The campaign staff was not so sure, and scheduled him for only the briefest of visits. He was sure his touch with African-American voters would blunt Obama's natural advantage (almost half the Democratic voters in South Carolina are black). The former president wanted to go to South Carolina for the next Democratic test, the Jan. Hillary's narrow victory in Nevada had sustained her post-New Hampshire comeback momentum. 19, working the casinos in his larger-than-life way, charming the off-duty waitresses and croupiers.
They were happier when he was on the road-that is, as long as he stayed on message, which was never for very long.īill Clinton was enormously effective at the Nevada caucuses on Jan. But the staff, including the campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, found his presence, complete with Secret Service, to be uncomfortable, sometimes intimidating. Clinton wanted to be a major player in his wife's campaign, and he used an office sometimes inhabited by Mark Penn or Mandy Grunwald at Clinton headquarters in Arlington, Va., just outside Washington. It was always hard for Clinton to be anything but the most amazing person in the room, the "smartest boy in the class," as author David Maraniss had once described him. More vexingly, Obama, in remarks to some reporters in Nevada, had praised Ronald Reagan as a true change agent and seemingly dismissed Bill Clinton as an incidental politician. Obama was upstaging him by threatening to truly become America's first black president. Clinton was proud of the fact that some blacks called him "America's first black president," because of his comfort and empathy with African-Americans. Or, in some strange way, he may have been envious of Obama. At some deeper level, the armchair shrinks speculated, he was jealous of her. He seemed anxious that his wife was blowing the chance to get the Clintons back in the White House. Exactly why was a psychologist's guessing game. The former president was restless and petulant that was obvious. Brazile kept asking him, "Why are you so angry?" (Article continued below.) "If Barack Obama is nominated, it will be the worst denigration of public service," he told her, ranting on for much of an hour. 13, Clinton got worked up in a phone conversation with Donna Brazile, a direct, strong-willed African-American woman who had been Al Gore's campaign manager and advised the Clintons from time to time. If the press wouldn't go after Obama, then Hillary's campaign would have to do the job, the ex-president urged. The press was still in love with Obama, or so it seemed to Clinton, who complained to pretty much anyone who would listen. The former president had amassed an 81-page list of all the unfair and nasty things the Obama campaign had said, or was alleged to have said, about Hillary Clinton. In the days after his wife's back- from-the-brink victory in New Hampshire, Bill Clinton was full of righteous indignation.
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