EDITORIAL: Bill Clinton’s Johnson Controls gaffe

OPINION:

Watching Bill Clinton play politics is like watching Brooks Robinson play third base. A master at work is a delight to see. Bubba is trying to help Hillary now, and it’s obvious that he would suit up in a New York minute if he could. Politics is his game. Helping his beloved try her hand at it only tries his patience.

But sometimes he goes a little awry, trying the patience of Hillary’s handlers. The missus has been making Johnson Controls, a large Wisconsin manufacturer of automobile parts, her corporate villain of the month to demonstrate that she can be as mean about businessmen as Bernie Sanders.

The former president apparently didn’t get the message, because the other day he called Johnson Controls “one of my favorite companies,” and praised its work in developing “clean energy” in a lot of unexpected ways. Sometimes even a president boots a ground ball into the outfield. It’s called “going off message,” the cardinal sin of any campaigner.

But he committed what should be an object lesson in how to rebuke a sinner without reading him out of the congregation, saying nice things as well as ill, and the Clintons must regard Johnson Controls as a valued sinner, after all. The company has donated a quarter of a million dollars to the Clinton Foundation as “dues” to the Clinton Global Initiative, the fabulously successful family business. A good husband has to look after the family business.

Mr. Clinton, speaking at a rally in Greenville, N.C., praised Johnson Controls for working “with our foundation to retrofit the Empire State Building, cutting the electric bill in that old building by 40 percent and created 275 jobs full-time jobs for two and a half years doing it. But they came to Congress and said, ’please bail out the automobile industry,’ and Congress helped them, and should have.”

Uh, oh. Not only had Bubba stepped on Hillary’s message but Johnson Controls denied that it had sought government protection, or taken a government bailout. Not only had he stepped on Hillary’s message, but at another rally in North Carolina he couldn’t resist taking a poke at Barack Obama.

“Here’s the deal,” he said. “Why is it such a wacky election? Because millions and millions and millions and millions of people look at that pretty picture of America [Mr. Obama] painted and they cannot find themselves in it to save their lives.”

A gaffe, as a fan of the national game (if not the national pastime) once observed, is when a politicians accidentally tells it like it is. Bubba committed a telling gaffe, and no one’s better at it than the master.