I've Been Saying This For Weeks Now

He is attacking Barack Obama with the same playbook he used to go after Republican targets like Newt Gingrich. Are the Clintons stuck in reverse?

But what seems clear -- in a way that is reminiscent of that sad-eyed year 1998 -- is that Bill Clinton is once again a double-edged sword for the Democrats.…

Or perhaps (and this is my own guess), Bill Clinton is out of practice and out of his era. As president and a globe-trotting former president, Clinton has been mostly insulated from the rough-and-tumble of the press scrum where ambush questions can't be avoided. Now reporters can catch him shaking hands in a small room. When he ran for president as a small-state governor in 1992, the Internet was off in the mists of the future, while cable TV and CNN were virtually synonymous. The fabled invention of the 1992 campaign war room was in response to the demands of what now seems a sleepy media age. Cosseted by handlers for 15 years, Clinton may have lost sight of the ease with which loose lips can sink ships.…

It is a strange reality of politics 2008 that both parties are still partially mired in the 1980s. Republican candidates vie to be regarded as the next Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton was the president who belatedly crafted the Democratic response to Reaganism -- taking issues like welfare, crime and the deficit off the table. But there was always a backward-looking aspect to the Clinton presidency even as he purported to build a "bridge to the 21st century."

In the midst of discussing the folly of the No Child Left Behind education program Wednesday, Bill Clinton suddenly invoked legendary Negro League baseball star Satchel Paige's dictum: "Don't look back, somebody might be gaining on you." The former president did not mean it this way, but Paige's words could easily apply to how the Clintons regard the Obama challenge on the cusp of Saturday's South Carolina primary.