Backhand Bill

Ah, good ol' Slick Willy!

Before Hillary dropped out, Clinton had accused Obama of playing the race card against him and suggested Obama was a fairy tale candidate.

Since Obama sewed up the nomination, he's been playing nice...kind of.

First, he complimented Sarah Palin, saying she was an effective candidate with a compelling story. Then, he defended McCain's actions before the bailout debate, and contradicted Obama that the Democrats were, in fact, largely responsible for the Fannie/Freddie meltdown. Now, in a recent campaign stop, Bill Clinton paid another backhanded compliment to Barack Obama:

Barack Obama cultivated the image of a cool and collected leader during the height of the economic crisis last month, when lawmakers on Capitol Hill scrambled to draft a workable bailout package after a meltdown on Wall Street.

And when John McCain suspended his campaign to dive head first into the fray, Obama's campaign accused the Republican of being "unsteady."

But to hear Bill Clinton tell it, the Democratic nominee didn't quite have a handle on the situation himself.

"I haven't cleared this with him and he may even be mad at me for saying this so close to the election, but I know what else he said to his economic advisers (during the crisis)," Clinton told the crowd at a Wednesday night rally with Obama in Florida. "He said, 'Tell me what the right thing to do is. What's the right thing for America? Don't tell me what's popular. You tell me what's right -- I'll figure out how to sell it.'"

Clinton said when the crisis broke, Obama called his own advisers as well as those of the former two-term president, Hillary Clinton, Warren Buffet and others.

"He called those people. You know why? Because he knew it was complicated and before he said anything he wanted to understand," Clinton said. "That's what a president does in a crisis."

The obvious McCain response came quickly:

"Barack Obama had no idea what the right thing to do is or at least that's Bill Clinton's impression," McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb said.

"It's disturbing that ... Barack Obama's response to this is 'Tell me what to do and I will sell it,'" Goldfarb added. "That's been Barack Obama's entire campaign -- is one big sales job."

Goldfarb said he can't speculate on the content of the advice Obama solicited in late September but that, "The result was to sit back and do nothing."

One almost wonders if Bill Clinton is a stealth opponent for some reason. Hmmm...

If nothing else, at least it's entertaining.

There's my two cents.