He should have skipped right to the fund-raisers.
It's bad enough that he arrived to address the group Monday just as one of the other guys, George W. Bush (who won't be there), is riding high in the polls. Clinton was taking vicious pre-address potshots Monday from all the men and women who would be Bush's veep — for being disloyal to the group he swears he loves so well.
"He's good about coming to the meetings, he's very good about having us to the White House and having the Cabinet members there," sniped New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman. "That's all very nice, but what we wanted is more action and less of the big government things." Added Virginia's Gov. James Gilmore, another oft-mentioned veep candidate: "His Environmental Protection Agency has been aggressive to the point of really being very, very offensive, almost."
Tough crowd.
It gets worse.
In 1993, Clinton was already waxing nostalgic for his days of provincial politicking ("I miss you. I miss this. I miss the way we make decisions," he waxed in his first alumni visit). But after seven years of this administration, the NGA has become a living diorama of one of the big failures of the Clinton years — the big guy's failure to use his legendary political buoyancy to lift all Democratic boats.
Clinton's audience is nearly 2 to 1 Republican, and the GOP is looking to add to that margin in November. Never mind Congress, where Clinton torpedoed the Democratic majority with health care in 1993 and proceeded to triangulate his colleagues into fractious irrelevance in '96. Sure, he whipped Newt and nailed the Republicans on impeachment, but if folks liked Clinton in the White House, they liked Republicans in their statehouse. The governorships are where likable, pragmatic Republicanism has taken hold, and the 2000 election is likely to be a showcase for just that.
The names in the guest book at State College, Pa., reads like GOP veep-finder Dick Cheney's legal pad — Tom Ridge, Tommy Thompson, John Engler, George Pataki, Jim Gilmore, Christy Whitman. All are popular, moderate and Republican. For Gore and the Democrats, there's just one: California's Gray Davis. And he doesn't want it.
"I would say no," Davis, after some diplomatic hemming and hawing earlier in the day, told the Associated Press. "I still believe the best thing I could for the country is to elect Al Gore and the best way to elect Al Gore is to carry California and remain his chief spokesman," Davis said.
Translation: The way things are these days, I'm lucky to have a job at all.