NEW YORK — Since hitting the campaign trail in January, Bill Clinton has tried on different suits: supportive spouse hailing his wife as a "changemaker" in Iowa; Bernie Sanders attack dog in New Hampshire; redemption seeker in South Carolina.

Now, as the never-ending primary zeroes in on the critical April 19 contest in New York, the former president has entered a new phase of his surrogate work: defender-in-chief of his own legacy.


Bill Clinton’s growing focus on Bill Clinton was on display this past weekend, when he campaigned for his wife at three African-American Baptist churches in Harlem. “On the day I took the oath of office, the unemployment rate in Harlem was 24 percent,” the former president told the overflowing congregation at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, nine days before New Yorkers head to the polls. “On the day I left, it was 8. … We had three balanced budgets and the longest expansion in history.”

Bill Clinton implored New Yorkers to vote by reminding them of the high stakes of the election and of his wife’s experience. But it was his focus on his own achievements that stood out for some lawmakers making the Sunday rounds with him.

“I thought he was running for reelection rather than campaigning for his wife,” Rep. Charles Rangel, who introduced the former president at the three back-to-back church stops, told POLITICO in an interview on Tuesday. Rangel — the “lion of Harlem” whom Hillary Clinton credits with convincing her to run for Senate in 2000 — has been a stalwart supporter for years.

But Rangel said the former president appeared to revel more in his own past than in his wife’s future during his remarks on Sunday. “He was talking about all the great things he and I had done together — the empowerment zones,” he said, referring to the 1994 law that incentivized private investment in the struggling neighborhood through tax credits. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s nice, but that had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. But I enjoyed it, it’s OK for me.”

Rangel added: “There are times that I think he's got it; there are times when I think he's off subject. But it's clear the crowds love him.”

Since he began campaigning for his wife four months ago, Clinton has often digressed into discussions of his own legacy. In South Carolina, for instance, he referenced paper printouts showing how much the economy grew under his administration. In Nevada, where he toured a revitalized shopping district off the Strip, he talked to voters at length about his own vegan diet — and, yes, even there, the drop in the unemployment rate in Harlem under his watch — before remembering to throw in the line of the day: caucus for Hillary.

But his focus on his own accomplishments has intensified as Bill Clinton faces growing criticism on the trail from Black Lives Matter protesters and Bernie Sanders over his record on criminal justice issues — and his wife’s campaign, which has distanced itself from the 1994 crime bill, is not eager to help in his defense. The landmark legislation, which reduced crime but has been blamed for increasing mass incarcerations after creating a “three strikes” rule and funding new federal prisons, has become a flashpoint in the Democratic race. And in Bill Clinton’s inner circle, the feeling is that Sanders — who voted for the bill as a member of the House of Representatives — is now effectively running a campaign targeting him.

Campaigning at the Apollo Theater last week, Sanders said the former president owed the country an apology “for trying to defend what is indefensible” during his exchange with protesters in Philadelphia over the crime bill. The Vermont senator went on to criticize Clinton’s welfare legislation. “Do you all remember that?” he said. “The premise, which was a right-wing Republican premise, was that the problem was all these people were really living high off the hog.”

Sanders’ attacks came after a rally in Philadelphia last week, where Bill Clinton tussled with protesters who challenged the legacy of his crime bill, saying it had a negative impact on African-American families. In a move unhelpful to his wife's campaign, Bill Clinton defended the term “super predator” — one that Hillary Clinton has personally apologized for using decades ago to describe black teens involved in crime. "You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter," Bill Clinton told a Philadelphia protester, wagging his finger from behind the podium. "Tell the truth."

Hillary Clinton’s campaign does not defend the crime bill or the former president's criminal justice legacy. Bill Clinton has also chosen not to participate in any interviews with the press this year, which leaves him to act as his own one-man rapid response operation at public events. "I talked to a lot of African-American groups,” he said in Philadelphia. “They thought black lives mattered; they said take this bill because our kids are being shot in the street by gangs. We had 13-year-old kids planning their own funerals.” The following day he admitted he was not “most effective” in dealing with the assault on his record.

On Sunday in Harlem, Clinton did not directly address the crime bill, which, among other initiatives, added 100,000 police officers to cities across the country. But in pointing out its virtues, he noted that Rangel helped him recruit a more diverse force that would “look like the people they were policing, and talk to the communities and establish trust.”

Back on his adopted home turf, Clinton also wanted to reminisce about his own personal history with the historic neighborhood. Explaining his decision to move his personal office to Harlem 16 years ago, Clinton seemed to give the audience more of a blow-by-blow than voters were necessarily hoping for. "People who did this sort of thing ... picked out some office space for me in midtown, near Carnegie Hall — I thought I could see a lot of music,” he said. But he explained that the pricey office space sparked a controversy over the high rent, leading him to decide to move to Harlem instead. “President Reagan opened his office in Los Angeles [without] arguing about the rent,” Clinton said. “But I heard it for a couple days.”

The traveling Bill Clinton show — even when it includes entire acts that have nothing to do with the 2016 election — is still considered a net positive for his wife. Bill Clinton still has towering favorability ratings among Democratic voters, and underlying Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is an idea among Democrats that the country and the economy work better when the Clintons are in charge.

But too much focus on the past could be a risky framework for his wife in an election in which voters so far have shown a preference for political outsiders over establishment candidates.

“It's difficult enough to be the third term after two consecutive terms of your own party,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. “It would be doubly hard to be Barack Obama’s third term and Bill Clinton’s third term. Hillary has done better than Jeb Bush, but it's been a struggle in part because she's been around the track so much. It's nice to send Bill into targeted areas to say specific things, but my sense of it is he gets off script a little bit.”

But the former president, campaign aides said, remains a critical surrogate in New York, where the Democratic electorate combines the audiences where he holds the greatest appeal: African-Americans, Manhattan liberals, and blue-collar workers in upstate New York.

“She was the senator for eight years and took a hiatus when she was secretary of state — he continued," said longtime donor Jay Jacobs, who is helping to organize the state. "He was the political Clinton in New York for those four years.”

And Clinton still holds some sway as explainer-in-chief, longtime allies said. “As a successful two-term president, he is in a remarkable position to assess how someone might perform in that job — that is part of what made his 2012 convention speech extolling President Obama so successful,” said longtime Clinton adviser Paul Begala, who now serves as an adviser to Priorities USA, the super PAC backing her campaign.

If along the way he freelances about himself, Begala shrugged: “I would not overthink it. Let the Big Dog run.”