Apparently without consulting the White House, President Clinton on Nov. 12 distanced himself and his wife from Mr. Obama’s signature legislation, which remains deeply unpopular. Mr. Clinton told an interviewer that he favored amending the Affordable Care Act to allow people to keep health-care plans that the law was forcing them to surrender. Calling on Mr. Obama to “honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got,” Mr. Clinton made it clear that the health-care law had to be revamped in order to survive politically.

The move accomplished two things. First, it provided political cover to the 39 House Democrats who voted for Rep. Fred Upton’s legislation allowing insurance companies to continue to offer policies that had been canceled because of ObamaCare. Second, by turning around and explicitly endorsing ObamaCare and the president days later in a CNN Espanol interview, Mr. Clinton managed the delicate task of maintaining close ties and clear distance from the administration.

That isn’t to say Mr. Clinton’s intervention will be enough immunize his wife from criticism. Mrs. Clinton’s advocacy for health-care reform in the first years of the Clinton presidency will almost certainly brand her as the “mother of ObamaCare,” notwithstanding that her reforms were more limited than Mr. Obama’s. But the popular perception is that Mrs. Clinton was the first advocate of national health insurance, and in the 2008 primary she, and not Mr. Obama, was the main advocate for the individual mandate.