CanadaNews’ Reporter Notes

The Hillary Machine is looking to pull out the upset in New Hampshire tomorrow. The ‘Obama Show’ that everyone has been getting a taste of is determined to rock the Granite State. All indicators point at Obama winning the primary tomorrow. Both candidates have made numerous stops to the New England state of the past year, and the payoff is less than 24 hours away.

The question is: “With Hillary down by double digits, things look bleak. A person within the Hillary Camp emailed me yesterday and said they were looking to try to do as well as possible. It didn’t read like a person who once had as much as a 20 point lead over Obama. It’s possible that Hillary’s answer is her husband. You know the guy, the former President of the United States; none other than William Jefferson Clinton. His friends call him “Bill”.

Bill Clinton has been all over New Hampshire campaigning for his wife. He is dedicated to her politically. He braved points unknown to help her out. In November he spoke at Gorham Middle-High School located in Gorham, New Hampshire. He spoke to a crowd of about 400 people. He was trying to drum up votes for Hillary. The small town, just a mere 50 miles away from the Canadian border was jumping with excitement – despite the cold temperatures. Some believe it is the biggest thing to happen there since Dwight Eisenhower visited in the 1950s.

You have to wonder if having Bill hitting the trail helps or hurts her chances. Right now she’s down when she should be leading and personally, she has her own ‘coldness’; unlike her husband. Bill left office oozing with popularity. All of is mishaps and indiscretions have been forgiven; for the most part.

Previously to 2007, Bill Clinton hadn’t been to New Hampshire’s famed North Country since his inaugural presidential bid in 1992. Take note, I was in high school at the time. It’s apparent that Clinton loves New Hampshire and hopefully New Hampshire still loves him. More importantly, he hopes that they show Hillary the same love that they had once shown him.

In many more areas, though, the progress that was made under Clinton — almost 23 million new jobs, reductions in poverty, lower crime and higher wages — had been reversed or wiped away entirely in a remarkably short time. Clinton’s presidency seems now to have been oddly ephemeral; his record etched in chalk and left out in the rain.

Supporters of the Clintons see an obvious reason for the domestic decline of all the success made by Bill Clinton’s administrations — that is George W. Bush and his Republican party. According to the supporters, for the past seven years the GOP has undertaken a ferocious and unbending assault on Clinton’s progressive legacy. Bush and the Republicans abandoned balanced budgets to fight the war in Iraq, widened income inequality by cutting taxes on the wealthy and scaled back social programs.

Some Democrats, though, and especially those who are apt to call themselves “progressives,” offer a more complicated and less charitable explanation. In their view, Clinton failed to seize his moment and create a more enduring, more progressive legacy — not just because of the personal travails and Republican attacks that hobbled his presidency, but because his centrist, “third way” political strategy, his strategy of “triangulating” to find some middle point in every argument, sapped the party of its core principles. By this thinking, Clinton and his friends at the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist think tank that served as a platform for his bid for national office, were so desperate to woo back moderate Southern voters that they accepted conservative assertions about government (that it was too big and unwieldy, that what was good for business was good for workers) and thus opened the door wide for Bush to come along and enact his extremist agenda with only token opposition. In other words, they say, he was less a victim of Bush’s radicalism than he was its enabler.

Hence the problem with Bill in New Hampshire.

“His budget policies were pretty much an extension of Bush I, and his economic policies were largely an extension of Wall Street,” says Robert Borosage, co-director of the left-wing Campaign for America’s Future.

Aside from a few partisans on each end of the spectrum, there aren’t neatly delineated camps on this question, with Clinton lovers on one side and critics on the other. Rather, a lot of Democrats seem genuinely conflicted, on practically an existential level, when it comes to Clinton. They almost uniformly admire the former president; 82 percent of Democrats polled by Fox News in November had a favorable opinion of Clinton, and, in a New York Times poll released earlier this month, 44 percent of Democratic voters said they were more inclined to support Hillary’s candidacy because of him. And yet, they regard with suspicion, if not outright resentment, the centrist forces he helped unleash on the party. They might love Bill Clinton, but they loathe Clintonism.

That in turn brings us back full circle to Bill’s role in everything.

Some think at its best, Clintonism represented a more modern relationship between government and individuals, one that demanded responsibilities of both.

It is important to note that Bill Clinton directly challenged the status quo of both his party and the country. He argued that such a tumultuous moment demanded more than two stark ideologies better suited to the past. Possibly, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is focused on restoring an old status quo. Word is she has several people from Bill’s historic group helping out in New Hampshire and points unknown.

It’s hard for Hillary to tort change if she sticks to old dems for help. Someone is going to be the machine in all of this – and I sometimes wonder if Obama wish it were him.