Interesting quote of the day

This one's going to leave a mark, coming from Clinton biographer John Harris:

A second Clinton presidency would suggest that Clintonism was not just a 1990s-era bag of political tricks, but a historical movement dominating American politics for a generation or more.

Without a second Clinton presidency, Bill Clinton might be remembered as a colorful but in the end not terribly consequential president who governed in comparatively placid times between two war presidents named Bush.

For all that he is often touted as a political superhero, Bill Clinton was always a mere mortal. He never cleared the 50 percent threshold in two presidential elections. He steered his party to disaster in the congressional elections of 1994 and never steered it back over the next six years even through years of peace and prosperity.

In Iowa, it is not clear that Bill Clinton’s tireless campaigning and importuning on behalf of his wife did any good at all.

At times, it seems likely he hurt the cause, as with his clumsy and ill-supported assertions that he was opposed to the Iraq invasion at the time. His very presence, coupled with his legitimate but sometimes irrelevant defenses of his own record in office, seemed to draw attention to the 1990s and undercut one of his own political truisms — that all elections are about the future.

It was not so much that he was off his game as that he was on it in some very characteristic ways.

The fear to Bubba that he will wind up on the list of presidential consequence and greatnes amidst the Chester Arthurs and Grover Clevelands burns with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns.

And it's causing Bubba to make comments like this: you can almost see the finger wagging in this granite gem of self-pity

"Nobody would like it better than us if you could get that personal vilification out of there, because nobody’s been vilified more than we have," he said, after noting that he thought Hillary and McCain could run a respectful campaign. "One of the problems with laying down and turning the other cheek is McCain had one dose of it. They gave it to us for eight years.

"And the fact of the matter is, independent voters think you’re polarizing if someone else attacks you, even if that someone is Rush Limbaugh, even if you’ve been totally exonerated of every single charge ever leveled against you, which Hillary was — and some people forgot to tell you about that," he said, jabbing again at the press.

"Nobody would be happier to see all this go away than us. But you can’t ask somebody who is at a breathtaking disadvantage in the information coming to the voters to ignore that disadvantage and basically agree to put bullets in their brains," he said.

But attacking the press in this way isn't smart, as they always hit back (how smart was it for the Clintons to go after Tim Russert?) Harris counters:

Some of that petulance has been seen lately, as with comments in New Hampshire Friday suggesting that the media has been unfair to his wife. In fact, the Clintons’ celebrity has been a constant media advantage, giving them entrée to network interviews and magazine covers. They used this to promote a narrative of her “inevitability” and can hardly complain now that Obama has exposed that she is not inevitable at all.