Opinion: Former president reveals future president’s plans for him

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Isn’t it just a wee bit early for President Hillary Clinton to be making such specific plans for how to use her once infamous now famous husband Bill in her almost-certain administration?

Yes, she’s been planning this since before the moving trucks took her stuff away from the White House on Jan. 20, 2001. To be sure, right now 2008 looks like a pretty good year for Democrats given current polls, which won’t be current for very long but who cares? And her well-oiled machine is running a meticulously safe campaign designed to appear inevitable, until maybe Barack Obama comes a little too close in Iowa or New Hampshire, where he’s got nearly 100 staffers on the ground.

Yes, for now she seems to be building an even larger lead in polls over Obama. He’s spinning his wheels at the moment trying to figure out how to rip into her (‘How does experience as a first lady traveling to Kenya to visit a school and ride an elephant possibly qualify you to become commander-in-chief?’) without tarnishing his nice, polite candidate of hope image. And fewer people are paying attention to that Carolina trial lawyer who’s challenging everyone to do what he has to do, take public financing, when they don’t have to.

True, polls--even unscientific ones like web surveys on LATimes.com--indicate that no matter how they feel about her (and there sure are a lot of feelings about her), an awful lot of people believe at the moment that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee.

And if she’s lucky, James Dobson and his suicidal better-dead-than-red homemade church crowd will hopelessly run a third-party evangelical against a not-100%-pure Republican nominee and petulantly ensure that the next couple of Supreme Court justices are liberal activists.

But everywhere he goes now, allegedly hawking his new book or his initiative to save the world between closed fundraisers for his wife, the former president seems to be talking publicly about what his duties will be in his wife’s administration. Somehow, the ‘if’ seems to have disappeared from this discussion.

Last weekend President Clinton I repeated to Tim Russert and Martha Stewart and his former aide, George Stephanopoulos, ‘Whatever she wants me to do I’ll do.’ Eighteen months before her presumed inauguration, President Clinton II was describing to campaign crowds how she’d use her husband as a roving ambassador sending him all over the world to rebuild the U.S. image. He’s got Secret Service protection for life anyway. Why not put them to good use?

The Clintons work very hard controlling their image. Having blanketed American television on countless programs for the past several weekends and dismissing talk of political dynasties, the 61-year-old former president Clinton is over in London now, ostensibly promoting his book but actually doing more fundraisers and granting interviews.

He told the Guardian that his first assignment from the future president will be to ‘go out and immediately restore America’s standing, go out and tell people America was open for business and cooperation again’ after eight years of unilateral activities that he said have enraged the world.

For years now, according to Clinton’s analysis, American politics and its media have been under the powerful influence of ‘the most ideological, rightwing element of the Republican party’ and Americans are tiring of it. This, he says, has led to a national climate in which ‘three-dimensional reality’ has been turned into ‘two-dimensional cartoons, and then [the rightwing media] try to get people to divide up on the basis of whether you like the cartoon or not.’

The Guardian reports: ‘Mr. Clinton says his wife’s image as a ruthlessly ambitious politician is unfair. ‘Contrary to the image that has been cultivated about my wife, she’s always been a rather reluctant electoral person,’ he says.’

Scanning the cross-country campaign travel schedules that the future president’s staff efficiently distributes to media a couple of times a day, that might not be the impression an average non-rightwing person would take away.

--Andrew Malcolm