Bill Clinton, Spokane, Washington, Monday, March 21

We’ve seen Hillary spend much of the last two months embracing Obama and arguing that she would build on his legacy. She has also, on multiple occasions, explicitly criticized Sanders for being critical of Obama. Well, in a campaign speech he gave in Spokane, Washington yesterday, Bill was by all appearances critical of Obama’s legacy when he said this to the audience:

But if you believe we can all rise together, if you believe we’ve finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us and the seven years before that where we were practicing trickle-down economics with no regulation in Washington, which is what caused the crash, then you should vote for her because she’s the only person who basically has good ideas, will tell you how she’s going to pay for them, can be commander-in-chief, and is a proven change maker with Republicans and Democrats and independents alike. (emphasis added)

The video of this part of his speech is here: www.cnn.com/…

So now that Hillary has finished her tour of the southeast and no longer needs the base of African Americans voters who live there, I guess it’s now okay for her campaign (in the form of Bill as a key surrogate) to abandon Operation Embrace Obama and to adopt Operation Appeal to Republicans Who Hate Obama but Can Be Persuaded to Support Hillary. Classic Clinton politics. And it’s exactly what turns me off about the way the Hillary and Bill operate.

Now, we could interpret Bill’s comments as an implicit critique of Republican obstructionism, or even as a lament of the slow economic recovery that has occurred since Bush left office. But Bill is a master politician and a talented speaker; if he meant either of those things, he would have made that clear. I don’t know how to see this as anything other than him trying to create distance between Obama’s record and Hillary.

I’m sure some (especially Hillary supporters) will see this as the most cynical interpretation of what Bill meant. If you think so, then I would be really interested in hearing how you interpret Bill’s comments.