Now we find out: they really can't stand Bill

John Harris, who has written his own book on Bill Clinton, The Survivor, has an article today about the relationship between Bill Clinton and the Washington establishment. And Harris says that we're finally seeing the real feelings that the Washington elites have towards to Bill and Hillary. According to Harris, they just never really liked him. He didn't fit in their club.

In some moods, the Clintons also like to imagine that they are victims of Eastern snobbery against Arkansans. There is probably a whiff of truth to that. But nearly everyone in Washington is from somewhere else, and Arkansas roots hardly hurt Clinton’s mentor, William Fulbright, with the Washington elite.

From Washington’s perspective, to judge by the most common criticism heard over the years and again in recent days, the problem is not that Bill Clinton is Bubba but that he is Eddie Haskell — smug, smarmy, self-absorbed.

When he first arrived in Washington (I did not start covering him until a couple years later), many journalists seemed to be hoping for another JFK, a politician detached and ironic about his own performance, who shared reporters’ love of gossip and process and style. They hoped for too much.

The obvious question, still relevant all these years later, is: Who cares?

I have learned to be impervious to journalistic predictions of Clinton’s demise. While still working at The Washington Post, I recall a top newsroom editor predicting early in the 1992 campaign that Clinton would never be the Democratic nominee. (“He’s got too many scandals.”)

Nine years later, the legendary Watergate editor Ben Bradlee confidently told me that Clinton’s reputation and relevance were permanently shattered by the pardon scandal. (“This is the coup de grace,” he rasped.)

Of course, they were fully happy to rally around the Clintons when they were in the White House and when she ran for the Senate. They might not have liked him deep down, but they were in his pocket whenever he needed them.

It's been quite fun to see all these liberals have their own public epiphanies that there something rather sleazy and distasteful about the Clintons now that the former president and his wife have turned their ammunition away from the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy to train it on an attractive liberal black Democrat. My husband had a roundup yesterday of such liberals sharing their disgust with the Clintons. Conservatives like myself are enjoying some sweet vindication as prominent liberals are coming around to our long held views that those two will do anything to win.

You can add Frank Rich to the list. Rich had a column this weekend warning about the shoes that might drop if Hillary is chosen as the Democratic candidate and then we start finding out what is being hidden in the Clinton papers that haven't been opened to the public or what we will find out about those Friends of Bill who have been sending the big bucks to Bill's library in Little Rock.

One of those shoes is dropping in Newsweek this week as Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball report on some of those F.O.B.'s and their donations to the Clintons. And there are several shady characters who have been shoveling money to the library and to Clinton's global fund.

If Hillary Clinton had been seen with a discredited former autocrat, it would have made front pages across the country. But Bill's Yalta visit went unnoticed outside Ukraine. The trip illustrates the unusual position the former president is in. He is his wife's top political adviser, and Hillary does little to downplay the idea that he would be a notable, if unofficial, presence in her administration. In speeches, she says that she would deploy her husband as a roving ambassador. Yet unlike Hillary, who must report the names of her campaign contributors and how much they give, Bill Clinton is a private citizen and does not have to disclose most details about his charitable and business ventures. His private dealings raise inevitable questions about who might come seeking favors if he and Hillary move back into the White House.

Stories like these are another reason why so many liberals are suddenly finding their voices and endorsing Barack Obama. They just don't want to have to spend another four or eight years defending this sort of thing. And they're not even part of the Vast Right Wing. Welcome to the Conspiracy, guys.