Surprise, surprise! It turns out Barack Obama doesn’t think much of Bill. And he said as much during the presidential campaign.
After Obama won the South Carolina primary, Bill Clinton said dismissively that Jesse Jackson had won there, too, essentially implying, that, oh, it was some kind of black thing. Then, when his racial sensitivity was questioned, Clinton claimed incongruously that the Obama campaign had “played the race card on me.” Weeks later, Clinton termed Obama’s oft-cited (and well-documented) assertion that he was the only major candidate to oppose the Iraq invasion as “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” And as the campaign wound down, Clinton complained, weirdly, that “they” (Obama? The media?) were engaged in some massive “cover-up” to hide public opinion surveys demonstrating Hillary’s potential strength in a general election campaign.
“We had to figure out how to deal with a former president who was just lying, engaging in bald-faced lies,” Obama told Wolffe. When the author asked if Bill Clinton had gotten into his head, Obama replied, “Yes, but I got into his.”
True enough, and, according to Wolffe, that consideration entered into Obama’s thinking when it came to choosing a running mate. Obama instructed his aides to consider Hillary — if and only if they thought she’d help the ticket win in November. “But,” Obama added, “I’m concerned about Bill Clinton being a loose cannon.”
So what does the president say to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton these days?
