Old Democrat

“Bill Clinton could talk the owls down from the trees,” the veteran journalist Mark Halperin remarked repeatedly on his 2Way program (the cult hit of this campaign cycle) on Wednesday. 

Newt Gingrich, an old antagonist, added more in quick cuts to POLITICO’s Jonathan Martin: “Had Al Gore allowed Clinton to campaign the way he could have, Al Gore would have won the presidency [in 2000]…. If I was them, and if they want to penetrate working-class voters, I can’t think of anybody they have with greater potential than Bill Clinton.”

With Jimmy Carter in hospice, as President Joe Biden ghosted from the job, while the Obamas maintained an uncanny overman role in American life, and as Hillary Clinton was drowned in umbrage, the greatest prospect for a refresh of the old deck this week seemed to come from “the kid from Hope.” But it was not to be. 

Bill Clinton is old. 

He admitted as much. Clinton conceded in his speech he had been to every Democratic National Convention since the 1970s (the incumbent president reported the same). The two make for an interesting duo. They’ve reportedly been close during Biden’s years in power. Biden speaks more with Clinton than he does with his former boss, Barack Obama. 

Clinton’s physical appearance is more youthful and his gait more impressive than Biden’s. But Clinton’s voice has been shot for years. (Rightists have alleged a causal link with his veganism.)  He sounds worse, at least compared to Biden at his most incensed. 

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Clinton innovated the New Democrats. His leadership in that endeavor, his optimist’s luck, and his unrivaled sense of timing helped him leapfrog Biden and other Democrats on the scene. Clinton asserted control of not only the American center-left but returned America’s oldest party to the White House after 12 hard years in the cold. (His brothers-in-arms, as it turned out, would be Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in “New Labour,” then lowly members of Parliament across the pond.)    

Though it was hardly a steady dominance—the man was impeached—he nonetheless had clear command of American esteem for two decades running. 

By the mid-2000s, anti–Bill Clinton paranoia was a bad joke. The worst president in American history occupied the White House right then and there. That man’s father had been an accomplice to the grisly charade. Contrarian defenses of Jimmy Carter? Forever a mug’s game. Ronald Reagan was dead and gone. 

In 2012, the Clintons’ mystique made discussion of a Hillary Clinton primary challenge to Barack Obama not completely daft. And the party old guard still discusses Bill Clinton’s convention address in Charlotte that year as if it were Mark Antony’s funeral oration.  

It all lasted for, perhaps, a quarter-century—that is, until Hillary Clinton’s shock defeat in 2016. Until the disclosures of Bill Clinton’s clear links to the person and activities of Jeffrey Epstein, a murky figure that singed not just Clinton but a generation of the American power elite. Though, of course, Bill Clinton was Epstein’s prize scalp. 

Now Obama (if anyone) occupies that saintly presence in the party. And Clinton had a torrid relationship with Carter, his would-be contemporary in undeclared exile from the American center stage. 

“The Republicans devoted a good chunk of their convention’s prime TV time in San Diego to saluting former Presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush,” Douglas Brinkley noted in the New York Times twenty-eight years ago. “In Chicago, by contrast, the Democrats have gone out of their way to avoid even acknowledging the existence of their party’s only living former President.” Today it is the Republicans who are dinged for a lack of luminary alumni. 

But Clinton is now on similar enough footing as the kindred Southerner he never quite cared for. Like Jimmy Carter, the Democratic Party of 2024 could take or leave Bill Clinton.

If anything, the parade of the past this week on display in Beirut on the Lake has distracted from the promised killer app of the Kamala Harris–Tim Walz ticket: a clean break from the past. This includes the Obamas, but also very much Biden, and even more the Clintons. Most of all Bill, who once seemed to possess political chops apart from his wife. The former secretary of State gave a more commanding speech than her husband this week in a shocking role reversal. But come Christmas, she may watch another woman become president.      

Donald Trump may yet win, and the scene in August this week will be remembered as haughty hallucination by those enthused. A ferocious, regimented pitch (such as that which J.D. Vance made in a post-proceedings response Wednesday) could steal the day. But if Donald Trump goes down in this election, his vanquishing will be a headliner for the ages. And anyone reasonably mortified by the prospect of ratified and enhanced Democratic power will have to do some deep thinking—to put it lightly. 

But historians could eventually render a broader verdict. That is: Although inexcusably belated, and with all the attendant risks, 2024 also marked a change of the guard in American life.

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