Just four years ago former President Bill Clinton was seen by the national media as the guy who almost single-handedly secured Barack Obama’s second term in the White House.
That was a long time ago.
With just one interview, Bill has been turned into a liability for his wife Hillary’s nascent presidential campaign.
Bill Clinton on Monday defended himself and Hillary from recent allegations that foreign donations to their nonprofit, the Clinton Foundation, may have influenced Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state. Bill also responded to critics who have questioned the high-priced speeches he delivers around the world.
“I gotta pay our bills,” Bill told NBC News when asked about his speaking fees. And he rebutted charges of impropriety on behalf of his and Hillary’s nonprofit, saying that it has never done anything “knowingly inappropriate.”
The New York Times said Bill’s comments “seemed certain to give fresh fodder to critics of the Clintons” and “would create the potential for a fresh round of scrutiny into his family’s finances as Hillary Rodham Clinton seeks for the Democratic nomination in 2016.”
A Washington Post article said Bill’s interview”caused some problems” for Hillary, whose campaign on Tuesday launched a website with a video that attempts to defend her from attacks on her record at the State Department.
Politico called the comments “unwelcome flashbacks” to controversial remarks Bill made about Obama in 2008, during Hillary’s first run for president.
By contrast, Bill was heralded in 2012 as keeping Democrats in control of the White House weeks before what seemed to be a tight election between Obama and then-GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
In September that year, Bill gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention widely received by the national media as the lifeline Obama needed in order to win.
“When Obama called in late July to say he would be grateful if his Democratic predecessor would give the speech placing his name in nomination, something that no former commander in chief has done before, it was an acknowledgment of how much the sitting president needs the former president,” wrote the Post at the time, calling Bill a “key asset” to Obama’s campaign.
NPR said Clinton was Obama’s “No. 1 surrogate.”
An article in Time magazine said Clinton “can explain the hell out of a thing.”
Reasons for the change in Bill’s impact on presidential politics are unclear. But in an interview last month with the Washington Examiner, Nicole Krassas, a political science professor at Eastern Connecticut State University and co-author of Hillary Clinton: A Biography, said Hillary’s relationship with the press has beenexceptionally fraught, going back to her days as a politically outspoken first lady.
“It goes back to the conventional wisdom that Hillary is behaving in some way that’s inappropriate to her position and that was the often-told story early in [then-president Bill Clinton’s] first term,” Krassas said. “There are things that the culture sort of puts in its mind about any one person and then that becomes the wisdom. So, anything that happens is viewed through that lens.”
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