Bill Clinton's first-term Labor Secretary Bob Reich is one:
While it may be that all is fair in love, war, and politics, it’s not
fair – indeed, it’s demeaning – for a former President to say things
that are patently untrue (such as Obama’s anti-war position is a “fairy
tale”) or to insinuate that Obama is injecting race into the race when
the former President is himself doing it. Meanwhile, the attack ads
being run in South Carolina by the Clinton camp which quote Obama as
saying Republicans had all the ideas under Reagan, is disingenuous. For
years, Bill Clinton and many other leading Democrats have made
precisely the same point – that starting in the Reagan administration,
Republicans put forth a range of new ideas while the Democrats sat on
their hands. Many of these ideas were wrong-headed and dangerous, such
as supply-side economics. But for too long Democrats failed counter
with new ideas of their own; they wrongly assumed that the old
Democratic positions and visions would be enough. Clinton’s 1992
campaign – indeed, the entire “New Democratic” message of the 1990s –
was premised on the importance of taking back the initiative from the
Republicans and offering Americans a new set of ideas and principles.
Now, sadly, we’re witnessing a smear campaign against Obama that
employs some of the worst aspects of the old politics.
Granted, Reich has been something of a Clinton critic ever since his 1997 book Locked In the Cabinet, but you do wonder how many other former Clintonites are starting to feel a bit queasy.
Update: This George Packer article quotes Reich and a number of other Clintonites getting off the bus.
--Jason Zengerle