Former President Bill Clinton sat down with POLITICO Wednesday. | Photo by John Shinkle | John Shinkle/POLITICO Clinton offers Obama success tips

NEW YORK — Bill Clinton says Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats have not been “vigorous enough” in pushing back against Republican distortions, warning that to prevent a midterm debacle, his party must urgently rally around a national message designed to halt the flight of independent voters into the arms of the GOP.

In a POLITICO interview Wednesday, the former president said Democrats must find a better way to frame their case to fiscally conservative swing voters, who abandoned the GOP in 2006 and 2008 but this year have not heard a sustained rebuttal to the Republican argument that President Barack Obama stands for growing deficits and European-style Big Government.


Clinton said his enthusiasm for Obama’s policies and memories of his own failure to stop Republicans from winning Congress in 1994 leave him “extremely sympathetic” toward the president, and he professed that Democrats still have “plenty of time” to reverse their fortunes.

Even so, Clinton said it was good for Obama to encounter a woman telling him to his face at a CNBC televised town hall Monday that she is growing weary of defending the president and that he should acknowledge many voters’ “disappointment” at Obama’s progress so far.

“He’s being criticized for being too disengaged, for not caring,” the 42nd president said of Obama. “So he needs to turn into it. I may be one of the few people that think it’s not bad that that lady said she was getting tired of defending him. He needs to hear it. You need to hear.”

His advice for Obama, Clinton said, is to reclaim the spirit of hope that animated the 2008 Obama campaign but infused with realism about the challenges many voters are facing: “So I just tell him to sort of try to get the country up again without being — looking — naive or la-la, but be optimistic about our future. Embrace people’s anger, including their disappointment at you. And just ask ‘em to not let the anger cloud their judgment. Let it concentrate their judgment. And then make your case.”

That case, Clinton made plain, should be part of a coordinated national message designed to help Democrats across the country hold back what by most evidence so far is a powerful Republican tide. Clinton repeated an observation he has made many times over the years — that Newt Gingrich’s contribution to American political history was to show in 1994 that midterm elections are now national arguments, rather than the collection of local races that was typically the case in the past.

While some congressional Democrats may be tempted to save their own skins by adapting a localized message and distancing themselves from Obama, Clinton said this strategy “just won’t work.”

“Let’s give the Republicans a little bit of credit here,” Clinton said, arguing that they have pursued a more nuanced, double-barreled strategy than many Democrats have reckoned with.

The first barrel is widely noted: What Clinton called a “sort of crude” argument that resonates with base voters that Obama’s 20 months are a failure, pure and simple, and should be punished by electing a new Republican majority.

The second barrel is aimed at a different set of voters and involves promoting a false “narrative that under President Obama there is this sort of quasi-socialist, Big Government, regulatory, big spending overreach that is trying to crush the spirit of enterprise and individual initiative — and basically turn America into some European social democracy.”

This story line, Clinton said, has “immediate appeal to modern independents for two reasons. No. 1, a lot of the independents who voted for President Obama thought that the Republicans were too far to the right and were worried about the deficit under [the George W. Bush presidency], doubling the debt of the country when we didn’t have a recession. And they believe in less bureaucratic government. They believe in sort of a government that sets targets but doesn’t prescribe too much. And they’re worried about the deficit and spending because, unlike a lot of the Democratic base, they did not lose their jobs and they haven’t done too badly. They just didn’t like the direction of the country.”

The only way to counteract this argument, Clinton said, is by explaining why Obama’s ideas do not fit what he called the conservative caricature and by turning the argument back on Republican ideas — such as undoing the recent overhaul of Wall Street regulation and overturning even the most popular parts of health care reform.

Clinton’s comments came in a hotel suite in New York, where he is holding his annual Clinton Global Initiative to spur corporate and non-profit charitable efforts to combat poverty, disease and other social ills. They came at the end of an intrview for a forthcoming article about his post-presidency.

The comments on the pending midterms were the most immediately newsworthy because they are aimed at a question consuming Democrats nationally: What to do amid polling that shows the party at risk of massive losses?

All things being equal, Clinton said, he would prefer to stay out of the debate.

“I’m not in politics anymore, I really don’t want to do it,” said Clinton, though he does keep a robust schedule of fundraisers and appearances for Democrats, especially those who supported Hillary Clinton for president in 2008. “But because I had a good record on budgets, the size of government and the deficits — the things that the independents are concerned about, the things that the Republicans are attacking the president about — I seem to be in a relatively unique position that people at least listen to my arguments. I literally have no idea if I can turn any votes.”

Despite his claims to be a reluctant warrior, Clinton spoke with exuberance as he described what he would say if he were Obama. The case would start by emphasizing that the U.S. economy, while still troubled, is returning to health faster than the economies of many countries and much faster than if the stimulus hadn’t passed.

“I would say ‘I’m not bragging. I’m not asking for credit. I’m not asking you to feel better. What I’m trying to show you here is how deep this problem is, and all over the world people are having trouble doing it, and we’re doing better than others are,’” Clinton said.

From there he would turn to what in recent days he has made a regular riff, delivered as though he was Obama making the case for Democrats: “All I’m asking you for is two more years. You get a chance to fire us all in two more years, but don’t throw us out and embrace the policies that got us in trouble. Give us two years…See if what we’re doing is working, and you can throw us out.”

Clinton said Democrats need to combat an enthusiasm gap between the parties by firing up the Democratic base — including many young voters who are easily disillusioned when progress is slow — to some degree with classic right vs. left arguments. Independents, he said, need a more detailed “right vs. wrong” argument based not on ideology but policy effectiveness.

Throughout the interview, Clinton never breathed a word of substantive criticism of Obama, saying the two have long since moved beyond their clashes during 2008. But his tour of the electoral landscape did have a strong element of critique of how the policy substance is being sold.

Pressed by a reporter on whether Democrats are being too quick to turn away from the lessons of the 1990s, when Clinton survived Republican efforts to evict him from office by reclaiming the loyalties of independent swing voters, the former president clearly agreed.

Party moderates say the White House ignored evidence, emerging in polls as far back as summer 2009, that showed independents moving against the Democratic agenda, as well as big Republican gains in off-year elections in 2009 in New Jersey and Virginia, states Obama had won the year before. White House aides argued at the time those results had scant relevance to Obama or congressional Democrats.

A POLITICO/George Washington University Battleground Poll released last week backs up Clinton’s assessment about voter enthusiasm and independent voters.

Only 21 percent of self-identified independents said the country is on the right track. Republicans led 29 to 24 on the generic congressional ballot among this group, but nearly half said they remain undecided. Overall, the generic ballot was split evenly, 43-43.

Obama’s job approval rating is 45 percent overall. It’s 37 percent among independents.

Polls have shown a consistently sizable enthusiasm gap that favors the Republicans’ constituencies. While 96 percent of voters age 65 or older say they’re extremely or very likely to vote, 79 percent of voters ages 18 to 34 said the same.

If Democrats do get routed in November, Clinton said, Obama’s own reelection prospects might improve, though this is hardly the path he would prefer to a second term. Based on his own experience amid similar circumstances in 1994, Clinton said his advice to Obama would be “to keep his chin up. You’ve still got to show up for work every day. And he’s got to give people hope. So he can’t get down. Or, if he does, he can’t show it. And he’s got to realize that, in the end, it’s not about him. It’s about the American people, and they’re hurting, and they hire us to fix things.”

Clinton finished his political analysis on a lyrical note about democracy and how voters make themselves heard by their leaders: “That’s why every election is magical. The American people are like Mozart, writing a different symphony. They use the same words, in greater volume and different order. It’s like notes. You’ve got to hear it.”