Hillary running from Bill is a big story
President Clinton is out there campaigning for Mrs. Clinton. However, he is also finding out that this is a very different party from the one he moved to the center in the 1990s. I found this article by Tory Newmyer rather interesting:
But for the 42nd president, so long the irrepressible Big Dog of the political scene, the moment must have offered some deeper catharsis. He's spent the better part of a year holding himself in check while Hillary Clinton has disavowed much of his record, piece by piece. The Democratic Party she seeks to lead is rediscovering lefty instincts he banished a generation ago as the young tribune of an ascendant centrism, and she is adjusting accordingly.
Candidate Hillary now talks up the need for criminal justice reform to undo the 1994 crime bill her husband championed; decries the wages on American workers of NAFTA and subsequent free-trade deals he ushered in; and calls for cracking down on a financial sector he helped deregulate. Her evolution appears aimed at least in part at keeping faith with younger Democrats, a bloc that's nevertheless rejecting her, en masse, in favor of a septuagenerian with a '60s vintage message. (In Wisconsin on Tuesday, Bernie Sanders won a whopping 82% of voters under 30.) So Bill could be forgiven if he's feeling a bit lost in the party he once defined.
I would add that this tilt to the left, or rejection of the Clinton presidency, really began in 2000, when 4 million voted for Ralph Nader.
It continued in 2008, when candidate Senator Obama decried NAFTA and then-senator Clinton was forced to dance around the agreement.
It has come full circle with Senator Sanders's supporters, who did not get the memo about Mrs. Clinton's coronation.
It must be tough for the narcissist Bill Clinton. He's been thrown under the bus, in much the same way that he threw the left under the bus back in 1996.
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