Bill lets loose in interview
Posted: Monday, December 17, 2007 10:30 AM by Domenico Montanaro
From NBC’s Abby Livingston
“Probably, just to get a political story and get a fight going, somebody will watch this interview and parse everything I said,” said the 42nd president Friday night on Charlie Rose. What? Never!
In the hour-long interview, Bill Clinton downplayed Hillary’s chances in Iowa, citing her competitors’ strengths in the state. He noted Edwards’ history in Iowa. He also commented on Obama’s home state of Illinios’ proximity to Iowa, neglecting to mention that his wife was raised in suburban Chicago. “So my view of this is that I never thought she had a big lead in Iowa and never thought she could have one.”
Bill Clinton was on the prowl last night, and he was after Obama and the press. He made a litany of criticisms toward Obama, but diverging from Clinton campaign strategist Mark Penn, Clinton made no mention of cocaine. He did, however, bring up Kinder-gate with no prompting from Rose. Clinton claimed that the controversy began because Obama was quoted making a “fairly derisive and obvious comment about Hillary saying, you know, she had some decades-old plan to be president, repeating this total canard.”
“He kept repeating this totally fabricated account from this anti-Hillary book that she had this decades-long plan to be president,” Clinton continued. “As if it were something bad…And so on her website, they put up reports from people who worked for Senator Obama that he was planning to run for president when he first got to the Senate, then he was planning it in the state Senate, and then they put the kindergarten letter in. They thought it was funny.”
Clinton felt that the press played into the Obama side of the story, saying, “He just got a few stenographers to write stories about the- as if this kindergarten letter was serious.”
It is clear that the months of Obama’s veiled criticisms of the Clinton administration are getting under Bill Clinton’s skin. “If you listen to the people who are most strongly for him,” Clinton said, “they say basically we have to throw away all these experienced people because they have been through the wars of the '90s.”
Later, he followed up with, “That’s sort of a superficial, you know, bigotry. That’s like saying ageism or something. It’s like you fought and did good things, we got to give you a gold watch and tell you goodbye.”
Clinton also sees little similarity between his own changing of the generational guard campaign of 1992 and that of Obama’s current campaign. Clinton perceives stark differences in both the candidates and the times. “Unlike 1992 when I ran,” he said, “I don’t think security can ever get completely into the background.”
And in Bill Clinton’s worldview, Obama is just not experienced with security. He elaborated on the age similarities during their runs for the White House. “But remember, in 1992,” he said, “when I was just 46-years-old, I was also the senior governor in America…I had been doing it for a very long time. And I had also extensive international economic experience because of my economic development efforts.”
Although Clinton “gets tickled” watching Obama, he feels it is simply not Obama’s turn, stating that Obama is “somebody who started running for president a year after he became a senator because he's fresh, he's new, he's never made a mistake, and he has massive political skills.”
Clinton also referenced his own early career in the 1988 campaign. “And I, even when I was a governor and young and thought I was the best politician in the Democratic Party,” he said, “I didn't run the first time. I could have….I had lots of Democratic governors encouraging me to. I knew in my bones I shouldn't run, that I was a good enough politician to win, but I didn't think I was ready to be president.”
He even went so far as to say a vote for Obama is “rolling the dice.” “In theory, we could find someone who is a gifted television commentator…and let them run,” Clinton said. “They’d only have one year less experience in national politics…I don’t want to be flippant here. There are a lot of people who honestly believe what you have done for other people in your public life…is completely irrelevant, but what matters is what you symbolize.”
Wearing his strategist hat, Clinton said he believes Hillary’s embattled history is a strength in the general. He said that the Republican trend of attacking his wife is attributable to the fact that “they think she would be the hardest to beat because she has been vetted and because she consistently does better with the Republicans as they get to know her.”
Clinton countered Obama's argument that experience got the nation into the war in Iraq. "I remember the first time Senator Obama said that, said, you know, 'Cheney and Rumsfeld had a lot of experience,’” Clinton said. “And that has great superficial appeal. But let me make the argument in another context. That's like saying that because 100 percent of the malpractices case, medical malpractice, are committed by doctors, the next time I need surgery, I'll get a chef or a plumber to do it. I mean, the logical extension of that is inherently absurd."
Earlier in the fall, Hillary Clinton made use of the Harry Truman quote, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” And she even unveiled the slogan “Turn up the heat” at the Iowa J-J Dinner. This time around, however, it was her husband turning up the heat.
