Obama’s aides say he was never as clueless as Clinton portrayed him. Clinton's '08 slaps still sting Obama

“Friendship” was the main course during Hillary Clinton’s lunch with President Barack Obama this week, according to an Obama spokesman, but no one could have blamed Clinton for ordering a small side of I-told-you-so.

Much of the bombastic campaign rhetoric from 2008 — think “3 a.m. call” — proved as ephemeral as the thousands of half-melted “Hillary” candy bars Clinton’s staff handed out on Super Tuesday five years ago.


But some of Clinton’s most memorable ‘08 shots at Obama have had resonance far beyond the short shelf life of the standard campaign hit parade: her mockery of his vow to transform Washington in his own image, her cry of “elitism” and her skepticism about his managerial chops echo today in the form of GOP attacks and the lingering doubts of some in his own party.

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Clinton’s campaign attacks on Obama may have been an exaggerated version of reality, but in retrospect they were illuminating, in the way a hand grenade provides a flash of light before going boom.

Former Clinton staffers didn’t want to be within a mile of this story. (“I’m hanging up now,” said one top ’08 campaign aide cheerfully before the line went dead.) But several more intrepid ex-aides pointed to one quote in particular: a Clinton broadside delivered in Toledo, Ohio, on Feb. 24, 2008, that represented her most stinging attack on Obama’s core hope-and-change message.

“I could stand up here and say: let’s just get everybody together, let’s get unified,” Clinton said, voice dripping with contempt long since discarded.

“The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know that we should do the right thing, and the world would be perfect,” Clinton added. “Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this will be. You are not going to wave a magic wand…”

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It was caricature — but a little prescient too. In 2012, Obama downplayed his soaring change-Washington mantra, replacing it with a very Hillary ’08 focus on the economy, competence and rationality – the stuff of incumbents and battle-scarred DC veterans. Exactly what Clinton had been four years earlier.

Longtime Clinton adviser James Carville, who was in close touch with the Clinton family during the rocky ’08 primaries, says Obama has come to recognize what Hillary Clinton had already learned during her eight tough years in the White House: Transcendental politics works on a campaign, but not so much when it comes to governing.

“His message was “I can transcend Washington’ — her message was ‘I can bend it, I can cut through it.’ Guess which one turned out to be right?” Carville said.

“I got nothing against the president and his people. Hell, when [Bill] Clinton came to Washington, he believed that stuff too. … But the system in Washington devours everything. It always wins. The power of it is awesome to watch. Hillary understood that [in 2008], and he gets it now.”

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Obama’s aides say he was never as clueless as Clinton — or any of his subsequent critics — portrayed him. Voters need inspiration, not just perspiration, and he was hoping his message would spur the GOP to compromise, they say.

“You don’t go out in a campaign and sell a B-plus, you go out and give people an ideal,” said Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council spokesman who was a mainstay of Obama’s 2008 campaign press operation. “I think that was — and is — a key part of what made the president so successful. … And he didn’t know that the GOP leadership would make derailing progress their one and only priority.”

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Many of Clinton’s claims have turned out to be total duds — especially on foreign policy, where Obama has proven to be less the doe-eyed naif than the cautious caretaker who signed off on Afghanistan troop withdrawals only after approving one final military surge.

But comments about his overall approach to governing have been more durable, and frequently re-purposed by Republicans.

“There’s a big difference between us — speeches versus solutions, talk versus action,” Clinton said, also in the make-or-break month of February 2008. “Speeches don’t put food on the table. Speeches don’t fill up your tank, or fill your prescription, or do anything about that stack of bills that keeps you up at night.”

A more pointed, and more controversial, statement came in late January 2008, when Clinton questioned Obama’s ability to control Congress — with a comparison of Martin Luther King and President Johnson, which many Obama backers took to be a veiled racial swipe.

“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” Clinton told Fox News on the eve of Obama’s blowout win in the African-American-dominated South Carolina primary.

“It took a president to get it done,” she added.

In the short term, Clinton’s quip was a classic rhetorical boomerang, cleverly stoked by Obama’s staff and surrogates who did little to discourage the implication that it revealed the candidate’s hidden feelings on race. But the negative comparisons to LBJ have intensified over the years, much to the chagrin of Obama’s staff.

“She took a lot of shots for that, but I thought was a very resonant and legitimate point Hillary was making,” says Jonathan Alter, a two-time Obama biographer who covered the 2008 campaign for Newsweek. “I thought the LBJ comment was a lot more resonant than the ‘Choir’ comment, which was sort of a caricature.

“When LBJ was president everybody was in congressional relations — if you were a secretary and your brother-in-law worked on the Hill, he wanted you to work that connection,” adds Alter. “LBJ had filibuster-proof majorities. The root cause of Obama’s problems are the Republicans [on the Hill]… But he’s left tools in the toolbox…

“He thought of himself as a bridge-builder — but he came up too fast to build any big bridges, and the ones he built were small, over creeks. That was Hillary’s point.”

Early in his first term, Obama rode big congressional majorities — and Hill-savvy types like Rahm Emanuel, Phil Schiliro and Jim Messina — to a string of accomplishments that has thus far defined his presidency, from the stimulus to Obamacare to Dodd-Frank.

And more recently, his team has carefully cultivated relationships with Senate Republicans, providing him with a limited breakthrough on comprehensive immigration reform and a burgeoning partnership with the wheeler-dealer Senate duo of John McCain and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

But for the most part, he has struggled to achieve any kind of consensus with Republicans since the 2010 midterms, and has more or less thrown in the towel on trying to change hearts and minds on the Hill, grousing to an audience in Chattanooga Tuesday that Republicans block most of what he proposes “just because it’s my idea.”

That may be true, but even his closest advisers admit he has sometimes been his own worst enemy. Obama, who was subjected to a serenade of “Happy Birthday” from House Democrats on Wednesday, has few enduring personal relationships on either side of the aisle in the town he ostensibly controls.

Another Clinton broadside that still echoes came in April 2008, after Obama was secretly taped saying he thought rural voters “cling to guns or religion” to cope with economic uncertainty.

“You don’t have to think back too far to remember that good men running for president were viewed as being elitist and out of touch with the values and the lives of millions of Americans,” Clinton said, referring to the unsuccessful campaign of 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry, who would become her replacement at the State Department five years later.

And, as Clinton hinted, Obama has yet to shake that ivory tower aura: Hill Democrats have long eye-rolled at Obama’s tendency to lecture them, with one Senate leader nicknaming him “The Professor.”

Of course, some of her shots were embarrassingly off-base.

In August 2007, she slammed Obama for suggesting that he would attack U.S. ally Pakistan if that was the only way to kill or capture Osama bin Laden. Four years later, Obama was good to his word — and authorized the secret mission to Abbottabad, Pakistan over the objections of the Pakistani government and with a now-friendly Clinton by his side in the Situation Room.

But even those negative messages rooted, however tenuously, in some reality — Obama the dreamer, Obama the neophyte, Obama the kale-nibbler — have never quite taken deep root during either of his presidential campaigns. The Romney campaign, struggling with its own image problems, tried to revive the elitist argument in 2012 to no great effect.

Clinton’s inexperience attack fizzled in 2008 as voters looked for fresh leadership. John McCain had no greater success that fall — done in by his own less-than-steady performance during the financial crisis.

“It just didn’t stick,” said former Des Moines Register reporter David Yepsen, an Iowa kingmaker who capped a three-decade journalism covering Obama’s stunning win in the caucuses. “They threw everything at him, and none of it really resonated.”

Even so, some of those Clinton criticisms have clearly had a major impact on the way Obama has governed and campaigned.

The centerpiece of Obamacare is the individual mandate, which Clinton forcefully advocated during the 2008 campaign and Obama noisily opposed — until he was elected. After Obama declared himself willing to meet with leaders in Iran and North Korea sans preconditions during a mid-2007 debate, Clinton slammed him as “naive” and “irresponsible.”

Obama, incidentally, has made no trips to Tehran or Pyongyang, adopting a hard line with both regimes, after initially offering dialogue on the pre-condition they give up their nuclear weapons programs.

The former first lady genuinely warmed to Obama over the years and both downplay their worst 2008 nasties as time-capsule toss-offs.

“We could never figure out what we were different on. Yeah, we worked at that pretty hard,” Clinton said during a joint “60 Minutes” sitdown with Obama as she left Foggy Bottom earlier this year.

But Clinton, people in her orbit say, has always derived quiet satisfaction from the victor’s growing reliance on the vanquished — as an embattled Obama seeks out her counsel and star power.

“Oh, it’s not lost on her,” said one longtime Clinton associate.