Clift: Clinton's Legacy Worries

Thirteen rallies in three days, five in Indiana and eight in North Carolina, is how Bill Clinton is spending his time. Both states vote on May 6, and Hillary's got to win at least one of them. The former president is working harder on the road to get Hillary elected than he did in 1996 to get himself re-elected, judging by the jam-packed schedule of "Solutions for America" events staged in school gymnasiums from morning until night in all corners of the two states. Except for an occasional red-faced outburst over a media slight or someone's perceived disloyalty, he's soldiering away with extraordinary discipline.

The reason he's working so hard on his wife's behalf is that he sincerely believes she would make a good president, better than he was, if daughter Chelsea's word is taken to heart. He's also doing penance for how much he humiliated her when he was president, and even for some of his missteps in this campaign, mostly having to do with race. But perhaps most important, Clinton understands that if Barack Obama is elected, his presidency becomes an asterisk.

It's less about the historic nature of the first black president, a title once bestowed on Clinton by writer Toni Morrison, than it is the levers of power Obama would have at his command. If Obama wins in November he'll have a majority in the Senate close to 60, and at least 15 more seats in the House, numbers that signal a true governing mandate from the people. Clinton was forced to play defense, too often settling for mainly symbolic gestures like advocating school uniforms when only two years into his term the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Clinton knows that through the long view of history, he'll be viewed a lot less positively if the bridge he set about building to the next century leads to a president with the ability to overshadow him legislatively, as opposed to one who carries on his name and legacy.

Obama rankled Clinton earlier in the campaign when he remarked in an interview that Ronald Reagan was a transformational president, seeming to dismiss the eight Clinton years as incidental and setting Reagan as a benchmark for success. The Clinton campaign went berserk, accusing Obama of aligning himself with a president who didn't want to raise the minimum wage. But that wasn't Obama's point. You didn't have to agree with Reagan's policies to recognize the impact he made on the direction of the country, good and bad, and the lasting impression he left on the national psyche. Reagan-style optimism is the gold standard in politics, and if there's an heir apparent today it's Obama, with his message of hope, not Hillary and her workmanlike solutions for America.

For Hillary Clinton it's less about legacy than what to do with the rest of her life. There are quiet talks in the Senate among senior Democratic staffers and some members about creating a quasi-leadership position for her should she fail to win the nomination. She is widely admired in the Senate for her intelligence, competence and ability to work across party lines. She could easily be Senator for Life, carving out the kind of legislative leadership role that will keep her on the national stage for decades to come. There is no shame in coming in second, should that be her fate. The steps she's taken to rejuvenate her campaign, bringing in more voices and half-firing Mark Penn, the architect of the "Ready on Day One" theme that never captured the voters' imagination, have probably come too late to close the gap without tearing the party apart.

If she does overcome long odds and prevail in the primaries, experience is not an argument she can win against John McCain, who's been in the Senate longer and doesn't have to fake tales of sniper fire to prove his bona fides. Penn still sits in on strategy meetings and conference calls, so he's far from banished. Even so, it's worth pointing out that Penn is really Bill Clinton's pollster and tends to see things through the Bill prism. Al Gore fired Penn as his pollster during the 2000 campaign for reasons that sound familiar. He thought he spent too much time on his corporate clients, and they clashed over Clinton's role in the campaign. Gore thought Bill was a liability because of the Lewinsky scandal and wanted to keep him off the campaign trail. Penn disputed that there was such a thing as Clinton fatigue, a position he continues to uphold. "I betcha he never told Bill he hurt anything," says a campaign adviser, expressing the frustration many felt at Penn's iron control. What will play better against McCain than the "experience" card? A fresh start—and that's a hard truth for Hillary to hear, and even harder for Bill.