Clemency suggests

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Is it the economy again or is that just stupid?

James Forsyth

Sunday, 3rd February 2008

Bill Clinton drew a crowd of a couple of thousand at the University of Missouri today. The former president has definitely toned one thing down since South Carolina: his choice of ties. The burnt orange and canary yellow ones that he sported last week have been replaced by a rather sober blue effort.

South Carolina hovered over the event in another way. The Clintons are now clearly keen to heal the split between them and African Americans that emerged in South Carolina following their hard ball tactics there. One of the warm up speakers stressed what Hillary had done for the civil rights movement as a student and ‘her commitment to inclusion’ while Bill himself introduced a black Florida Congressman. Worryingly for the Clintons, though, in a state where more than one in ten of the population is black I saw more Asian-Americans than African-Americans at the rally.

Most of Bill’s speech was centred on the plight of the middle class. The Clintons clearly believe that this primary and the general election in November can be won by responding to the economic insecurity that so many Americans feel.

The current economic woes play both to Hillary’s strengths as a policy wonk who has detailed prescriptions to these problems and to her campaign’s argument that she, unlike Obama, is read to lead immediately in these difficult times. As Bill put it, “you hire a president to keep big, bad things from happening as well as to make good things happen.”

Bill is clearly trying to be more disciplined on the stump. Every section of his speech now ends with a section about how that’s why you have to vote for Hillary. But he still spends a large amount of his time defending his administration’s record which gives the impression that he is running for a third term.