There's something delicious about Bill Clinton being asked to serve as the chief character witness for Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention. Clinton, let's recall, was a very messy president. His meetings didn't start on time; his speeches didn't end on time.
His biggest legislative project, health-care reform, never passed (unlike Obama's). He made compromises with Republicans; he made Democratic liberals furious. He even got impeached (and ultimately acquitted) over sexual peccadilloes, though nobody seems to remember the details now.
But Obama isn't asking Clinton to testify about his personal character. The president needs Clinton to vouch for his political character - to assure voters, especially white middle-class voters, that Obama feels their pain, knows how to do the job and deserves another four years.
During the primary campaign four years ago, Obama dismissed the Clintons, husband and wife, as exemplars of a discredited old politics - as "calculating" Democrats who weren't bold enough to aim high.
Now Obama wishes he had more of what the Clintons had: the gift, honed in inhospitable Arkansas, of framing Democratic ideas in forms that wary middle-of-the-road voters can embrace. Obama, who launched his career in liberal Chicago and faced most of his early challenges from the left, still doesn't always have the hang of it.
Obama's decision to ask Clinton to be the one to officially nominate him - the first time a president has asked one of his predecessors to do that - makes that official. It was a direct personal request; aides say Obama telephoned Clinton to make the ask several weeks ago. Why? Because Clinton still has the touch.
Here, for example, is how Clinton defended the Obama economic record at a Democratic fundraiser in Virginia in April: "So if somebody says, 'Well, but I don't feel all that great yet,' or 'Not everything is back yet,' or 'It's still kind of slow yet,' you just remind them we've gotten 4 million jobs since the recession bottomed out; the ones we lost in the crash have been restored - thanks to the stimulus, which kept unemployment 1 1/2 to 2 points lower than it would have been; thanks to his restructuring of the American automobile industry, which saved a million and a half jobs and created 84,000 more."
Last weekend, Obama aides were still struggling to find an answer to the predictable question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Clinton had his answer ready long before the question was asked.
