Something fairly remarkable happened at the annual convention of the NAACP on Wednesday. A former president apologized for having done something that helped ensure his re-election, but that turned out to be hopelessly bad public policy.

"I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it,"

Clinton said at the 106th NAACP National Convention, which concluded Wednesday

in Philadelphia. "In that bill, there were longer sentences, and most of these

people are in prison under state law, but the federal law set a trend. And that

was overdone; we were wrong about that."

Now, I can be as cynical as the next fellow, even if the next fellow is Niccolo Machiavelli. Bill Clinton's wife is the prohibitive favorite in a Democratic presidential primary process that has shifted markedly to the left since the last time she ran in it, and certainly has done so since the last time he ran in it. So anyone can be forgiven if they believe that the former president is merely clearing his triangulations out of the way so that Hillary Rodham Clinton has a clearer road through the new politics of her party. Maybe this can become a weekly series; next week, the former president sends his regrets for having signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and for having signed into law the Commodities Futures Modifications Act, which he signed virtually as the moving vans were pulling up to the White House. The following week, why he insisted on a more punitive than necessary welfare "reform" measure that, once the economy cratered, made everybody's problems worse. The week after that, why he signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which made the climate for civil liberties in this country worse, took the biggest whack at habeas corpus since Lincoln, and (arguably) provided the blueprint for all the horrors of the Patriot Act five years later. This could be a helluva series. MSNBC might even pre-empt episodes of Lockdown for it.

Nevertheless, Bill Clinton is possibly the only white politician alive who could go before the NAACP and apologize for having signed a law that codified the racial injustice that lies at the core of the country's mass incarceration problem and not be booed from hell to breakfast for it. He still occupies a very unique place in the political life of this country and, it appears, he's more ready than he was in 2008 to use his unique position to help elect his wife. In 2008, he was bungling around South Carolina, talking about Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson, and generally being foolish. Now, he's going before the NAACP and apologizing for having arranged for so many African Americans to get tossed into the hoosegow because it helped him get elected in 1996.

Your mileage may vary on how sincere this transformation is -- and, frankly, I don't care -- but it is something of a masterstroke nonetheless. (Imagine if C-Plus Augustus were to get up before, say, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and say that he'd launched a war that made their problems worse. OK, Arthur C. Clarke didn't have that kind of imagination, but you take my point, right?) The Big Dog still has the mad skillz, he does. His ability to wrong-foot people is unsurpassed.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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