Dear President Clinton:
It looks like you might be starting to do it again. By “it,” I mean the ill-advised attacks on your wife’s primary opponent that did a lot of damage back in 2008, bad feelings from which still linger, and are still held against not just you but Hillary.
I get it. I saw you speak at Dartmouth College in January 2008. You said some stuff that day that made the kind of headlines you shouldn’t have been making … but it was also one of the most moving and personal political speeches I’ve ever seen. Someone you love was struggling and under attack and it hurt you and made you angry, and it was so easy to relate to that pain. If someone attacks my husband, I will go after them with a rage I would never bring to defending myself. But that doesn’t make it a good idea. In your case, the love and the pain won’t come through in the media accounts. It’ll just look mean and desperate. You’ll go too far without realizing it, and it’ll influence how people read everything else coming out of the Clinton campaign.
I get it. You do a lot of appearances for Democratic candidates, and your ability to slyly stick the knife in their opponents without looking like a bad guy is one of your calling cards. You’ve used it to help elect so many Democrats, and you must desperately want to use that to benefit a certain presidential candidate. And you can—if and when she’s the Democratic nominee. Until then, it’s not going to help. If you go negative, none of the positive things you say will register.
By all means, campaign for Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic presidential nominee—as long as you can keep it positive. I’m betting you have a lot of good things to say about her, so make sure they’re what dominates the coverage of your events. If you can’t do that, I hear you have other political skills. Maybe you can put some of them to use until it’s time to let loose on a Republican nominee.