American Crossroads, the right-wing super PAC organized and steered by Karl Rove, has released its latest in a series of early TV spots attempting to wrap the economy around Barack Obama’s neck. This one was inevitable: Bill Clinton’s statements in recent weeks that hiking taxes immediately (which Barack Obama has not proposed to do) would harm the economy:

The National Memo’s editor-in-chief Joe Conason personally asked Clinton about this charge, which he said was a misleading rehashing of his words.

One has to wonder if the former president isn’t flattered that he remains so politically relevant and universally beloved that Republicans continue to use him as a reasonable figure in attack ads on wayward “liberals.” The Third Way that Clinton represented — modern, moderate, Southern populism — persists in the American imagination.