About that Republican fantasy of Bill Clinton going rogue ...

Republicans have a strange fantasy that when former President Bill Clinton speaks at the Democratic National Convention tomorrow night he is going to veer wildly off message, in the process sabotaging President Obama's reelection campaign'and the fact that the Obama campaign has not yet seen Clinton's speech isn't going to make those dreams go away:

President Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina and deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter downplayed questions about Bill Clinton's speech not being vetted by the campaign at a Bloomberg News breakfast this morning, calling it a "mountain out of a molehill."

"We have had lots of conversations with President Clinton," said Messina. "This is a mountain out of a molehill. He's going to give a great speech tomorrow."

Has he seen the speech? No, Messina acknowledged at the start. Cutter added, "Someone in our organization is likely to see the speech before (Clinton) gives it just because that's the normal course of business."

Sadly for Republicans, President Clinton isn't going to go rogue. The Obama campaign might not yet have a copy of his speech in their hands, but, rest assured, there are not going to be any passages in which Clinton engages in a conversation with an empty chair. He's not going to endorse Mitt Romney nor his economic philosophy. He's not going to rebuke President Obama's plan to move the country forward because much of the Obama plan is to restore the economic policies that enabled the Clinton boom. And he certainly isn't going to say they were right to have impeached him.

But if the hope that Bill Clinton is going to somehow give the body blow to Obama that Mitt Romney was unable to deliver last week in Tampa causes Republicans to tune in to tomorrow night's speech, then more power to them, because the more people that watch Clinton, the better.