Bill Clinton has compared Barack Obama's position on the Iraq war to a "fairy tale." He dismissed the Illinois senator's campaign as based on a "false premise." And he suggested that electing Mr. Obama would be a "roll of the dice."
Mr. Clinton is clearly agitated. At first blush, his outbursts and willingness to insert himself into the middle of the contentious battle between his wife and Senator Obama in the Democratic primary appear to reflect the former president's concern about his wife specifically and, more generally, the outcome of his party's presidential nomination.
But for Mr. Clinton, more is at stake in 2008 than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's political future. Mr. Obama is also a threat to Mr. Clinton's presidential legacy and to the Clinton machine's lording over the national Democratic Party.
Yesterday, I asked Mrs. Clinton if the idea of a possible Obama presidency's eclipsing her husband's legacy might explain Mr. Clinton's recent behavior.
"I really find these questions to be totally off-topic, off-base," she said, adding that she and her husband will give full support to whichever Democrat wins the nomination. "I can tell you that that just never crossed our minds. That is just not the way we think."
Despite such protestations, could it be that the deeper worry for Mr. Clinton, whose self-absorption was evident during his eight years in the Oval Office, isn't that Mrs. Clinton will fail to reach the Oval Office but that Mr. Obama will?
It requires only a little foresight and imagination to see what an Obama presidency might mean for Mr. Clinton's legacy:
Suppose Mr. Obama wins the nomination and the White House with a popular-vote majority (something Mr. Clinton failed twice to achieve) and does so by mobilizing previously disaffected voters, young voters and millions of independents and crossover Republicans. Imagine, two years later, in the 2010 midterms, that Mr. Obama's oft-stated goal of building a true "governing majority" is realized, and the Democratic majorities in Congress, among governors and elsewhere down-ballot that he inherited are expanded - in striking contrast to the 1994 partisan collapse precipitated by Mr. Clinton's failed first two years in office.
Imagine, moreover, that these political-electoral feats were achieved by an African-American candidate with a charismatic personality and compelling rhetorical style who dims the house lights on the so-called first black president as he exits the political stage.
