Bill Clinton and crypto-Socialists

By Ruth Marcus

The only thing that annoys Bill Clinton more than Republicans running elections in “a parallel universe divorced from reality” is Democrats who let them get away with it.

In a conversation that touched on everything from the ancient Sumerians to the latest discoveries in astrophysics, the former president was asked to comment on the the current arguments about American exceptionalism. “I don’t like what I see…as one of the main themes that the new Republicans are trying to set up in the 2012 election, which is that they know that America is a truly exceptional nation and all these wussy Democrats don’t,” Clinton said.

He cited Minnesota Republican Rep. Michelle Bachmann's statement, in her response to President Obama’s State of the Union, that “everybody knows that we have the greatest health care system in the world. That is factually untrue….You can get the best health care in the world in America if you’re Bill Clinton…but that’s not the same thing as having the best system that works for everyone. So I think what America needs as much as anything else is to stop conducting its politics in a parallel universe divorced from reality with no facts.”

Preferably, Clinton said, with Democratic help this time around. He lacerated his party for failing to offer a national message in 2010 to counter the GOP description of Obama and congressional Democrats as “crypto-Socialists who were driving the country right off the brink.”

Democrats, he said, “raised $1.6 billion and didn’t spend even 10 percent of it to tell the American people what they had done, what they intended to do and what the differences were….I am not criticizing Republicans. They’re in the business of beating us. I’m criticizing my party. We had no national message so our losses were roughly twice as great as they needed to be.”

If that’s what he had to say in Davos, just imagine the earful Clinton delivered to Obama at the White House last month.

Ruth Marcus is an editorial writer for the Washington Post.