The Obama-Bill Clinton Thing

All along, below the radar of contesting Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama has been matched up with her husband in a battle of both substance and style that reflects generational differences.

Now, at the end of Jeremiah Wright Week, as Obama is out there doing TV interviews to stop his slide in the polls, the contrasts with Bill Clinton are coming into sharper focus.

In his speech on race in Philadelphia, Obama tried to put the Wright YouTube clips into context--an admirable trait in a president but treacherous for a candidate, as it soon proved to be.

Contrast this with Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment in 1992. Granted, Clinton had no previous connection with her, but, after her inflammatory rhetoric about white people after the Los Angeles riots, he didn't hesitate to make political points by condemning her for black racism at a meeting of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition.

That's what politicians do. But Obama, by trying to address the issue of race seriously before Wright's antics forced his hand, has been politically wounded by not throwing his pastor to the media wolves as soon as the issue surfaced.

It's this serious deliberation that seems to rankle Bill Clinton most. In New Hampshire, he branded Obama's opposition to the Iraq war as a "fairy tale." After South Carolina, the former president pooh-poohed Obama's victory by pairing him with Jesse Jackson and, when he was criticized for it, claimed that Obama was playing the "race card" on him.

Now on a shorter leash after embarrassing Hillary's campaign, Bill Clinton is out there less visibly using his old-politics style in North Carolina and Indiana. It's as if Obama's surge toward the nomination with a new kind of appeal to younger voters is a personal affront.

Bill Clinton is telling his generation that "once you've reached a certain age, you won't sit there and listen to somebody tell you there's really no difference between what happened in the Bush years and the Clinton years."

But what seems to bother him most is the potential difference between both those eras and what might become the Obama years.