New York Times: “Twenty-two years after he won the White House and six years after his wife’s near miss for the Democratic nomination, former President Bill Clinton again stands in the thick of the competition for the nation’s highest office.”

“That makes Mr. Clinton, who addressed his first national convention at age 33 and on Friday became a grandfather at 68, the most durable high-stakes player ever in American presidential politics.”

“In the art of politics he’s Michelangelo, and in the science of politics he is Einstein. He follows political results like a baseball junkie follows box scores. Because he has campaigned in so many places, he has absorbed and integrated millions of data points, yet can assemble them into a narrative that folks can follow.”

— Paul Begala, quoted by Businessweek, on Bill Clinton.

“When Bill Clinton left the White House in January 2001, Americans had experienced quite enough of the boisterous Big Dog and his unending dramas, both personal and political,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“All of which makes it rather remarkable that today Clinton, as reviled a figure as ever served in the White House, stands as arguably the most popular political figure in America.”

“It’s not just his desirability to campaign for Democrats who, apart from distant fundraising assistance, want absolutely nothing to do with the current occupant of the White House. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that, alone among today’s major political figures, Clinton is seen in an overwhelmingly positive light, with 56% approving of the former president compared to 21% who disapprove.”

The Daily Show has a hilarious look for a presidential candidate not named Clinton or Bush, “the Coke and Pepsi of politics.”

[Read more…]

John Avlon: “When Hillary Clinton spoke of ‘the vast right wing conspiracy’ targeting her family in the 1990s, in large part she was referring to the cottage industry of Clinton haters briefly bankrolled by Richard Mellon Scaife.”

“But something surprising and heartening happened in recent years that puts that hyper-partisan hunting season in perspective: Scaife and the Clintons found an unexpected mutual respect. It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of demonizing those we disagree with in the Obama era. Because caricatures break down when you see over-heated political passions with a sense of perspective.”

Bill and Hillary Clinton “helped raise more than $1 billion from U.S. companies and industry donors during two decades on the national stage through campaigns, paid speeches and a network of organizations advancing their political and policy goals,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Those deep ties potentially give Mrs. Clinton a financial advantage in the 2016 presidential election, if she runs, and could bring industry donors back to the Democratic Party for the first time since Mr. Clinton left the White House.”

“Republicans, while capable of raising similar sums, worry the Clintons will take an early lead in the next presidential race, which is expected to total well above the $2 billion spent in 2012.”

“Bill and Hillary Clinton have long supported an estate tax to prevent the U.S. from being dominated by inherited wealth. That doesn’t mean they want to pay it,” Bloomberg reports.

“To reduce the tax pinch, the Clintons are using financial planning strategies befitting the top 1 percent of U.S. households in wealth. These moves, common among multimillionaires, will help shield some of their estate from the tax that now tops out at 40 percent of assets upon death.”

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News/Annenberg poll finds Bill Clinton “is by far the most admired president of the last quarter century underscoring how much he has done to burnish his profile since leaving the White House in 2000.”

“Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton raised $200 million in 10 months for their foundation’s endowment, positioning the nonprofit to survive even if its cash-collecting namesakes engage in a 2016 presidential run,” Bloomberg reports.

“The race to build an endowment is a sign that the foundation is maturing, that 67-year-old former President Bill Clinton won’t always be able to serve as its chief rainmaker, and that the time for Hillary Clinton, 66, to settle the question of her presidential ambitions is running out, said three people involved in the endowment project who asked for anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the fundraising effort.”

Hillary Clinton, in an interview with People magazine, said she had “moved on” from the Monica Lewinsky scandal that dominated her husband’s second term as president, the New York Times reports.

When asked about published reports that she called Lewinsky a “narcissistic loony toon” after the affair became public, Mrs. Clinton said, “I’m not going to comment on what did and didn’t happen.”

Stephen Sestanovich: “The frenzy surrounding the June 10 release of Hillary Clinton’s State Department memoir is at full tilt. Both The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have published chin-pullers on what sort of secretary of state she was. (And this wasn’t just punditry: The Journal’s reporters described a juicy-sounding 2012 Clinton memo to President Barack Obama on the collapse of his “reset” policy toward Russia.) There is, of course, going to be more of this–and if Madam Secretary runs for president, it will never let up.”

“Still, Mrs. Clinton’s record as America’s chief diplomat will not really come into focus until we know how she positions herself for the 2016 campaign. Is she going to run as the candidate who would revive American foreign-policy activism–distancing herself from Mr. Obama’s approach–or would she accept the president’s case for a downsized international role? Mrs. Clinton’s paper trail at State allows her to do either.”

Michael Sneed “hears rumbles former President Bill Clinton, who lied about his affair with White House intern Monica ‘That Woman’ Lewinsky, may opt to publicly apologize for the abuse Lewinsky claims she’s endured since the sex scandal broke more than 15 years ago.”

“Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.”

— Monica Lewinsky, writing in Vanity Fair.

Former President Bill Clinton, “who has grown increasingly frustrated that his economic policies are viewed as out-of-step with the current focus on income inequality, on Wednesday delivered his most muscular defense of his economic legacy,” the New York Times reports.

“The speech reflected a strategic effort by Mr. Clinton and his advisers to reclaim the populist ground now occupied by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and other ascendant left-leaning Democrats, and, potentially, to lay out an economic message that could propel his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to the White House in 2016.”

Jeff Greenfied: “Even in this Age of Permanent Gas-baggery, when the signal-to-noise ratio is approaching the win-loss ratio of the 1962 Mets, the mindlessness of the Baby Clinton conversation has made CNN’s search for the Malaysian airplane look like a model of thoughtful analysis. I would cheerfully give a significant three-figure sum to any talking head who, when asked to opine on the earthshaking consequences of Chelsea’s pregnancy, would channel John McEnroe: ‘You cannot be serious!'”

The Week: Meet the Clinton baby truthers

The famous Clinton White House document known as the “conspiracy commerce memo” has finally surfaced in a batch of documents released by the Clinton library, Politico reports.

“The memo, which details how right-wing conspiracy theories made their way into the mainstream press, was written in 1995 and first acknowledged by the White House in 1997. The idea of a ‘conspiracy’ was also famously referred to by Hillary Clinton in 1998, when she cited a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he ran for president.'”

Hillary Clinton “played an energetic role in virtually every foreign policy issue of President Obama’s first term, advocating generally hawkish views internally while using her celebrity to try to restore America’s global standing after the hit it took during the George W. Bush administration,” the New York Times reports.

“But her halting answer suggests a problem that Mrs. Clinton could confront as she recounts her record in Mr. Obama’s cabinet before a possible run for president in 2016: Much of what she labored over so conscientiously is either unfinished business or has gone awry in his second term.”

Chelsea Clinton told Fast Company that she might run for public office one day.

Said Clinton: “I live in a city and a state and a country where I support my elected representatives. If at some point that weren’t the case, and I didn’t support my mayor or my city councilwoman or my congresswoman or either of my senators — and I’m lucky to live in a state where I have lots of women representing me, you know — maybe then I’d have to ask and answer the question for myself, and come to a different answer.”