The unraveling

Mike Tomasky's insta-reflections on Nevada are worth a read, most especially for this insight about Bill Clinton's recent behavior:

The Clinton campaign may conclude that, numerically and on balance, Bill helped. But, trust me, to the thousands of committed progressives who supported him when he really needed it, who went to the mat for him at his moment of (largely self-inflicted) crisis but who now happen to be supporting someone other than his wife, he's done himself a tremendous amount of damage.

I think it goes a bit beyond that, too. I don't know Bill Clinton, so I can't say why he does what he does, but it's hard not to conclude that--whether he became habituated to a way of politics in a bygone era or whether he just is this way--he's still disposed to some of the things that made liberals bristle when they were supporting him a decade ago. But the political realities in the 1990s were much different than the political realities today, and there's much, much less chance that people like Mike Tomasky will countenance the Ricky Ray Rectoring, welfare-reforming, Obama-smearing side of Bill Clinton now, when such behavior isn't really construable as an unfortunate side-effect of the historical moment.