PITTSBURGH — She can implicitly criticize him and publicly embrace him, sometimes in the same day. But Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton cannot escape the shadow of her husband, the former president whose huge personality and fame sometimes threaten to overwhelm her efforts to control the daily message and tone of her presidential campaign.
This week’s events in Pennsylvania bolstered the view that Bill Clinton is his wife’s greatest asset and perhaps her biggest encumbrance.
The only Democrat in three decades to win the presidency, he brings his renowned political instincts and insights to her private strategy sessions and to public stages, where he is a crowd-pleasing surrogate whom her rivals cannot match. He also brings baggage.
It begins, of course, with his White House sex scandal and subsequent impeachment. But it extends to areas that many Democrats would not have anticipated.
The usually silver-tongued Arkansan has erupted at times, blurting out racially tinged remarks that have angered many blacks, a key constituency of his wife’s Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama.
And his presidential record is proving to have two edges.
Hillary Clinton embraces his economic legacy but increasingly distances herself from his trade policies, a hot issue in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary.
The family crosscurrents resurfaced Wednesday. In the space of a few minutes, the New York senator implicitly criticized her husband’s stand on trade with Colombia, then lauded his economic record and campaign skills.
The day culminated with mutual praise, a hug and a kiss in front of 5,000 people, as the Clintons introduced Elton John for a concert at New York’s Radio City Music Hall that raised $2.5 million for her campaign.
Driving the latest intra-family tension is the anger that many Pennsylvania voters and union leaders feel toward trade policies that they blame for shipping U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas.
Acknowledging that her husband supports the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, which she opposes, Sen. Clinton said in a stop near Pittsburgh: “I have a long record of being on a different attitude toward trade than my husband does.”
Moments later, the senator could hardly praise her husband enough. Asked about their daughter Chelsea’s quip that her mom would be a better president than her dad, she replied: “I think I have two great surrogates, and I only hope to be able to amass the economic record for our country that my husband did.”
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been inextricably entwined with her husband’s legacy from the start. She cites her eight years as first lady as vital training for the top job. And the strong opinions many Americans hold for her, positive and negative, often stem from those days, when she delved deeply into health care issues and endured the embarrassment of her husband’s affair with a White House intern.
Surprisingly, given that Bill Clinton was famously called the nation’s “first black president,” the biggest problems he has caused his wife’s campaign involve black voters. Black Democrats’ support of Obama did not become so lopsided until he won heavily white Iowa, followed by a key win in South Carolina, where Bill Clinton angered some blacks with comments before and after the primary.
Hillary Clinton’s eventual win or loss this year will, inevitably, be placed partly at her husband’s feet. At the Elton John concert, he kept his message simple and adoring.
“She can win this nomination,” he said, urging the crowd to resist calls for his wife to drop out.
Then, paying her perhaps the biggest compliment he can, he said he agreed with Chelsea that her mother would be a better president than her dad.
