever say "no" to an alpha male in her life, much less a group of them, without fear? And why would Hillary, even as an adult, trust women as decisionmakers?
Even among women of Hillary's caliber, the world of still seems to divide between: a) those who had relationships with their fathers that included the right to say "no" without repercussions; and b) those who had relationships with their fathers in which any sign of rebellion or disagreement was treated either with harsh rebuke or, worse, by distance or shunning.
And Bill surely picked up where Hillary's dad left off in that regard.

dijamo:

As much as you love all things Clinton, you are off base here. In fact, I suggest you read this review of a book that argues that Clinton completed the Reagan Revolution:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_11_52/ai_74410357/print

The author of this book is none other than the child of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg -- so he has the progressive credentials to be critical.

This is consistent to one of the hidden facts of the Clinton years: that finance became the most important sector in the economy. Which explains why the Clintons are tied to Wall Street in much the same way that the Bushes are tied to oil.

Unless you earn deep 6 figures, the Clintons haven't represented your interests economically speaking particularly that well.

I also direct you to:

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/Issuebriefs_Ib127

The title is nice

FINALLY, REAL WAGE GAINS Lower unemployment, higher minimum wage spur recent wage growth

(the article is from 1998), but note the paragraphs that read:

The bigger picture of the 1989-98 business cycle Our examination of the past few years provides important insights into the short-term condition of the economy and underscores the importance of low unemployment. But to accurately assess the economy, it is best to examine an entire business cycle (in this case 1989-98) and compare it to trends in other cycles.

From this perspective, the typical worker has lost ground since 1989, the last business cycle peak, and the typical male worker is still well behind his pre-recession wage level. The final column in the table shows the annualized percent change in wages over the 1989-98 period. Despite the growth since 1996, the wage of the median male has fallen 0.5% per year since 1989, representing a decline of $0.59 per hour. Clearly, most of the damage was done in the 1989-96 period, when the median male wage fell 1.1% annually. Strong growth in the recent period has helped low-wage male workers regain much of the ground lost over the 1989-96 period; their wage in the first half of 1998 was only slightly below that of 1989.

The wage of the median female worker, which rose consistently over the 1980s, fell 0.2% per year from 1989 to 1996. The increase over the last 18 months, however, led to a 0.3% annual growth rate over the full period. A similar pattern prevailed for low-wage female workers.

At the top of the wage scale, the wage of the 90th percentile worker grew more quickly for both men and women over the full 1989-98 period than it did for other groups. Thus, despite the equalizing pattern of wage growth in the very recent past, wage inequality has continued to grow for both men and women, as workers at the top of the wage scale have pulled away from both those in the middle and at the bottom.

Adding fringe benefits to these wage data does not brighten the picture. Although the compensation (wages plus benefits) of the median worker is not directly available, assigning the average benefit package to the median worker in proportional terms (which certainly overstates the typical worker's benefits) reveals that the typical worker actually lost more in terms of compensation than in terms of wages. For example, the inflation-adjusted decline in the median wage for all workers was 3.2% from 1989 to 1997; the fall in median compensation was 4.2% (the most recent data of this type are for 1997).

So this should settle what the facts represent.

It also explains why people haven't done as well in general since 1973 -- which not-so-coincidentally is the year that the lower 48 states hit peak oil -- and the US lost dominant control of the world's energy economy.

dijamo:
"Please don't talk to me about objectivity about the Clintons Mr. Obama can do no wrong. I trust him implicitly with everything, how dare one question Obama on FISA, NAFTA, healthcare, Iran, Iraq. I am a progressive liberal, yet I support the most conservative democratic nominee in recent history."

I think you midread the attitude of at least a number of us. I do think very highly of Sen. Obama (primarily from reading his books and the way he has handled this campaign) but I certainly don't expect him to be perfect. Right now, however, the question is who is going to be elected president: Barack Obama or John McCain?

In all this kerfluffel about FISA, for example, I don't recall anyone talking about how John McCain is going to be voting on the bill (if he bothers to vote) or why they would prefer to have him as president. But that is, in fact, the logical outcome of the extremely high level of outrage, threats of denying support, etc. that's been going on.

If Hillary had won the nomination and her supposed supporters were ripping at her, giving MSM and McCain ammunition, instead of figuring out how they could actually support, how would you be feeling?

As I'm concerned, folks can criticize and critique and bemoan all they want - and I fully expect that they will once he's in office. But right now there is a two-choice option in front of every American citizen: which do you want? It really is that simple.

For those of us who CARE about the outcome of the election - then, yes, there is a good deal of anger and intolerance, not toward any criticism of Obama but toward those who want to act like the election has already been held and they have 4 years to vent their strong displeasure about various positions he takes. That is simply not the case. And if McCain really does bring on Mike Murphy in a major role (someone who is smart and NON-Rovian, and who understands how the 'maverick' McCain ticks), then this is going to be a LOT closer and harder-fought election than people seem to be expecting.

Some gardeners water their weeds. Some pluck them out.

I believe Bill Clinton is a bitter, sick old man who needs to be taken out to pasture and left there. I think he (probably unconsciously) sabotaged his own wife's campaign, and now he's doing the same to Obama. For Bill, it's all about defending himself and his perceived place in history. He can't let it go, and he won't let it go. He really is a gigantic pain in the ass.

You know, Elizabeth, you really should be a reporter. You have a gift of taking for taking a comment out of context by someone who didn't give the context in the first place and then pretending a disengenuous "inquiry" as to what the meaning could be while insinuating the worst.

So let's see...Clinton mentions "apropos of nothing" that POWs become justifiably angry - he couldn't have been referring to Mandela's imprisonment as a political prisoner for 22 years, could he? He couldn't have been referring to Mandela's, whom Clinton knows personally, having flashbacks of prison, could he? Let's see...a man is imprisoned as a political prisoner for 20 years, sentenced to hard labour, he walks out of prison and then completely forgets everything that happened to him the last 22 years of his life in prison - no flashbacks, no memory triggers, no phrases uttered by others, no one who looks similar to a guard or an authority figure triggering bad memories and none of this occurs to you as something Clinton might have been referring to - something that Mandela not only talked about, but wrote and testified about for Amnesty International and the U.N. among organizations that monitor pows and political prisoners, a syndrome well documented by the medical community called PTSD.

Then we come to your other complaint - Clinton did not mention Obama while participating in a panel discussion of Mandela. This complaint is so obviously, stupidly trite that to even mention it makes me question your intelligence and ability to discern appropriate behavior and speech at dedicated seminars and events. To bring up Obama during a panel discussion of Mandela would have been inappropriate, it would have been gratuitious, it would have been bad form to politicize at a panel discussion which following the rules and custom is always limited to the discussion announced, which in this case was Mandela.

So what do we have here? We have a poster who in her blissful ignorance of appropriate behavior at panel discussions during an "ideas" seminar, of which Clinton was a founding member and has been in attendance for years and a poster who has never attended the weekend, knows nothing about it, doesn't know the rules or the procedures, the customs or the traditions, who wasn't present for the panel discussion and knows virtually nothing about it, criticizing, intuiting motive and pretending to a level of understanding that is beyond that poster's knowledge.

RALPH NADER???? You HAVE to be kidding! You are a self-proclaimed "progressive", you are not a democrat. And progressives are to the democratic party as the libertarians are to the republican party--and as such, they are irrelevant.

Give it up Jason, Bill Clinton is not running for anything, so your opinion of him matters little if at all. As for Monica--she was a groupie and she got exactly what she wanted.