On the flight to Puerto Rico, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) turned to former President Bill Clinton and told him one of the reasons his wife was losing was because the campaign too often allowed Sen. Barack Obama to frame the issues.
When Clinton ran in the 1990s, he stayed on message - most famously with his "it’s the economy, stupid" rundown of the first President Bush. He won, Menendez observed, because Clinton forced his opponent to respond to the issues on his terms.
A flummoxed Bush was left marveling at supermarket product scanning devices while Clinton told voters, "I feel your pain."
Sixteen years later, his wife didn’t capture the issues and present them aggressively enough, in Menendez’s view, and she suffered the consequences.
Now, as he shifts gears from Clinton to Obama, Menendez is on the offensive, trying to frame the immigration and ethics debates against Sen. John McCain, a day before the presumptive Republican presidential nominee lands in New Jersey for a Burlington County campaign rally.
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