What business does the spouse of an as-yet-undeclared candidate have announcing a governing agenda for his wife’s first hundred days as president? Shouldn’t Hillary be doing that? And shouldn’t she wait until after she’s declared, instead of outsourcing the job to her husband while she’s still playing coy?
Hillary’s willingness to allow Bill to set forth a governing agenda at the recent conference of their joint foundation tells us what we should already know. Bill and Hillary are running together and will govern together as co-presidents. Unfortunately, co-presidencies aren’t in the Constitution and they don’t work in practice, as the first Clinton administration proved.
Enough memoirs and studies of the Clintons’ White House years have now been published for us to reconstruct what actually happened behind-the-scenes as husband and wife simultaneously took the reins of power in the 1990s. Itwasn’t pretty. And all the problems are set to return, as I explain in “Déjà Two,” my recent piece on the Clinton co-presidency.
Imagine the media and public reaction if the spouse of any other presidential candidate laid out a governing agenda for the first 100 days — even after the candidate had thrown a hat in the ring, much less before. This shows how thoroughly we now take for granted the notion of a Clinton co-presidency. That is a mistake, not only because it means a return of governing chaos, but because fears of a second Clinton co-presidency helped to kill Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign and could easily be a factor in 2016.
This is what the media forgets or suppresses. Todd Purdum’s Politico piece on Hillary’s Bill problem (really the cross between a fan letter and an advice column) doesn’t even mention the most important challenge posed by Bill: public fears of an out-of-control co-presidency, with Hillary not truly in charge.
In 2008, Democratic primary voters initially saw the prospect of a second Clinton co-presidency as a positive. The chaos of the dual campaign quickly turned that perception around, however, raising damaging questions about how having two presidents in the White House would actually work.
Bill Clinton’s announcement of a governing agenda for his wife is news, and not good news, whether the media wants to admit that or not.
— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He can be contacted at comments.kurtz@nationalreview.com.