With former President Clinton due to deliver tonight’s keynote
address at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte on
behalf of President Obama, Ryan Lizza dropped
this bombshell from the 2008 campaign in an article in the
New Yorker:
Tim Russert told me that, according to his sources, Bill
Clinton, in an effort to secure an endorsement for Hillary from Ted
Kennedy, said to Kennedy, “A few years ago, this guy would have
been carrying our bags.”
Conservatives, of course, know all too well that if it had been
reported that those words were uttered by a Republican there would
be no effort spared in ostracizing that Republican from public
life. Don’t forget that MSNBC personnel fell all over themselves
telling us that words like anger, Chicago and golf are racial
code words against Obama. But since Bill Clinton was “the first
black President,” he gets their dispensation.
Yet let us put aside the racial overtones of Clinton’s statement
(which, as if this writing, he has neither confirmed nor denied).
The most interesting aspect of this revelation is that, four years
later, it is Clinton who is set to carry Obama’s bags. (Meanwhile,
Hillary was wise enough to pack her
bags before the Labor Day Weekend. She is currently in
China amidst six country, Asia-Pacific tour thus
avoiding President Obama, her husband and the DNC
altogether).
It should be noted here that the 42nd President isn’t the first
person to have carried Obama’s bags nor will he be the last. Since
Obama won the 2008 Iowa Caucus, the liberal media has been carrying
his bags usually with great enthusiasm. Early on this was an easy
task because Obama’s bags were light owing to his tendency to vote
present. Matters of inconvenience such as Reverend Wright, Bill
Ayers and Rashid Khalidi were simply cast aside like lost baggage.
Or in the case of the
Khalidi videotape, some baggage was put under lock and key,
never to see the light of day.
However, over the past three and a half years, the liberal media
has found Obama’s bags heavier to carry. They still haul them but
not with the ease they did when hope and change danced off Obama’s
tongue causing people to faint in his presence. You would think
with the country accumulating nearly $5 trillion in debt, a
stimulus with no spark, the albatross of Obamacare and an
unemployment rate that hasn’t fallen below 8% would cause people to
feel faint or at the very least feel faint hope in President Obama.
No doubt this has played a big part in adding to the strain to the
backs and shoulders of the liberal media’s heavy lifting for The
Anointed One. Yet for the liberal media, carrying Obama’s bags is
preferable to the prospect of a Romney presidency.
But even some of Obama’s surrogates are having trouble carrying
his bags. When Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley was asked by Bob
Schieffer on CBS’ Face the Nation over the weekend if we
were better off now than we were four years ago, O’Malley replied in the
negative. O’Malley has since
changed his tune. But O’Malley, who has been touted by some as
a future Democratic presidential nominee, is likely to be relegated
to carrying Joe Biden’s bags for the next two months.
You know things are not going well when the best a surrogate
like former New Mexico Governor and Ambassador to the United
Nations
Bill Richardson can do is say that the international community
wants Obama to be re-elected. Unfortunately for Obama, UN General
Assembly members like Iran and Venezuela do not have a vote in this
election.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be
“a new era
of responsibility.” Instead, Obama has spent this new era of
responsibility blaming his problems and shortcomings on the Bush
Administration, Japanese tsunamis and the Arab Spring, thus passing
his burdens onto us. In a sense, all of us have been carrying
President Obama’s bags whether we want to or not.
There is a simple reason for this state of affairs. Barack Obama
cannot handle the responsibility that comes with being President of
the United States. President Obama cannot carry his own weight.
Will the American people choose a President who can carry his own
bags this time?
