The Big Dog is Off the Leash on Immigration

Bill Clinton off script, Pennsylvania warning signs, Talking Points, David Mamet

The Big Dog has returned to the campaign trail, and he’s up to his old tricks. No, not those tricks — the one where he offers a running commentary on the choices campaigns are making instead of just stumping for the Democratic candidate. Barack Obama does the same thing, of course, except he’s just perpetually disappointed in all Americans. Bill Clinton’s mistake is being too honest about what he thinks is really going on and warning Democrats why they might lose if they don’t shape up.

Bill closed out the 2016 campaign season by engaging in a very thinly veiled public dispute with the people running his wife’s campaign, crisscrossing places Hillary hadn’t visited — including Wisconsin — with a message tailored to the economy, reminding people of his redneck past and trying to connect and feel the pain of frustrated voters who he knew were swinging in Donald Trump’s direction. His repeated objections to the campaign’s strategy was rejected by the eggheads who deemed a “waste of time and energy” to try to win rural white voters:

…every time Bill Clinton warned that the campaign was dangerously losing support among the white working class, and “underestimating the significance of Brexit,” Mook responded that “the data run counter to your anecdotes.” After the election, asked to explain what the hell had happened, Mook blamed the data. (I can’t help but be reminded of Michael Scott obediently following his GPS as it directs him to drive into a lake, because “the machine knows.”)

This time around, Clinton is leaning into the immigration issue, obviously aware that it’s the Harris campaign’s Achilles’ heel. “You got a case in Georgia not very long ago,” he told a crowd at a Georgia fish fry event this week. “They made an ad about it, about a young woman who’d been killed by an immigrant. Yeah well, if they’d all been properly vetted, that probably wouldn’t have happened.”

The former president’s comment is a near-perfect example of a Kinsley gaffe, in which a politician accidentally tells listeners the truth. The subtext here of course is that regardless of whether the oft-cited Lankford immigration bill had come to pass (it was a nonstarter that got only two GOP votes), you already had three-plus years of border crossings with more than ten million migrants pouring into the United States. That number includes Laken Riley’s killer, twenty-six-year-old Venezuelan José Antonio Ibarra, who crossed the border near El Paso in the fall of 2022 and almost immediately released by Customs and Border Patrol.

Even in his latter years, Bill Clinton’s political capacity remains more attuned to the leanings of Americans than many of the key figures in his own party. He’s not always right. But if he’s right about how this issue plays and its implications for the election, Kamala Harris’s advisors should be worried. He’s warning them why he thinks they might lose.