Charles Krauthammer: Eventually The Public Will Agree With Me About The Clintons. You Just Wait.
November 3, 2007 -- 12:10 PM EST // //

Let's call them the Waiting-For-Godot pundits.

If you're a pundit who's trying to make the case that Bill Clinton is going to prove a liability for Hillary's Presidential campaign, life must get pretty vexing at times. After all, poll after poll shows that the American public simply isn't willing to play along with this pundit-approved version of Campaign 2008.

So what can pundits facing this little problem do about this? Simple: They can pretend the public hasn't weighed in on this question -- and keep on asserting that one day in the future, the public will finally reveal that in fact it does see the Clintons the way they say it should.

Case in point: Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post this morning. He writes:

Americans did not like the idea of a co-presidency when, at the 1980 Republican convention, Ronald Reagan briefly considered sharing the office with former president Gerald Ford. (Ford would have been vice president with independent powers.) And they won't like this co-presidency, particularly because the Clinton partnership involves two characters caught in the dynamic of a strained, strange marriage.

The cloud hovering over a Hillary presidency is not Bill padding around the White House in robe and slippers flipping thongs. It's President Clinton, in suit and tie, simply present in the White House when any decision is made. The degree of his involvement in that decision will inevitably become an issue. Do Americans really want a historically unique two-headed presidency constantly buffeted by the dynamics of a highly dysfunctional marriage?

Bill "will inevitably become an issue." This smacks of a recent column by Waiting-For-Godot pundit David Broder, who wrote that Bill would be playing a "central role" in a Hillary Presidency and that this was something "the country will have to ponder."

But again, the American public has already passed judgment on this many, many times. Again and again and again the electorate has confirmed that it simply doesn't see Bill as a political liability for Hillary -- and indeed sees him as an asset to her potential Presidency.

As for Krauthammer's assertion that the public will come to believe that a Hillary presidency would be merely an extension of Bill's -- an idea Krauthammer appears to think is an original one on his part -- well, it turns out that the silly public has been duped by those scheming Clintons into seeing Hillary as her own person. A poll last month in Krauthammer's own paper found that a full two-thirds of Americans think Hillary will take her Presidency in a different direction.

Of course, what the public actually thinks doesn't matter at all to the Waiting-For-Godot pundits. To them, the voters have never really focused on the Billary question and have never really reached their true conclusion on it. And when they finally do, they will reveal that they agree with Krauthammer and Broder, after all. We know this because the WFG pundits keep telling us this is so.

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