The last time the issue of Bill's love surfaced it was over a white woman in a closet. This time it's with a black man on the stump and in full view of everyone!

But to be fair, I'm sure all the candidates are exhausted and I don't know how they keep it up on the campaign trail, including Billary. I may not support her, but she does have a lot of energy, and so does Bill, after his surgery of a couple years ago.

An even earlier example would consist of James Buchanan being so unhappy at losing the nomination to Stephen Douglas that he bolted the Democratic Party and set up another faction who nominated John Cabell Breckenridge to represent the pro-slavery South. Buchanan was no shrinking violet in the few speeches he gave describing alternately Lincoln or Douglas as tyrannicides and (politley put) Negro lovers.

Theodore Roosevelt guaranteed the victory of Woodrow Wilson when he campaigned and railed against his succesor for one term, Howard Taft, as being in the thrall of of the Morgans and the Vanderbilts. He even led his own delegates physically out of the Republican convention and into another hall nearby to create and run as the nominee of the Bull Moose Party. Roosevelt described Taft as selling out the progressives and Woodrow Wilson as a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer. Hardly the gentility we assume to have the norm for ex-presidents.

As distasteful as some obviously have concerning Bill Clinton's campagining he does not represent some kind of break with American presidential politics. And as much as our memories assume that all our former presidents retired as represented by The Apotheosis of Washington the reality is that the dignified retirement is relatively rare and a recent phenomena.