On Sunday, former President Bill Clinton attended the Fort Valley GOTV Community Fish Fry in Fort Valley, Georgia. It was the kind of small-scale, face-to-face politicking that was the former president’s specialty. Today, at 78, he’s still good at it.

But Clinton, who won the presidency in 1992 as a centrist New Democrat — his campaign was based on his understanding that the party had moved too far to the left, even back then — does not really represent the progressives who make up the core of Harris’s support. 

Clinton offered the crowd personal testimony on Harris’s abilities. “I’m telling you, I know her, I have watched her, and I believe she’ll be a great president,” Clinton said. He spent a lot of time talking about healthcare. He talked about inflation, trying to absolve the Biden-Harris administration of blame for the decline in millions of people’s standard of living. And then he got to the disaster at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“On the immigration thing,” Clinton said, “she’s the only candidate who has actually endorsed a bill that would hold down immigration in any given year to a certain point and then make sure we gave people a decent place to live. We didn’t divide people from their children, and we did total vetting before people got in. Now, Trump killed the bill. The bill was being written by senior Republicans in the Senate, and he killed the bill. Why?”

Here, Clinton was rolling into the standard Democratic charge that former President Donald Trump “killed” a bill that would have somehow solved the problems created by Kamala Harris’s and Joe Biden’s policy of allowing millions of illegal border crossers not only to enter the United States but to stay. There’s a lot wrong with that story. One, the bill would not have done that. Two, the bill never had a chance of becoming law. It was doomed in the Senate and never even brought up in the House. Three, Republicans opposed it even before Trump moved into the picture. And four, the bill was introduced on Feb. 4, 2024, more than three years after Biden and Harris took office. Why did they open the border gates for those three years, allowing millions to enter, before coming up with an election-year proposal that supposedly would fix the problem?

Still, Clinton offered the Harris campaign’s Trump-killed-the-bill schtick. Clinton’s answer to the “Why?” question was that Trump killed the bill to exploit the Biden-Harris border mess politically. Clinton referred to a case Trump has mentioned often, that of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was murdered by an illegal border crosser from Venezuela. The alleged killer entered the U.S. illegally in 2022 and was allowed to stay. Trump has said that Harris has “blood on her hands” for the Riley case and for other victims of illegal border crossers who have murdered Americans. 

“You had a case in Georgia not very long ago, didn’t you? They made an ad about it. A young woman who had been killed by an immigrant,” Clinton said. “Yeah, well, if they’d all been properly vetted, that probably wouldn’t have happened.”

At that moment, Clinton blew up the Harris-Biden defense on the politically powerful issue of migrant crime. In effect, Clinton said this: If Biden and Harris had conducted the normal vetting required to allow migrants into the U.S. — if they had just done that, Laken Riley would probably be alive today. “They [Harris and Biden] were for open borders, no talk, anybody comes in, just walk right into our country, which is insane,” Trump told the Blaze’s Glenn Beck. “[Clinton] is a little late in saying it. … The damage has been done.”

Indeed, it has. The headline of this newsletter refers to Clinton’s “gaffe.” And that, in turn, refers to the classic Washington definition of “gaffe” from the journalist Michael Kinsley: “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” That’s what Bill Clinton did on Sunday. Democrats aren’t supposed to say that the Biden-Harris border policy has had appalling results across the country. But that’s what Clinton did. Yes, he was a little late in saying it. But Kamala Harris never will.