Obama, Clinton set aside past to talk job creation

Reporting from Washington —  Two old adversaries from the bitter 2008 Democratic presidential race reconnected Wednesday at the White House in a fragile partnership that could unite two strands of the party and possibly strengthen its prospects in a bleak midterm campaign season.

President Obama welcomed former President Clinton for a talk about job creation — an issue that was the 42nd president’s strong suit but may be the 44th president’s political undoing.

With voters unnerved about unemployment, Obama has been wrapping himself in a Clinton era linked in the public mind to flush economic times. Earlier in the week, the president tapped as his budget director Jacob Lew, a former budget chief under Clinton who helped convert deficits into budget surpluses by the end of Clinton’s second term.

In their meeting in the Roosevelt Room, the two presidents and a handful of business leaders discussed ways to create jobs by making buildings more energy efficient.

“To the extent that Americans remember the 1990s, they remember a terrific economy,” said Robert B. Reich, Labor secretary under Clinton. “President Obama obviously wants the public to connect with those years rather than these terrible ones.... President Obama needs all the help he can get at this point, given that we’re still in the throes of a recession.”

A fresh wave of polling shows that the public has grown disenchanted with Obama’s management of the economy, despite White House assertions that its policies are working.

On Wednesday, Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors released a report showing the government’s stimulus program had saved or created about 3 million jobs.

But with unemployment at 9.5%, the public doesn’t seem impressed. In a new CBS News poll, 74% of those surveyed said they believed the stimulus either has had no impact on the economy or has made conditions worse.

Business leaders also are unhappy. U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donahue said Wednesday that the economy could plunge back into a recession and that faulted Obama was for “demonizing” businesses.

In this sour climate, Clinton may be an effective campaign surrogate. Some House Democrats bluntly concede that they don’t want Obama campaigning in their districts, given his sagging approval ratings. Clinton’s link to a prosperous time positions him as a welcome substitute. When Clinton left office in 2001, unemployment was about 4%.

The White House wants the former president’s help, particularly with polls showing the House Democratic majority in peril. “Bill Clinton has probably been campaigning longer than I’ve been working in politics and you’ve been reporting,” Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said to members of the media Wednesday. “I think it would be crazy not to have a very popular former president out campaigning.”

But an Obama-Clinton alliance depends on the public forgetting, or ignoring, much of what the two men have said about one another in recent years.

Obama’s promise to build a “new foundation” for the American economy rests on his argument that America has relied too heavily on fleeting economic bubbles. He has made no effort to spare the Clinton era, which ushered in the housing boom and the high-tech surge.

In “The Promise,” a book about Obama’s first year in office, author Jonathan Alter wrote that in a private Oval Office meeting between the president and his advisors on Sept. 1, 2009, Obama took a swipe at Clinton

“I wasn’t sent here to do school uniforms,” Obama said, in a dismissive reference to a series of small-scale policies that Clinton pursued heading into his 1996 reelection campaign.

The rhetoric was even more caustic in 2008. Eager to see his wife win the Democratic nomination, Clinton at one point accused the Obama campaign of launching a political “hit job” against him.

He also sought to gain traction after a Nevada newspaper interview in which Obama said: “I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom.”

Clinton bristled, telling reporters later, “I thought we challenged the conventional wisdom of the ‘90s.”

But the 2008 election is over, and grudges are being put aside.

Obama, of course, tapped chief rival Hillary Rodham Clinton for the most prestigious Cabinet post in his administration, secretary of State. And while relations with Bill Clinton may never be warm, they’re decidedly less chilly.

Doug Band, counselor to Clinton, said in an interview: “That’s all in the past.”

Clinton, he said, is “friendly with people who’ve tried to destroy him politically and personally over the years. He understands politics and is a larger-view person who cares deeply about America and the world and is willing to do anything he can to help.”

peter.nicholas@latimes.com