Bill Clinton’s Strategic Emotion [View All]

January 21, 2008, 6:55 pm
Bill Clinton’s Strategic Emotion
By MATTHEW CONTINETTI
Remember September 2006? It was a little over a month before Election Day when Bill Clinton gave an interview to Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace. The peg for the interview was a summit held by the Clinton Global Initiative, one of the former president’s many philanthropic activities. Wallace asked several questions about the initiative, but four minutes into the interview also brought up criticisms of the Clinton administration’s counterterrorism policies that had been aired in Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Lawrence Wright’s history of Al Qaeda, “The Looming Tower.” Whereupon Clinton went … ballistic. His face turned red. His voice rose. He tore into Wallace, accusing the veteran journalist, who over the decades has worked for several “mainstream” networks and whose credibility seldom has been questioned, of being a right-wing shill. He claimed the “neocons” who now say he did too little to capture or kill Osama bin Laden had in fact during the 1990s been highly critical of his administration’s emphasis on counterterrorism, that they “thought I was too obsessed with bin Laden” and “had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months after I left office.”

The former president neglected to name which “neocons” had said he had been “obsessed” with bin Laden, nor did he directly rebut the specific criticisms made in Wright’s book. That’s not what mattered, however. What mattered was Clinton’s fury, his outburst, his apparently uncontrollable emotion.


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And yet Senator Clinton’s recent string of success continues. She has won close, hard-won victories in the New Hampshire primary and the Nevada caucuses. She has the opportunity to outperform expectations this week in South Carolina, and is in a strong position to win major state contests on Super Tuesday. Mr. Clinton’s comments to the talk show host Charlie Rose in December that America would be “rolling the dice” by electing Barack Obama; his rambling description in New Hampshire of Obama’s Iraq record as a “fairy tale”; his aggressive response to a question from a television news reporter in Nevada concerning an abstruse legal battle over caucus rules — each display of emotion has earned headlines and the disapproval of American opinion makers, but has also done little to stop the Clinton Restoration from progressing.

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These days the former president’s “outbursts” serve a dual purpose: they lend the impression that Senator Clinton is the insurgent running against the media-supported Obama, while also creating the illusion that it is the former president, not his wife, who is actually the candidate for the Democratic nomination. Far from hurting Senator Clinton — who also understands how to deploy strategic emotion, as we saw before the New Hampshire Democratic primary — former President Clinton effectively has rallied a coalition of Democrats to her cause.

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/bill-clintons-strategic-emotion/index.html?ref=opinion

I think everything the Clintons do is calculated and strategic - they are political animals to the core!