As I noted yesterday, the Clinton campaign lost no time turning New York Governor Elliot Spitzer into an unperson.
As the WaPo’s Peter Baker notes, though, the Spitzer newscycle is probably the last thing the Clinton campaign wants right now:
How this will all play out remains unclear, of course. Spitzer chose not to step down yesterday in the face of some pretty sordid allegations, much as Bill Clinton resisted calls for his resignation in 1998 after news of his trysts with the onetime White House intern, which can only guarantee that the story will live on for a while, particularly in the hungry vortex of cable television, talk radio and the Internet. It may be that most voters long ago discounted Bill Clinton’s infidelities when making their minds up about his wife’s qualifications for president. It may be that voters conclude that Spitzer’s indiscretions have nothing at all to do with whether Hillary Clinton can effectively serve as president. And it may be that Spitzer ultimately does resign, allowing the political dialogue to move on.
Yet this certainly is not the way Clinton’s strategists would have mapped out this week on the campaign trail. They want voters to be thinking about that 3 a.m. phone call in terms of who is ready to handle a crisis in the White House, not in terms of where an unfaithful husband might be catting around town. And, sure enough, the late-night comedians wasted little time linking the Spitzer case to the Clintons. Jay Leno joked last night that Spitzer’s scandal “means Hillary Clinton is now only the second angriest woman in the state of New York.” David Letterman offered a Top 10 List of excuses Spitzer might cite, including the number one excuse: “I thought Bill Clinton legalized this years ago.”
And it can only serve to remind voters that, but for Bill’s dalliance in the Oval Office, Hillary would most likely be sitting on a corporate board right now rather than running for President.
