Ex-President Ventures Where Some Might Not - Mr. Clinton is embraced in states, mainly in the South and the West, where Mr. Obama is all but unwelcome.

From The New York Times:

When Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky’s Democratic Senate candidate, welcomed former President Bill Clinton to a fund-raiser here Tuesday, she offered a rendering of recent political history suited for red-state Democrats: Mr. Clinton’s tenure was showered with praise, former President George W. Bush was mildly scorned, and President Obama was implicitly rebuked.

“We all know what the problem is: it’s a Washington, D.C., that just doesn’t understand Kentucky,” Ms. Grimes said.

Her gibes at the capital’s “dysfunction” were chiefly aimed at her likely opponent, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, but her nostalgia for the 1990s, when Ms. Grimes was in her teens, and her lament about the present was also aimed at linking herself to Mr. Clinton and distancing herself from Mr. Obama.

The former president’s presence on the stage also underscored a larger truth of the 2014 midterm campaign: Mr. Clinton is embraced in states, mainly in the South and the West, where Mr. Obama is all but unwelcome.

 

So the party is again turning to Mr. Clinton to help Democrats in seven of the most competitive Senate races, all of which are in states Mr. Obama lost in 2012. “He’s probably the most popular national Democrat alive,” Gov. Steve Beshear of Kentucky, a fellow Democrat, said of the former president.

Democratic strategists, and some candidates, are nearly giddy in discussing Mr. Clinton’s approval ratings in private polling but are far more sober when asked about Mr. Obama. “I’m a Clinton Democrat through and through,” said Ms. Grimes, Kentucky’s secretary of state, in an interview, suggesting that it was highly unlikely she would invite Mr. Obama to Kentucky.