SALON

Wednesday, Aug 8, 2012 6:28 PM UTC

Romney shill’s amazing Clinton spin

Jennifer Rubin thinks it is horrible news for Obama that our most popular living ex-president supports him

By

Topics: 2012 Elections, Politics, Bill Clinton, Mitt Romney, Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, Media, Media Criticism, Welfare, Barack Obama,

Romney shill's amazing Clinton spinBill Clinton and Barack Obama (Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

Astute campaign analysis from the Washington Post’s fiercely independent conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin: A news event that seems to be a misstep by Romney is in fact a thrilling Romney victory that has Obama cowering with fear.

Here in reality, Mitt Romney seized on a misleading right-wing talking point about an obscure TANF policy change from Barack Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services and used it to create a blatantly dishonest attack ad (and stump speech attack line). Then, still in this reality, Bill Clinton, whose name and image were invoked in the Romney attack ad, released a statement saying plainly that Romney’s ad was dishonest. Bill Clinton remains broadly popular nationally, because his time as president was a time of relative prosperity for many Americans, which is why the Democrats have given him a prime speaking slot at their upcoming convention. The last Republican president, by the way, won’t be speaking at the Republican convention. In fact, he won’t even attend.

In Jennifer Rubin’s world, a world where everything is Good News For Mitt Romney, this is a “debacle” for Obama. It may shock you to learn how much Jennifer Rubin admires Bill Clinton, or at least the conservative anti-Obama Bill Clinton that she has invented for the purposes of this post. “One wonders how Clinton feels as Obama repudiates the centrist vision that made Clinton the most successful Democratic president since Harry Truman,” she writes. (He feels OK enough about it to stump for Obama?)

This is my favorite part of the post, where Rubin somehow turns Clinton releasing a statement calling Romney dishonest into a confirmation that Clinton totally agrees with Romney’s attack:

The Obama campaign, plainly fearing what Bill Clinton would say unscripted, released a statement by Clinton last night that was, at most, a thin rebuke to Romney. In it, Clinton essentially confirms Romney’s take on the change: “The recently announced waiver policy was originally requested by the Republican governors of Utah and Nevada to achieve more flexibility in designing programs more likely to work in this challenging environment.” In other words, the Obama administration opened the door to states’ defining “work” as everything from self-help classes to weight-loss programs. Clinton’s statement actually undercuts the opening line of the release (“Governor Romney released an ad today alleging that the Obama administration had weakened the work requirements of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. That is not true.” Well, actually Clinton explains that this is precisely what it does.)

Clinton calls Romney’s attack “disappointing.” That’s an interesting, and decidedly understated, word choice.

If that seems “understated” you might want to return to the first sentence of the statement where his word choice was the more plainly stated “not true.”

Then Rubin moves on to just outright imagining that if Clinton were to speak extemporaneously on the subject of welfare reform he’d assuredly hurt Obama even more than he did with this secretly pro-Romney statement, written in a code only Jennifer Rubin can decrypt. Then she writes: “And the prospect of Clinton speaking at the Democratic National Convention has, more each day, Republicans licking their lips at the prospect of Clinton vs. Obama comparisons.”

This defies parody.

Here are the various things Jennifer Rubin would have us believe, in this one, brief post:

  • Bill Clinton’s popularity is bad for Obama.
  • Popular Bill Clinton’s support for Barack Obama is bad for Obama.
  • The fact that popular Bill Clinton will be giving a speech in support of Obama at the Democratic National Convention will be terrible for Obama.
  • Obama is scared of popular Bill Clinton opening his mouth, which is I guess why they are having him give a prime-time televised address at the convention.

And all this is ignoring the divorced-from-reality idea that Obama represents a significant break, policy-wise, from the Clinton era (hence his filling out his administration with longtime anti-Clintonites like Larry Summers, Rahm Emanuel, Jack Lew, and … Hillary Clinton).

Again, Rubin is just an outright shill for the Romney campaign, and it’s bizarre that the Washington Post thinks this is “good conservative blogging.”

Continue Reading Close
Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 26 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations