Learning From Clinton

And It May Be Early, But Lots Of Democrats Are Ready To Run

(CBS)  In her latest edition of Political Points, CBS News Senior Political Editor Dotty Lynch charts the early field of Democratic challengers to President Bush.

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When Bill Clinton was running for president in 1991 he was fond of saying that Hillary had recently given him a psychology book which contained many pearls of wisdom including the definition of insanity: "Repeating the same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different result." He was referring to Republican economics, but one wonders if he's ever thought of pardons in that context.

Betsey Wright, Mr. Clinton's former Arkansas chief of staff and permanent institutional memory, wondered recently why he took such risks with pardons this time.

"That's what the mea culpa ads were all about," she said. One ad Mr. Clinton ran in February 1982, she said, was specifically about "apologizing to voters in Arkansas for pardoning violent criminals" at the end of his first gubernatorial term in 1980.

The talk among Mr. Clinton's friends (yes, he does have them) is that he went a little crazy at the end because he was frustrated by the slowness of the Justice Department in providing him with cases, and because he identified with some folks he viewed as victims of "out of control" prosecutors.

But Mr. Clinton doesn't seem ready to apologize quite yet. This week in Atlantic City he said that the "truth" would eventually come out and that he had no worries about recovering from the criticisms over the pardons. "I don't have anything to recover from," he said, despite three new nation polls showing his approval rating plummeting.

Meanwhile, the man who told an airport rally on his successor's Inaugural Day that he may have left the White House but he wasn't "going anywhere" is now pulling a modified Garbo. His spokeswoman Julia Payne told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the former president "just wants to be left alone."


Getting Ready For '04

While Bill Clinton is figuring out what to do with his future, lots of other Democrats are trying to emulate his past. No, not Monica and Marc, but the Clinton of 1992 who came from nowhere and got his party's nomination and beat a one-term president named Bush.

Al Gore has been meeting with his moneymen in New York who are telling him he has to decide by July if he's running again because there are lots of others waiting in the wings, including the man he chose as his running mate. Joe Lieberman is about to start a PAC to give money to candidates and finance his political travels. In February he made a widely publicized trip to Florida, and his wife Hadassah has made two trips of her own.

Gore's short list of VP candidates provides the ames of some of the other potential presidential contenders. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry has become a "new Democrat" and has been talking to some of the same money folks as Gore, while North Carolina Sen. John Edwards popped up in Iowa last week. The former trial lawyer has become the darling of some prominent Senate liberals and is the Democrats' point man on the Patients' Bill of Rights. Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, meanwhile, is following Mr. Clinton's example and using the presidency of the Democratic Leadership Council as his national vehicle.

Former candidate Bill Bradley went once again to Dubuque, Iowa, for his Catholic basketball tournament but his advisors say that he is not looking at another presidential bid and his Time and Future Inc. PAC has pretty much dried up. Democratic leaders Gephardt and Daschle have healthy leadership PACs and are mentioned frequently, but both say that being Majority Leader is their first goal.

In the blast from the past category, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware is traveling to New Hampshire on March 25 to pick up where he left off in 1987. And former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey gave money to 56 state and local candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire before leaving for New York, a new job as president of the New School and a new marriage.

With the history of senators actually making it to the White House so poor, three Democratic governors are also eyeing the race. Gray Davis of California is temporarily sidelined because of the state's energy crisis but his advisers are counting the hours until they can get into the fray. Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes has a staff who has heard the stories of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and are reminding people that he actually removed the Confederate flag in the state. And Iowa's Tom Vilsack is also said to be poking around New Hampshire.

So despite Al Gore's moral victory in 2000 and President Bush's strong start, a bunch of white guys, old and new, are out there looking hard to replicate Clinton '92 and hoping to punch holes in what Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., termed Mr. Bush's "faith-based economics." But no one mentions Hillary anymore; she may be spending her time wondering whether that old psychology book ever made its way to Chappaqua.