CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Moments before Bill Clinton took the stage at the Democratic Party’s convention, word bubbled through the Time Warner Cable Arena that President Obama would join him on the podium after his speech. This made official what was already implicit: The sitting president had come to bask in the former president’s glow.
Obama was backstage while the audience clapped along to the old Clinton theme song, Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).” The 20,000 jamming the hall watched footage of Clinton’s past triumphs — “longest economic expansion in history” — and then erupted in cheers as Clinton strolled slowly onto the stage, giving a thumbs-up to the cameras.
His speech — a meandering Clintonian mix of folksiness and savage partisanship — was illuminated by the sparkle of thousands of camera flashes and punctuated with regular shouts of “We love you, Bill!” Inevitably, the subject matter frequently returned to the speaker’s favorite topic: Bill Clinton. “Thankfully, by 1996, the economy was roaring, everybody felt it, and we were halfway through the longest peacetime expansion in the history of the United States,” he reminded the delegates. “People ask me all the time how we delivered four surplus budgets,” he confided, adding: “Republican economic policies quadrupled the debt before I took office, in the 12 years before I took office, and doubled the debt in the eight years after I left.”
But what about Obama? “President Obama appointed several members of his Cabinet even though they supported Hillary in the primary. Heck, he even appointed Hillary.” Obama and his advisers knew that this was exactly what was going to happen. But they calculated that it was worth risking the perception that Obama was trying to ride a former president’s coattails to re-election. In the end, that gamble will probably prove to be a good one, because Clinton, a far more popular figure than Obama, bestowed his blessing on the president unambiguously, in some ways making the case for Obama’s re-election more cogently than Obama has made it. “No president — not me, not any of my predecessors, no one — could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years,” Clinton told the crowd. “But he has laid the foundation for a new, modern, successful economy of shared prosperity, and if you will renew the president’s contract, you will feel it. You will feel it.”
