To many, the 2000 Presidential election was really about “the Bush restoration” — bringing back the Bushes after the unseemly interruption of Democrat Bill Clinton’s Presidency. And now there are growing signs that the 2008 primary and possibly Presidential campaign will be about “the Clinton restoration” — pitched as a way to get the Clintons back into power.

A political masterstroke? Or a recipe for political problems? A winning formula to link to a President who rode high in the polls? Or a recipe for mega-polarization?

The bottom-line question really is: Is Bill Clinton a political boon for Hillary Clinton or a political albatross hanging around her candidacy’s neck?

The latest tip-off that the Clinton camp is going to seek to surround itself in lingering good feelings on the part of some of the electorate about Bill Clinton came in an article in the Washington Post which suggests that the campaign will all but use the word “restoration”:

After months of discussion within her campaign over how heavily she should draw on her husband’s legacy, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is closing out her Iowa and New Hampshire campaigns in a tight embrace of Bill Clinton’s record, helping fuel a debate about the 1990s with Sen. Barack Obama that she thinks she can win.

As part of the Clinton strategy, the former president is playing an increasingly prominent public role as an advocate for his wife. He appears to have overcome concerns within the campaign over how closely she should associate her candidacy with his time in office and over whether his appearances could draw attention away from her.

And here comes the CALCULATED RISK:

Both Clintons are making the case that theirs was a co-presidency — an echo of Bill Clinton’s controversial statement during the 1992 campaign that voters would get “two for the price of one” if they elected him. At times, the former president has seemed to cast the current race as a referendum on his administration.

If you strip away all of the diplomatic phrasing, then, what the Clinton’s are going to be offering is a re-election campaign — in essence arguing (just as the Bush supporters in 2000 gingerly argued) that the years of Bush 43 were a kind of political bookend interrupting the ClintonS administration.

However, to be sure — and fair — it is an argument that makes some political and administrative sense:

She has tried to co-opt the message of change from Obama, declaring that she has been “working for change” her entire life. Over the past week, she injected the phrase “new beginning” into her stump speech.

But the unchanging core of Clinton’s message is her experience, and in recent days she has presented the election as a binary choice: between a competent, experienced Clinton and novices such as Obama. “That’s the kind of logic that got us George Bush in the first place,” she said this week in Iowa.

And the main basis for her assertion is the time she spent as first lady. Bill Clinton is hitting the theme hard as the voting in Iowa and New Hampshire draws closer, pointing back to the 1990s, citing his record as his wife’s, referring to the work “we” did in office and, for the most part, brushing past or ignoring the tumult of those years.

But therein lies the flaw of this strategy which has some inherent weaknesses. Conservative blogger Ed Morrissey writes:

Only in the Clinton machine could anyone debate whether a wife should embrace her husband, even figuratively. Did she think that anyone would have separated the two of them in considering her for the Presidency? Of course not; without Bill, Hillary becomes nothing more than a Senator with eight years of experience in public office. Without him, she’s got less experience in that arena than Barack Obama.

Even so, from all reports (including several I’ve personally gotten from New York residents over past years) Hillary Clinton has been an excellent Senator in terms of responding immediately to her constituents’ needs. She probably realizes that if she fizzles on this campaign during this year, her prime chance for the White House may not come again. So she’s pulling out all stops, and not just with Bill but by campaigning with her daughter and mother. She’s energetically courting the women’s vote.

And she has reason to leave no stone unturned: polls show she is rapidly losing support in California. That’s not exactly a sign of a sure-footed campaign that’s catching on like wildfire and on the ascent.

Meanwhile, Bill is a portrait in political hyperactivity and hyperbole. He’s not just on the stump doing speeches that increasingly sound more like they’re about him but doing telephone conference calls to Iowa supporters. His latest was to call his wife a “genius.” A nice phrase from a husband and — as he points out — a political partner and administration co-worker.

But is he going to help or hurt Hillary Clinton (a) get the nomination and/or (b) win the general election campaign?

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson is one of the few who took the gloves off and bluntly raise the question in a column called “A Problem Like Bill” about whether an actively-campaigning Bill Clinton would help his wife or prove to be a doubled edged sword. The column needs to be read in full, but here’s a tiny taste:

When the Clintons made a campaign stop at an Iowa grocery store Tuesday, Hillary’s face said it all. She realized that Bill had departed from the script and wandered off to another part of the store, and cameras caught her scanning the aisles with a look of sheer terror. Bill was supposed to be at Hillary’s side; instead, he was way over yonder, giving an interview to “Entertainment Tonight.” What was supposed to be a controlled photo op had suddenly turned into a happening.

And in the future he poses some questions:

Does anyone think that William Jefferson Clinton would confine himself to the bland, inoffensive pronouncements we’ve come to expect from presidential spouses? I’d give him two weeks of ribbon-cuttings and ceremonial visits before he felt compelled — and perhaps entitled — to jump into policy. Clearly, the smart thing would be to give him a portfolio of his own rather than let him play hopscotch.

But how would anyone keep him on the reservation? How would anyone tone down his charisma? And what would happen if a new Clinton administration gutted one of the accomplishments of the old Clinton administration? One potential case in point is the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Hillary says has to be modified. If she were to keep that campaign promise, would Bill just smile sweetly on his way to the next East Room reception?

What people think of Bill Clinton and his presidency is grist for other columns. For now, I’m asking a simpler question: Since the Constitution provides for one president, not two, could he find a way to live in a White House that wasn’t all about him?

But even that column doesn’t quite explore some of the possible impacts and implications of Hillary Clinton’s decision to turn the race into what seems to be a pitch for a restoration not just of a kind of politics (triangulated Democratic centrist for much of the term) but of the players (Bill and Hillary).

Some thoughts:

–Bill Clinton’s endorsement of Hillary’s experience will bring Clinton administration admirers and many Democrats into the fold. Clinton left office with high poll ratings.

—Bill Clinton has shown that he may be able to stay on message but doesn’t know when to stop delivering the message. He sometimes doesn’t know when to stop.

–The GOP will most-assuredly use Bill Clinton’s presence on the stump to go after Hillary Clinton and push all the “hot buttons” among GOPers to get them out to defeat The Return Of The Clintons (which still may not be enough for the GOP). If controversy including Bill Clinton at any point dominates the headlines, it will divert the Hillary Campaign from its message.

–Linking herself and her experience so closely to the Clinton years and not stressing with equal fervor what she has done as a Senator will hurt her with many voters. There are some voters who believe she would not have gotten where she was if she had not been first lady. There are others who feel that way but don’t hold it against her. And there are some who feel she would have gone far in politics if she had carved out her own career, so her present career is overdue. But linking her so SO closely to the Clinton years and in-effect running as a former (unofficial) administration member feeds into the perception some have that she is where she is because of who she married.

Former John Kerry campaign bigwig John Stasso sees great things for Hillary Clinton, despite the present bumps in the road:

Despite the Barack Obama zeal, I believe Clinton will prevail. And if she is the nominee, I believe she is the most electable and least vulnerable Democratic candidate to face the Republicans.

….Today Clinton has forged herself into a formidable political leader. She has undergone a remarkable journey. In the face of unending autopsies on her personal and political past, unrelieved targeting at both Democratic and Republican debates, the punishing demands imposed on a woman candidate, she is still standing unflinchingly in place.

…If she does capture the nomination, she will see her standing soar overnight. Nomination is a transforming passage. What was viewed by some as calculation becomes smartness, impersonalness becomes thoughtful deliberation.

–Running in effect as a former Clinton administration unofficial official who made policy with and worked with her husband will likely continue the intense polarization of American politics that stems from the cultural and political divisions amid Baby Boomers who were divided over the Vietnam War. NOT ALL Baby Boomers were at Woodstock or protesting the war (look at George W. Bush).

Andrew Sullivan wrote about this aspect in depth in The Atlantic in a piece endorsing Obama. The piece is now slightly outdated, since former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s candidacy now seems on the descent. The key section:

This is the critical context for the election of 2008. It is an election that holds the potential not merely to intensify this cycle of division but to bequeath it to a new generation, one marked by a new war that need not be—that should not be—seen as another Vietnam.

A Giuliani-Clinton matchup, favored by the media elite, is a classic intragenerational struggle—with two deeply divisive and ruthless personalities ready to go to the brink. Giuliani represents that Nixonian disgust with anyone asking questions about, let alone actively protesting, a war.

Clinton will always be, in the minds of so many, the young woman who gave the commencement address at Wellesley, who sat in on the Nixon implosion and who once disdained baking cookies. For some, her husband will always be the draft dodger who smoked pot and wouldn’t admit it. And however hard she tries, there is nothing Hillary Clinton can do about it. She and Giuliani are conscripts in their generation’s war. To their respective sides, they are war heroes.

In normal times, such division is not fatal, and can even be healthy. It’s great copy for journalists. But we are not talking about routine rancor. And we are not talking about normal times.

We are talking about a world in which Islamist terror, combined with increasingly available destructive technology, has already murdered thousands of Americans, and tens of thousands of Muslims, and could pose an existential danger to the West. The terrible failures of the Iraq occupation, the resurgence of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, the progress of Iran toward nuclear capability, and the collapse of America’s prestige and moral reputation, especially among those millions of Muslims too young to have known any American president but Bush, heighten the stakes dramatically.

The great potential for Hillary Clinton is that by linking-up with her husband she’ll remind voters of her hard work during his administration, her immersion in policy issue details and her role as someone who helped him win the White House due to her own efforts — and, by several accounts, her advice on policy and political matters.

The downside is that a super-high-profile Bill Clinton could divert her campaign from its central message, be perceived by many Americans as representing an attempted unofficial “restoration” of him to office , be portrayed by her foes as precisely that, unfairly suggest that Hillary could not run for President in her own right as an articulate Senator — and continue the Vietnam Era polarization of politics perpetrated by Baby Boomers who seemingly have an intense yearning to pass along their old divisions, biases and grudges to new generations. Will the new generations LET them?

It’s been said that American politics may not be able to be unpolarized until the Baby Boomers are gone or away from the levers of power.

It could be said that Hillary Clinton will have a hard time being perceived by many Americans as a leader in her own right until her effusive and attention-loving husband keeps a lower profile on the campaign trail and, ultimately — if the campaign trail leads to The Main Goal — in the White House.

A CROSS SECTION OF OTHER WEBLOG OPINION:

–Gateway Pundit looks at the Clintons’ record and doesn’t like what he sees.

–Carl at the Reaction has a reaction quite different than TMV’s JG:

The race is turning into the home stretch now, and that people don’t know Obama may now be his weakness. The electorate generally prefers the devil it knows, and the electorate views all candidates as devils.

The more Bill Clinton appears on the campaign trail and the tighter Hillary Clinton hitches her wagon to his legacy, the tougher it will become for Obama to score victories. In fact, the right wing charge of “Billary” may prove to be a useful asset in the Super Tuesday primary season, since it neatly sums up the point that Hillary was a major force in Bill’s policy shop.

People need to know that, and remember how good the 90s were to their pocketbooks and their families, and they will come to Clinton in droves.

–The satire site Scrappleface has some fun:

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is expected to rule this week that Sen. Hillary Clinton can no longer receive public funding for a presidential campaign which increasingly touts her experience in the White House with former President Bill Clinton, because the Constitution limits a president to two terms in office.

Read it in its entirety.

–Liberal Values poses an interesting question:

Clinton often claims experience as reason to support her over Obama, but it is far from clear as to how valuable Clinton’s experience was as First Lady, especially as her major project, health care reform, was a fiasco. Similarly, despite supposedly being more experienced, it was Obama and not Clinton who recognized that supporting Bush on Iraq would turn into one of the worst foreign policy disasters in our history.

I wonder what Al Gore makes of all this. Gore has been criticized for distancing himself from Bill Clinton in 2000. If Bill Clinton winds up not helping Hillary, will this vindicate his decision?

–Blue Crab Boulevard:

So does that mean all the scandals are co-scandals as well? All the bitterly hyperpartisan hackery should be jointly blamed on Hillary and Bill? You can read the rest of this new “back to the future” themed article, but for many of us, that is exactly what bothers us about the Clintons.

–The Heretik (who as usual has a great original graphic):

Did anybody really think it wouldn’t be a two for one? Yes, this will be a referendum on Bill, but only if it isn’t also a consideration of what Bush has done to this country? This may be the first election with two incumbents in the back of people’s minds.

–State of The Day:

Hillary may want to embrace her husband’s legacy, but Hillary has her own 9/11, national security legacy to point to. A legacy which involved writing a blank check to a president with clearly questionable motives. A legacy which allowed George Bush to go to war. This is how she reacted to an unexpected crisis. This is how she used her experience as co-president. This is the true legacy she is saddled with, no matter how hard she tries to hug her husband’s.

And, as far as Hillary playing the 9/11-fear card, it worked for Bush, so why not deal the American people another hand? It’s just one more example of the type of presidency we can expect from her. Who knows, maybe if Hillary does win she too will want to be known as a war-time president. Maybe she too will be looking for Congress to write her a blank check. After all, we all know how hard it is to remove a war-time president after a first term, just ask John Kerry.

–Gun Toting Liberal:

I don’t think for one moment anybody who lived through the 1990’s considered Ms. Clinton to be their “co-president” but it MIGHT work with the younger college kids who drink the kool-aid. Most people I personally knew thought of her as being a particularly annoying and boisterous First Lady at the time; much as she has been as a presidential campaigner and as the Senator from New York.

So what — she was in the White House for eight years — that’s not “presidential experience” as she is trying to claim it is. I’m an avid college hoops watcher and NFL fan but I’m smart enough to know I’d be MURDERED on a NCAA Division I basketball court or an NFL football field in a matter of moments. And I truly believe the vast majority of voters can see right through this strategy, too. But, even as I digress, I suppose we’ll soon find out, won’t we?

And, come to think of it, if TRUE — wouldn’t that make Hillary the “blackest” of the two major front-running candidates for the Democratic nomination?

–That Political Blog:

Even rock solid liberals are very divided on the electability of Hillary. And as for the character of Bill Clinton and what sort of precedent he would set as the “First Gentleman”…well, do I really need to say anything about so obvious a point?

The campaign of Hillary Clinton will really come down to two points. She will hammer home her “experience” which I have yet to have seen explained. And the change she will offer from policies of the Bush administration. The former will focus on the differences between her and Barack Obama, her main competitor at this time. The latter will hammer home the failures of the Bush administration and that advantage has been handed to her on a silver platter.

I just hope people are not swayed by Bill’s smile and charm. That might work on impressionable interns but I would hope the general electorate to be a bit more sophisticated.

–Raising Kane:

With regard to the Clinton administration being a co-presidency of Bill and Hillary, I simply don’t remember that being the case, certainly not after the 1994 Republican landslide. If anything, I recall the post-1995 Clinton administration as more like a Clinton-Gore co-presidency (if anything), or maybe a Clinton-Greenspan-Rubin co-presidency (fiscal conservatism, the end of “the era of big government,” individual — but most definitely NOT corporate — welfare, etc.). But honestly, I can’t recall a Bill-Hillary “co-presidency” after 1994. Is my memory failing me? Does anyone else remember this? Or, is it simply Bill Clinton exaggerating in order to help his wife, just like a few weeks ago he said he had always been against the Iraq war? As we demonstrated, that simply was not true. Nor, as far as I can determine, is the current claim about a Bill and Hillary “co-presidency.”

P.S. Also, during and after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, I seem to recall the Clintons barely even talking to each other, with photos of Chelsea separating the two of them as they walked across the White House lawn, etc. Anyone else have a different recollection?