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Go Home All Clinton, All The Time

TIMOTHY NOAH SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

All Clinton, All The Time

BY TIMOTHY NOAH

Is this a slow news week or something? Former President Bill Clinton is scheduled to appear on all three Sunday morning chat shows to discuss next week's annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. It isn't even the first one! It's the seventh! Look, I know Sting and Geena Davis will be there, and Muhammad Yunus (to provide a little glitz). And sure, the guy's married to the current secretary of state. But can't David and Bob and Christiane do any better? When the Carter Center throws a shindig our 39th president never gets this kind of network-news love. What's Bill Clinton's secret?

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8 comments

Recency. And the fact that his party still likes him, unlike the Republicans' ill will towards both Bushes (for entirely different reasons!)

- chaitless

September 16, 2011 at 10:46am

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It's a slow news time. The Republicans are slowly revving up opposition to Obama's Jobs Bill. It has to be slow, otherwise their obstructionism becomes transparent. And we can't have that.

- AllanL5

September 16, 2011 at 10:49am

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I hope he'll take the opportunity to remind people that the Repubs are saying the same things now that they said in 1993 - and that they're wrong again. He argued for, and pushed through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases (as the first Pres. Bush had done), and the Repubs argued that ANY tax increase would "wreck the economy". Some wreck. Now Pres. Obama is pushing for a return to the Clinton-era tax rates as part of deficit reduction. Right now the Repubs are defining the issue as simply "increasing taxes", which, in the absence of specifics, sounds like a LARGE increase of MY taxes. Even mainstream media have placidly accepted these terms. Once we redefine the issue properly as a return to the Clinton-era rates, the Democrats' position has wider appeal.

- bjones

September 16, 2011 at 10:58am

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Bill Clinton still has star power. Plus the news is slow, so he owns this weekend.

- liberalref

September 16, 2011 at 12:49pm

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It boggles my mind that this somehow qualifies as "slow news time." Europe's financial system is in a slow-motion meltdown. We could all be plunged back into recession as a result. Yet that's not news.

- Dausuul

September 16, 2011 at 4:01pm

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@Dausuul: It's hard to get European central bankers onto the US Sunday-morning talk shows. They're not pretty, so who would want to see them?

- dmorehous

September 16, 2011 at 4:54pm

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He's such a bad boy, such a naughty boy. So cheeky. And glories in it. It's hard not to look. Takes our minds off the present gloom & doom.

- Haole45

September 16, 2011 at 11:57pm

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I think the answer is "demonstrated effectiveness". He didn't do as much as he could have minus self-inflicted wounds, but he will go down in history as the most effective Dem in the White House since FDR. He's still got the mojo.

- Robert Powell

September 17, 2011 at 12:52pm

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