The Clintonites' beef with Obama: it's not his policies they complain about but his messaging. Is that fair?

• Author: van Zuylen-Wood, Simon
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

It's April 2010, and an exploded BP rig is hemorrhaging oil into the Gulf of Mexico. President Bill Clinton, racing to the scene, leaps into the ocean "in a wet suit, trying to plug the leak personally."

This half-serious whimsy, which appears in Ed Rendell's latest book, A Nation of Wusses, is as much Clinton worship as it is Obama criticism; Barack Obama's "substantive response [to the spill] had been right on target in every way," writes the former Pennsylvania governor and staunch Clinton ally. "But [the] president hadn't been visible enough down in the Gulf." Rendell's dig is a curious inversion of a recurrent right-wing attack: Obama, Rendell suggests, is all substance and no style. It's also emblematic of a broader Clintonite critique of the president, one that has as much to do with well-intentioned frustration as with rose-tinted 1990s nostalgia.

This critique should not be confused with other popular left-leaning attacks on the president. It bears no relation, for instance, to the progressive charge that Obama didn't push for a bigger economic stimulus bill, or hard enough for a public option, and that he caved to the banks in negotiating the bailout and the subsequent financial reform legislation. Nor would you hear it from centrist ex-Clinton strategists like Mark Penn and Doug Schoen, who decry the current president's "divisive" policies on Fox News.

Instead, Rendell--along with a half-dozen former Clinton officials I spoke to--agree with Obama's policies, but argue that he's failed to use the presidential bully pulpit to sell them to the public. According to Rendell, Obama let the GOP define down his foremost legislative achievements--health care reform and the stimulus--and paid the price in the 2010 midterm elections. "How many Americans know that more than 40 percent of the stimulus spending was for tax cuts?" Rendell writes. "Hardly any, because it was never explained to them."

It's a refrain I heard often. "There has been, among the Clinton people, a concern that [Obama] hasn't been consistently effective at the bully pulpit," one former member of Clinton's senior staff told me. "Clinton has a unique ability to infuse policy arguments with real passion. And that energy has at times been lacking in this president." Bill Galston, a Brookings scholar and former Clinton adviser, was harsher. "His apparent inability to turn his communication skills as a campaigner [into] campaign skills as a sitting president is his single...