Bill Clinton: Older Voters Are Too Smart To Be Fooled By Obama

Apparently the emergency case of duct tape hasn’t arrived at Clinton campaign headquarters yet. This certainly doesn’t seem to be a way to appeal to younger voters in the primaries (or the general election) — and it certainly is not consistent with what former President Bill Clinton said just last week:

Older voters gravitate to Hillary Clinton because they’re too wise to be fooled by Barack Obama’s rhetoric, former president Bill Clinton told Pennsylvania voters today.

Clinton’s comments, to a packed high school gym about an hour north of Philadelphia, were one part presidential politics and one part legacy protection. His beef was with Obama’s contention that many of the problems facing the country today were simmering long before President Bush took office seven-plus years ago.

“I think there is a big reason there’s an age difference in a lot of these polls,” he said. “Because once you’ve reached a certain age, you won’t sit there and listen to somebody tell you there’s really no difference between what happened in the Bush years and the Clinton years; that there’s not much difference in how small-town Pennsylvania fared when I was president, and in this decade.”

“So I think it’s important that we get to the truth of this,” Clinton continued, going on to compare his and Bush’s record on jobs, family incomes, and other measures.

As the Boston Globe goes on to note, just last week Clinton suggested that older people (such as his wife Hillary Clinton) sometimes have memory problems around 11 p.m. But that was when Clinton was defending his wife on the Bosnia flap, and this time he was in attack mode:

At various points in his nearly hour-long appearance at Quakertown Community High School, Clinton cautioned the hundreds gathered to hear him against voting on history. (His defense of his White House record notwithstanding, of course.) Despite press coverage about how historic a campaign this is, Clinton said, “the history doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. All that matters is the future. Who will make the best future for you?”

That’s a fair enough point to make: voters should NOT cast their votes to vote for an African-American because he is an African American — and they should NOT cast their votes to vote for a woman because she is a woman. They should vote for the one each voter judges to be the better person to occupy the Oval Office.

But the problem with Bill Clinton’s campaigning is that more and more it resembles the kind of name-calling associated in recent years with Karl Rove-type campaigns, or zingers culled from a talk radio or cable talking heads show. To wit:

And later, after he had run through, in great detail, the ins and outs of America’s foreign and domestic policy challenges, Clinton returned to the theme of substance versus abstraction. Hillary Clinton, he said, would be a “servant leader,” and voters had to decide whether that was more important than electing a “symbolic leader.” “You gotta decide,” he said, as if he had laid out even arguments for each.

So unless voters opt for Hillary Clinton, they will be selecting a “symbolic leader.”

Bill Clinton would fare much better in generating something more than “Clinton fatigue” if rather than denigrate his wife’s prime opponent he would instead wow the audiences with details about how Hillary Clinton could improve their lives in terms of specific policies — and how she would be preferable due to her policies to Obama and presumptive GOP nominee Senator John McCain….in positive versus negative terms.

But Clinton now seems like a politician who has lost his political savvy — and could be a reason why some voters will vote against Hillary Clinton if she does get the nomination.