Bill Clinton, President Obama’s Saul Alinsky

A curious thing happened this week. The former President said about our current President, “I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.”

Those people were all of us who are getting health insurance cancellation notices, and the ex-President intimated, to put it mildly, that President Obama was either a liar, or was in over his head with regard to his now famous line that those of us who liked our health care could keep it.

That has never been the goal, of course; Obamacare is nothing more than a step toward a single payer system, in which the government, and not “market based exchanges,” decides what’s good for us, at our expense. This was, in fact, the same goal of HillaryCare back in the ’90’s. The polls convinced Bill back then that team Clinton should back off, and so they did.

Barack Obama is a different political beast. He convinced his party, with no Republican votes, to pass his plan. The Democrats paid the price in 2010. President Obama was uninterested in his party’s losses; he won, after all, and the Affordable Care Act stood to be his legacy.

Three years later, things have gone south, to wit: it isn’t working. As a pundit correctly said earlier this week, the number of people who are actually enrolled in Obamacare–roughly 50,000–could fit inside of Yankee stadium with seats to spare. So what is President Obama’s reaction? An 800 number, and a promise that his team is working overtime to fix the “website problem.”

The problem isn’t the website. The problem is the notion that the federal government can administer medicine competently and efficiently. Bill Clinton knows that, and he knows that if his wife is to win the White House in 2016, she is going to have to run as far as possible away from the sitting President.
Here’s where Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals comes in. Rule number four is, “Make the enemy live up to [his] own book of rules.” Clinton, knowing that there is no way for President Obama to keep his if-you-like-your-insurance-you-can-keep-it pledge, challenges the President, (with classic Clintonian charm,) to honor that “book of rules.”

Why? The answer is, Hillary has a lot on her plate as she prepares to be the next President. It’s not just Benghazi (though that’s a legitimate case alone against her); it goes back to her tenure as co-president, with multiple scandals plaguing her, from Travelgate to Whitewatergate to the turning of a thousand dollars into a hundred thousand dollars in no time in cattle futures. Bill, make no mistake, wants back into the White House.

The former President though, isn’t the ambitious one in the Clinton partnership; he’s the charmer, and he’s the thinker. So it makes sense that as she works tirelessly to do, logistically, what it takes to win, he will say what it takes to tantalize voters into voting for her, irrespective of her opponent.
It’s far from certain that their strategy will work. But that’s their plan.
By: Will Anderson