Bill-Barack Hostility Casts Pall on Party

Bill Clinton won’t be at Barack Obama’s acceptance speech tomorrow night, CNN reports, in the latest sign that relations between the former and would-be president are still frosty. “Obama does not like Clinton, and Clinton knows it,” one longtime Clinton adviser told the Washington Post. The enmity likely cuts both ways; Clinton remains incensed that he was accused of race baiting in South Carolina.

The enmity has surprisingly little to do with Hillary Clinton’s primary defeat, the Post reports. Obama sees Clinton as a bridge to 60s-era divisions, while Clinton believes Obama has underrated his accomplishments. But both are adaptable—and remarkably similar—political animals who could mend fences, but, conspicuously, haven't. Clinton associates insist it doesn’t take much to make the ex-president happy. “We all know that he wants to be loved. Just call him.” (More Bill Clinton stories.)