The man Hillary cannot overcome

Lurking in the shadows of inconvenient truths is the familiar form of an erstwhile president whose heart seems to warm to the precise extent that his wife’s anticipation of oval glory cools. Hillary Clinton floats the idea that her aspirations have been felled by sexism, and perhaps they have: not by America’s but by her husband’s.
Beneath the veneer of snow-white mane and country-boy grin skulks a formerly latent antipathy toward women (interns excluded and his wife particularly) occupying the office that once was his domain and playground. How else to explain Bill Clinton’s subtle but systematic rhetorical undoing of Sen. Hill, in some instances just as her hopes have inched toward audacity?
An ill-timed and politically sacrilegious reference to Robert F. Kennedy is the latest case in point. Hill, who has run a dead heat against Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama in the race to misspeak first and clarify later, invoked Robert Kennedy’s June 1968 assassination in defense of her campaign lingering. This, naturally, stirred the establishment ire, particularly as the comment roughly coincided with news of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s brain tumor. Meanwhile, Obama presumably increased his security detail and hired new wine testers.
So how did Hill arrive at the preposterous notion that referencing dead Kennedys in conversations with newspaper editorial boards, who tend to publish such things, made for sound campaign strategy? Well, according to columnist Bob Novak, the observation has been one frequently made by President Bill. One imagines him whispering it, subliminally, as she sleeps with visions of 3 a.m. phone calls dancing in her head.
When Hill stammered her way neck-high into the deepening gaffe mire by waxing ineloquent about dodging sniper fire in Bosnia, Bill ensured that her stumble was prolonged, as if in slow motion on continuous loop. In a speech after his wife’s flailing efforts at recovery, Bill revived the topic when it had begun to recede into entertaining footnote. She misspoke, he said, “one time late at night when she was exhausted.” Hill promptly admonished Flubba to keep quiet, then relegated him to stumping in the backwoods.
Of course, the senator from New York similarly had issued zipped-lips directives to staffers on the subject of race after arrows were hurled between her camps and Obama’s in South Carolina. Bill responded with references to Obama playing the race card, precipitating Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of the senator from Illinois.
The series of inopportune rhetorical trips — or, perhaps, pratfalls — prompted party insiders to wonder over the strange occurrences in the mind of a politician once known for remarkable slickness. Observers said Bill had lost political touch. South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn called it “bizarre.”
Less so have been the results. Hill has worry enough escaping herself without having to scramble to cover her husband’s tracks. It is difficult to imagine Bill Clinton disdaining a return stay at the place of so many former escapades. It also is difficult to imagine a man so adept at slipping beyond hazards of his own devising suddenly forgetting the art of it all.
Whether Bill’s assaults on Hill’s deliquescent presidential dreams have been intentional, this much is plain: She might have bested one man for the job but she cannot beat two, especially the one visibly restive in her shadow.