‘Explainer-in-Chief’ Bill Clinton makes the economic case for Kamala Harris

ROCKY MOUNT, North Carolina — Last Sunday, the morning after Donald Trump recalled Arnold Palmer’s endowment, Bill Clinton was in a Black megachurch warning parishioners that the price of insulin, cost of prescription drugs and insurance access for those with preexisting health conditions is on the ballot next month.

“And we’re talking about Haitian immigrants eating pets?” Clinton asked, receiving a round of supportive that’s-right murmurs and amens. “And apparently there’s no price for this.”

In just a few sentences, the former president encapsulated the difficulty of running against an opponent who has effectively broken the American political system. Nearly eight years after Clinton’s wife lost to Trump, the Democratic Party — and if we’re being honest the press corps, too — is still struggling with how to handle an aberrant figure in a country that seemingly grows more desensitized to his behavior the more outrageous it gets.

William Jefferson Clinton, though, seems to have settled on an answer. And it recalls one of his best lines from the 1992 presidential race, when the right was bearing down on him. Republicans, he said to voters then, care more about my past than your future.

Framed for today: focus more on their insulin than his bombast.

And, Clinton said, Vice President Kamala Harris should deliver her appeal with an open hand.

“I think that for her, her message is she wants to be inclusive and open a new era of working together,” Clinton told me last weekend. Across party lines, I asked? “Yes, I think it’s really important because I think people are basically sick of all this paralyzing bad-mouthing.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean breaking with President Biden, he said. But in classic Clinton fashion, he offered a third way she could handle the sitting president.

“I think that what she ought to do is to pick the things that she cares the most about and she believes and go beyond what’s been done,” he said, suggesting how Harris could embrace Biden’s record and move past it at the same time.

“I still don’t think most people know the Democrats favored the immigration bill,” he said. “I think if they did know it would make a difference.”

And keep the focus on policy even as Trump talks pet-eating.

“That’s why I talked about grocery prices and preexisting conditions,” Clinton said, recalling the nature of the party’s attack advertising in 2018. “We beat him in the midterms over preexisting conditions.”

Nobody knows better than Clinton that Republicans pay the heaviest political price when they threaten already-conferred, broadly held and deeply popular programs like Social Security, Medicare or, more recently, the expanded health benefits signed into law by Presidents Obama and Biden. Decades of winning Democratic campaigns demonstrate the maxim that Americans may be rhetorically conservative but are operationally liberal when it comes to the role of government.

But there it all was in a nutshell: how Democrats can play defense (immigration), offense (healthcare), appeal to voters exhausted by the political wars of the Trump-era and grapple with an unpopular incumbent without disclaiming him or embracing him.

To be fair to Harris, she has attempted to do a version of each of those strokes. It’s just that she hasn’t done it with the consistency and symphony sound of a Clinton or Obama. Truth is, Democrats got spoiled: their last two two-term presidents were generational talents.

Clinton is now 78 – though, as he reminded nearly every audience in North Carolina, still younger than Trump — and looks all of those years. He wears hearing aids. Like many people his age, he wears tennis shoes, even with slacks. And like everybody his age, his conversations with old friends often turn to matters of health.

Yet to be with him at five stops across eastern North Carolina was to see glimpses of perhaps the most gifted political athlete of our time.

In part because of Covid, in part because of his past transgressions and in part because Biden didn’t need a more robust generational peer shadowing him, Clinton has scarcely been on the campaign trail since the agony of 2016.

That election is plainly still not far from his mind. At one of the stops last weekend, I overheard him on the rope line tell a supporter: “But for Comey.” I didn’t need to hear the context.

He acknowledged he was reinvigorated being back out with a microphone, an audience and an election to win.

Being in his native South, and with crowds often more Black than white, also deepened that Arkansas accent and prompted him to recall outhouses, snakes and at one point say of Bojangles: “I love that place.”

When I asked him if he would like to run for another term himself, he humbly deferred.

“I like to see younger people do it,” Clinton said, before quickly adding: “I like being asked to help because I can say what I believe.”

That’s the fun of Clinton at 78, all of the smarts, most of the talent and with much less restraint.

He used stops in Fayetteville, Wilson, Greenville and Rocky Mount to don his title of what Barack Obama called “Secretary of Explaining Stuff.” Clinton rolled through the importance of legal immigration, the role of grocery store ownership concentration in food prices and got heads nodding at one stop by explaining the impact of supply chain bottlenecks on inflation this way:

“Suppose there were three bicycles in Wilson and everybody rode a bicycle and every one of you wanted one,” he said. “Think it would drive the price of the three up? That’s all that happened, and it happened everywhere in the world.”

Oh, and did they know Russia and Ukraine produce 30 percent of the world’s wheat? So when Moscow invaded its neighbor, the global price of that valuable commodity shot up, he explained.

What I find most compelling about Clinton, though, is less the MasterClass tutorials and more the tight lines. His most memorable one from the Democratic convention last summer was about Trump. “Don’t count the lies, count the I’s,” he said.

Last weekend, Clinton trotted out that one and a few more.

Reminding voters about how they demonstrate caring by showing up for funerals, he argued: “Voting is showing up for your country.”

Contrasting Harris with Trump, he said: “If you hire somebody to run the country, you want her to make it better, not to make you madder.”

From the pulpit on Sunday morning he invoked one of his favorite verses, Isaiah 58:12, to portray Harris as a “repairer of the breach” and said the choice next month was between “builders and breakers.”

In Fayetteville, he said he had recently run into “two guys in MAGA caps” and said “they were ragging on me and I was ragging on them.”

But, Clinton wanted to make clear, “We were in a good humor. If you can stay in a good humor, people can hear you. If you start name-calling right off the bat, we all go deaf.”

His best line, though, may have been the one that’s hardest for him to accept — and that which could doom Democrats in two weeks.

I had asked Clinton about the worsening erosion of blue-collar voters from his party, a trend that now extends across racial lines.

He was quick to praise Obama’s record, noting how much the Affordable Care Act and rescue of the auto industry helped working-class whites. Why, though, hasn’t that translated at the ballot?

“Partly because life is more than money and partly because they didn’t feel it,” Clinton shot back.

It was the first part that was so striking, for the man who ran on a message of “It’s the economy, stupid” to allow that culture and identity matter, too.

Few parts of the country better exemplify that than eastern North Carolina, the tobacco and vinegar-based BBQ belt that was at the leading edge of the rural realignment that would eventually sweep the South.

The “Jessecrats” here — the white Democrats who first left their ancestral party to support former Senator Jesse Helms in the 1970s and ’80s — have become overwhelmingly Republican. Here, as in many states, that complicates the Democrats’ electoral math. It forces them to drive a massive turnout of Black voters and win over enough white city dwellers and suburbanites to prevail by the narrowest of margins.

North Carolina Democrats pulled that off in 2008, Obama’s first election, but every four years since they’ve fallen short in the presidential race.

Traveling with Clinton across the region, I posed the same question to those who attended his rallies: Why has the party lost these voters?

Grady Todd, who works on a transmission line for a power company and attended the Fayetteville rally in a camo Carolina Panthers cap, said his politics are straightforward: “Democrats have a better history of creating jobs.”

But Todd said he’s the only Democrat on his line.

“Everybody that’s on my crew is for Trump, even my foreman, who said if the Democrats win he’s afraid of what could happen for his grandkids,” he said.

But Todd, speaking about his pro-Trump brother, said: “He believes everything he sees on the internet for Trump.”

Michael McGuinness, a civil rights attorney in Elizabethtown, North Carolina, recalled growing up in 1960s eastern North Carolina, where “being a registered Republican was tantamount to being a felon.” McGuinness allowed that Democrats had allowed “some degree of neglect of working-class folks.”

Vince Durham, an attorney in Rocky Mount who attended a post-church service rally there, said it was still OK to be a Democrat when Clinton was president. So what changed? Durham said Republicans have for years been “spewing hate to make it seem like we’re crazy liberals.”

Part of the challenge is Democrats have moved left, at least on culture, over the decades. But as was made clear by Helms’ bald race-baiting — invoking “the bloc vote” — backlash has long carried currency here.

Clinton himself had no easy answers on how to win back working-class voters, the electorate that powered him to victory in states that this century are simply part of “Red America.”

“I don’t think it’s Rome being built in a day,” he told me, but he had this advice for his party: “What we’ve got to do is more deliberately speak in the language of inclusion and look for ways to demonstrate it.”

To follow Clinton on the road is to take a step back through political history.

There was the Air Force veteran in Fayetteville who recalled meeting him when she was stationed at Ramstein and he came through Germany as president; there was the longtime local power broker, George W. Breece, who showed up in Fayetteville toting his Clinton-Gore ’92 jacket and was greeted by a “Hey George!” from the former president over three decades later; and then there are the Clinton alums and folks with Arkansas roots, including the sister of former Rep. Marion Berry. (Her appearance prompted much recollecting of the annual Coon Supper that the late Berry oversaw for many years.)

Perhaps most poignant are all the contemporaries Clinton served with, first as governor and then as president.

There was the legendary former Governor Jim Hunt in his hometown of Wilson, now 87 years old and struggling to walk but still in a blazer and tie to greet his old friend.

A classic eastern North Carolina Democrat, Hunt was first elected governor in 1976, two years before Clinton was in Arkansas. And if Hunt had defeated Helms in their titanic 1984 Senate race, well, the Democrats may have turned to another Southerner to run for president in 1988 or 1992.

“We were really close for a long time,” Clinton said of Hunt, recalling how they worked on education issues together.

Also in Wilson was G.K Butterfield, the former U.S. representative who was a judge when Clinton was president and recalled meeting him when he visited North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd.

And, in Greenville, there was former U.S. representative Bob Etheridge, who like so many rural Democrats lost or turned over his seat in 2010.

Clinton said at more than one stop that he had told Harris’ campaign he was eager to campaign in smaller communities, much like he had in Hillary Clinton’s two presidential bids.

Etheridge recalled how effective he had been then.

“This here makes a difference,” said the former lawmaker after the rally.

What is it about Clinton, I asked?

“He just knows how to connect,” said Etheridge. “He’s one of the few people I’ve ever met who can make a complicated issue sound simple.”

The former lawmaker and Clinton had been chatting privately after the rally and I was curious what they had discussed, perhaps messaging and tactics for this crucial part of a crucial state?

No, Etheridge said, they had been talking about how former Clinton Chief of Staff, and North Carolina native, Erskine Bowles and his wife were faring.

Always discursive, Clinton can be even more so now. Like many, he becomes even more like himself the older he gets.

He’s also more prone to speaking out of school on the stump. In Greenville, scorning Republicans who insist on saying Trump won in 2020, Clinton said they were only trying “to prove whether you’re one of the clan or not — and that clan can have a double meaning here.” This week, in Arizona, he called GOP senatorial candidate Kari Lake “physically attractive” before adding she believes “politics is a performance art.”

Yet when he showed up in the pulpit at Word Tabernacle in Rocky Mount, a former Home Depot, he was at his best.

He moved between verses, emphasizing what “St. Paul is really talking about” in 1^st Corinthians, gently chided JD Vance for having gone to Yale but “forgotten arithmetic” and expertly explained the central role of eastern North Carolina voters to any Democrat’s statewide vote coalition.

And, yes, he once again addressed inflation, immigration and made the case against Trump on policy grounds.

It’s not that Clinton ignores Trump’s threat to democracy — he regularly invoked all the former defense secretaries who are opposed to Trump — but he does less of it and explains the matter in an accessible way.

Why, Clinton asked, are we so riveted by the baseball playoffs and college football? Because they have uniform rules.

“If you let this guy get back there, it won’t be on the level,” he warned of Trump. “You know it, I know it, and they know it and they believe it.”

Clinton had ample praise for Harris and Biden.

Reiterating the White House support for the immigration compromise earlier this year, he praised them for “really trying” to reach across the aisle. “We’ve got to do more of that.”

Recalling his own presidency, he said: “I made a lot of compromises” and before his thoughts quickly turned to how that was used against his wife.

Clinton recalled how “one of the Gingrich congressmen from Texas” (it was Jack Fields) called the 1994 crime bill, which imposed mandatory minimum sentences on certain crimes but also included money for crime-prevention programs, “hug a thug.”

“Then, all of the sudden in 2016, all the lefties said it was a travesty, as if I had any choice to pass the bill,” he said, noting those who blamed him and Hillary for excessive sentencing.

Life, he said, is “full of them” — meaning compromises.

Again and again, Clinton used his appearances to urge Democrats to avoid the clenched fist.

“Trump is in the resentment business, Harris is in the reconciliation business,” he said in Wilson. “Are you for unity or division?”

Do not, Clinton implored the audience, “give up on your neighbor.”

With this, as with so much, it was not hard to catch glimpses of Clinton’s concerns. Even his asides were revealing.

“This is not a close question,” he said of the campaign in Wilson, before letting slip: “It is only a close question because so many people get so much information that basically is not true.”

At the same stop, he recalled the last time Democrats were in political danger because of the soaring cost of goods. “I saw President Carter lose an election at a time of terrible inflation,” he recalled.

Clinton emphasized, and tried to explain, inflation more than any other issue. Again recounting his own presidency, and how long it took before people believed the deficit was coming down, he suggested it hadn’t sunk in yet that inflation was on the wane.

Even as he recalled to me his Bojangles stop, he hinted at the challenge of what Democrats are attempting to pull off in this extraordinary election year.

Most everyone at his fried chicken pit stop would shake his hand, Clinton said, but one fellow told him that “Kamala Harris got this for nothing.”

Recounting his pitch, the former president said: “Sir, she was loyal to the president, he made the decision not to run. And we were out of time. The reason we didn’t have a primary is we were out of time.”

Clinton said he feels “pretty good” about the race, adding: “I feel much better than I did.”

Yet he made no attempt to conceal the degree of difficulty at hand for someone who became the nominee effectively overnight this past summer when Biden, after nearly a month of reluctance, finally dropped out of the race.

“You know, she’s taken a big load on,” Clinton said. “And I told her at the beginning, the Republicans do what they do. And if you just showed up, they think it will be easier to create buyer’s remorse because people don’t know you. So she’s just got to stay out there and be relaxed and be self-assured. They just don’t need to shake people’s confidence.”

His bottom line: “If people believe that she will do a good job and if she’s convincing [that] she’s not crazy and all this stuff they say about her then I think she wins.”