He makes another statement praising the likely Republican Presidential nominee Senator John McCain and his wife Senator Hillary Clinton — but this time singling them out as as two people who love their country. Is another name omitted? READ DETAILS HERE.
Was he implying that Senator Barack Obama isn’t in the same category? Clinton — who was not accused of being vague in most of his political statements as President — seems to be making a lot of statements during this campaign that have what some can take as having an unstated lingering-and-clear implication. A statement that goes just far enough to deny that there was any intent to make the implication.
Even if you give Bill Clinton the benefit of the doubt, the fact is that he will be one of the very few Presidents in American history who left office and shrunk a bit. He has gone from being perceived as former President with all of the majesty of that office to essentially just another political operative making a pitch. Former Presidents — such as Richard Nixon and another President unpopular when he left office, Harry Truman — usually live to see the public mellow as they develop auras of living history.
What’s puzzling is how Mr. Clinton thinks that if Hillary Clinton wins he’s going to put the party back together again with the bitterness that statements such as this will generate among Obama supporters — even if the interpretation is flat-out wrong. But, then, Clinton has been in politics long enough so that he generally knows what he is saying and how some will take it.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.