January 8, 2008--Where Have You Gone Billy Boy?

When I heard that a political opponent of Barack Obama’s claimed that what many are calling a phenomenon was in fact more like a “Fairy Tale” I assumed, considering the double-entendre possibilities embedded in the comment, that the Swiftboating of Obama was beginning.

What next, as in the racist campaign against Harold Ford in Tennessee, a picture of the Senator with a blonde? Or a parade of former Harvard law students “revealing” that Obama was their dope dealer? Or, and this is a joke, that like what Karl Rove did to John McCain in South Carolina, that Obama has not one but two black children?

No, this Fairy Tale crack came from hithertofor political savant, Bill Clinton. And on the same day that he said that voters will have to take Hillary as she is because, to quote him, “I can’t make her younger [like Barack], taller [like Barack], or a man [also like Obama].”

Is this just the frustration of a loving husband (I leave that to you to decide), a tired campaigner, someone who desperately feels Senator Clinton would make the best president, or someone who desperately wants to be back on the world stage and see his tattered legacy reaffirmed?

Whatever the political or psychic source of these, let me put this kindly, faux pas, he is not helping.

For someone who seemed so incandescently smart, even if at times stupidly out of control, it is a sad spectacle of perhaps dynastic entitlement. Above all others, Bill Clinton, genius politician, should recognize the equivalent in others. In this case, Barack Obama who, if he isn’t the real deal, is minimally a once-in-a-generation political wonder.

Perhaps he does recognize this and that more than anything else, for someone who always wanted to be the smartest one in the room, is what has frozen his circuits.