It’s long been obvious that Bill Clinton believes he was wronged in this year’s Democratic primary campaign, his words and actions deliberately twisted and distorted by his enemies and their accomplices in the press to turn him into someone and something he is not.

Two months after his wife formally conceded to Barack Obama, the former president is still pouting in full public view. In an interview with ABC News last weekend, he was noticeably stinting in his praise of the presumptive Democratic nominee while making it clear that he has some primary-related grievances to air just as soon as this election is over.  read more »

Eliot Brown asked the New School's president (and former senator), Bob Kerrey, yesterday about Hillary Clinton's standing when, assuming she doesn't end up on the Democratic ticket this year, she returns to the Senate. In Kerrey's assessment, "She will be immeasurably more capable and more powerful.”

Here's some of Kerrey's explanation:  read more »

Bob Kerrey, the onetime Clinton family antagonist who now supports Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, believes that “if things stay the way they are now” his candidate will withdraw from the race sometime between now and June 3, when the primary season concludes in Montana and South Dakota.

He did say that there was no reason for Clinton to yield to pressure to get out of the race before then, even as a famous South Dakotan, George McGovern, renounced his support of Clinton and called on her to quit.  read more »

Kerrey—who called Bill Clinton ‘an unusually good liar’—is suddenly a Hillary guy.  read more »

The news that New School president and former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey plans to endorse Hillary Clinton and campaign on her behalf in Iowa is noteworthy for its irony. Perhaps no Democrat in the 1990’s was as persistent a thorn in both Clintons' sides as Kerrey was.

A brief rehistory after the jump.  read more »

Some more comments on Don Imus' return to radio that didn't make it into the print story...

Bob Kerrey, New School president and former U.S. senator, told The Observer he'd go back on the show. "Look he apologized and he paid the price. Did Isiah Thomas apologize yet?"

Democratic political consultant Paul Begala said he'd go back too. "I shoot my mouth off all the time. If there was a death penalty for that I would have lost my job a long time ago … I am Catholic, we forgive the sin when asked to."

Brill's Content founder Steve Brill agreed. "If you think about Imus' show and Imus' appeal for the last four or five years, I think it had almost nothing to do with making comments like that racist comment. I think he can be every bit as provocative without getting into that kind of trouble. For example, he habitually calls Senator Clinton 'satan'. He can do that. It’s fair game. It’s funny."  read more »

At long last, some good news for Senate Republicans.  read more »

Bob Kerrey thinks boosting the Democrats' chances of increasing their Senate majority is not a good enough reason for him to leave his job and run for office.

Talking about his decision, made public today, not to seek the Nebraska Senate seat vacated by retiring Republican senator Chuck Hagel, Kerrey told me a few minutes ago that he was less worried about the Democratic majority than he was about the country as a whole.

"What I feel responsibility for is the possibility of putting the country in danger," Kerrey said. "I do worry about the direction and don't like the direction the country is going in a number of areas." 

"The idea of increasing the Democratic majority is not a motivator for me," he said. " Because it is me personally. I cannot run just to increase the number. If that's all that's motivating, that's a very, very small factor."   

More after the jump.  read more »

Bill Clinton rallies support around a name he once sullied.  read more »

It looks like Bob Kerrey, the New School’s President since 2001, has backed off just a little from his earlier statements that he wouldn’t head back to Nebraska to run for the Senate next year.

This means several things:

1) Chuck Hagel is not running for re-election: Kerrey, who represented Nebraska with his fellow Vietnam veteran in the late ‘90s, had promised to write Hagel a check if he ran for a third term in 2008. Now Kerrey is saying publicly that he doesn’t think Hagel will run – which probably means that he got something approaching an iron-clad guarantee in private.

2) Chuck Hagel is either running for President or retiring from politics: If he wants to seek the White House, it almost certainly has to be as an independent. Given the shortcomings of the top G.O.P candidates, there’s a theoretical vacuum in the Republican race – but Hagel, who’s been branded disloyal for his war opposition, is unlikely to fill it (even though he would give the G.O.P. its best – and perhaps only – shot of retaining the White House next year). An independent bid would be tough because of Hagel’s modest name recognition and campaign treasury. A teaming with Mike Bloomberg seemed to be his most logical option, but did Bloomberg’s comments to Dan Rather kill that idea? Would a Hagel independent bid now be doomed from the start to Ross Perot ’96-land? Maybe, at 62, he will jut hang it up in ’08.

3) Democrats are poised to expand the ’08 Senate playing field: Nebraska is a red state, but Kerrey is one of the few Democrats who can win it. (He previously won the governorship in 1982 and Senate races in 1988 and 1994 and has never lost in the state.) The Republicans seem poised to nominate Jon Bruning, the conservative state attorney general, who had been planning to challenge Hagel from the right in the G.O.P. primary. Against the other Democrats who have been eyeing the race, Bruning would have been the favorite. Against Kerrey, he’s probably an underdog. Republicans have a lot more turf to defend than Democrats in ’08 – 22 seats to 12 – and Nebraska is yet another G.O.P. seat that the Democrats are primed to pick off. The G.O.P. will obviously brand Kerrey an opportunist and a sort-of carpet-bagger (remember how he flirted with running for mayor of New York in ’05?), but even if they beat him, they will have to expend considerable resources to do it.

4) The New School will need a new President: Is there another retired politician in New York who could take over for Kerrey? Doesn’t George Mitchell live here??