Hillary Leaves Bill Out of Announcement Video

Notably absent from Hillary Clinton’s Sunday video announcement–her husband and former President Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton, who said that he will initially be a “backstage adviser” to Clinton’s campaign, is nowhere to be found in the announcement video, perhaps indicating that Clinton’s campaign does not want voters to associated her with Bill Clinton’s baggage.

Her supporters have been reportedly debating whether Bill Clinton should even be at her wife’s side during her formal announcement, which her campaign chairman John Podesta said will come sometime next month.

As Breitbart News noted, “in 2008, Hillary Clinton’s aides were worried that rumors of Bill Clinton’s numerous alleged hook-ups and affairs would undermine her campaign and remind voters of Monica Lewinsky, the blue dress, and impeachment.” Not much seems to have changed. Writing in the Observer, Ken Silverstein warned that Clinton’s “ties to convicted pedophile Jeffery Epstein may potentially ‘derail’ Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.”

Even Hillary Clinton herself warned Obama when he was considering her to be his secretary of state that Bill Clinton could be a “problem” for the administration.

“You know my husband,” she reportedly told Obama in 2009. “You know I can’t control him, and at some point he’ll be a problem.”

In 2008, as Breitbart News noted, Bill Clinton arguably “did more harm than good to his wife’s campaign.” He referred to Obama’s campaign as a big “fairy tale,” trying “to diminish Obama’s win in the South Carolina primary by comparing him to Jesse Jackson.” That angered black voters who viewed Clinton’s comments as an “affront.” One activist wrote in The Grio that Hillary Clinton’s service at Obama’s State Department “does not mean black voters will completely forget the bitter, racially tinged presidential campaign politics of seven years ago.”

Bill Clinton, though, took issue with reports that Hillary Clinton’s campaign may not want to deal with all of that baggage as Hillary tries to again reset her image, dismissing a New York Times report on the matter as “creative writing.”