Pitbull Bill – help or hindrance on the campaign trail?

It has come down to Obama versus Clinton in the key southern state of South Carolina — but the Clinton that Barack Obama is up against is Bill, not Hillary.

She flew out of the state late on Monday night, heading for Washington and then west to California and Arizona, leaving her husband behind to slug it out with Obama in the tough and rumbustious southern state that goes to the polls on Saturday.

The former president was making the most of it. At Lizard’s Thicket diner beside the Columbia highway on Tuesday, he let his breakfast of omelette and grits grow cold. He was enjoying taking questions from reporters far too much to care about food. After weeks of Hillary and Barack Obama being top of the news agenda, he was the story.

Addressing about 40 journalists crowded into the diner over a coffee, he joked: ‘I like to stay out of the papers. I am not used to this. I am a little out of practice.” While aides pleaded for him to be allowed to eat and told reporters ‘no more questions”, Bill Clinton could not resist taking another and another.

He spoke about his role as Hillary’s attack dog against Obama, about whether his presence was doing her more harm than good, and about the increasing viciousness of exchanges between the Clinton and Obama camps.

Arguments were inevitable in politics, he said. ‘This is a contact sport.”

Bill Clinton’s shift from being Hillary’s husband, behind her on stage and working town-hall meetings, to top of the news agenda began on Monday morning.

The Obama campaign team had been feeling the pressure of being ground down day after day by the Clinton machine and, on Monday, ABC carried an interview with Obama expressing frustration with Bill Clinton’s negative tactics.

The story accelerated that night, after an ugly series of personal exchanges between the two leading Democratic candidates in a televised debate at the holiday resort of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Obama complained about Bill Clinton making statements that were ‘not factually accurate”. The story grew as Hillary Clinton confirmed she was leaving South Carolina, a virtual acceptance that she is not expected to win the state’s Democratic primary, and would concentrate elsewhere. She was leaving Bill in charge.

Bill has won South Carolina before. Is this southern politician, one of the most formidable campaigners in modern history, capable of producing another surprise? Sometimes labelled the first ‘black” president because of his rapport with African Americans, is he capable of defeating Obama — or at least narrowing his lead — in a state where half the Democratic voters are African American?

If he is going to be so dominant in the campaign, will he also interfere if Hillary wins the White House and he becomes, as he put it, the First Laddie?

He remains popular, even among some Republicans. At Lizard’s Thicket, sliding easily into his old campaigning style, he took time to work the room, greeting those who had turned up just for breakfast; shaking hands with the men, hugging the women.

Caitlin Schmidt (36) skipped the polite chit-chat and expressed concern about the divisiveness of the debate. ‘I suggested that Hillary take the debate in a more positive direction,” she said. ‘He said Hillary had kept her mouth shut in Iowa when she was attacked and what should we do about it, and do you think there should be a double standard?”

The Clintons have a reputation in Washington for ruthlessness. Their research team has spent a year digging through Obama’s background, examining in detail his upbringing and, more specifically, his voting record while a senator in the Illinois legislature.

The results are now being pushed out by the Clinton team, day by day — in particular by Bill Clinton — working their way into the political mainstream. Did Obama work as a lawyer for a slum landlord in Chicago, as Hillary claimed in Monday’s debate? Is there ‘a nickel’s worth of difference”, as Bill put it in the diner on Tuesday, between Hillary and Obama over the Iraq war?

This is all to be expected, all part of campaigning. What the Obama campaign is protesting about is distortion. Robert Gibbs, Obama’s press spokesperson, said they were not worried about Bill substituting for Hillary in South Carolina, but that ‘we hope that when he campaigns, he tells the truth”.

But negative campaigning, no matter how often the public claims to dislike it, is effective. Obama’s communications director, David Axelrod, said this week that Bill Clinton is a brilliant and intelligent politician who makes no chance remarks: it’s all deliberately worked out.

The former president spent most of last year concentrating on the Clinton Foundation he established after he left office. He only became heavily involved in his wife’s campaign in November, alarmed when she began to slip in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire. In December, he questioned Obama’s lack of experience and, in a remark that angered previously loyal African Americans, claimed Obama’s account of his opposition to the Iraq war was a ‘fairytale”.

In the crowded diner on Tuesday, he indicated he would continue to raise questions about Obama’s record. ‘There was nothing specific I said that was inaccurate. I try to be very careful about what I say and not use too many adjectives,” he said.

He was asked to respond to a call by James Clyburn, an African American congressman from South Carolina, to ‘chill it”.

‘I am pretty chilled,” Clinton said, before finally finishing his congealed breakfast and heading off to other campaign events in South Carolina. —