May 15, 2012
WASHINGTON: Former American president Bill Clinton maligned Barack Obama as an ‘amateur’ and urged his wife Hillary to run against him in this year’s US Presidential Election, a new book has claimed.
May 15, 2012
WASHINGTON: Former American president Bill Clinton maligned Barack Obama as an ‘amateur’ and urged his wife Hillary to run against him in this year’s US Presidential Election, a new book has claimed.
According to Edward Klein’s new biography of Obama called ‘The Amateur’, Clinton branded Obama ‘incompetent’ and said that he ‘did not know how to be President’.
The book said he urged Hillary to quit her job as US Secretary of State and challenge him for the Democratic ticket as ‘she knew how to do a better job of it’.
According to the book, during a gathering at Clinton’s home in New York last August, he supposedly told his wife that ‘the economy’s a mess, it’s dead flat. America has lost its Triple-A rating’.
“You know better than Obama does. The country needs you! The country needs us! It would be highly unusual for somebody from within a serving president’s party to challenge him in the primaries,” he told Hillary.
According to the book, things remained heated when the Clintons’ daughter Chelsea walked in on the conversation and said her mother she ‘deserved’ to be President.
Clinton supposedly claimed to have ‘no relationship’ with the President and spoke more often to his own successor George W Bush, the book said.
According to the paper, the extraordinary claims, which have been strongly denied by Clinton, came after he finally gave Obama his backing and put their past differences behind them.
The two had reportedly clashed during Hillary’s failed bid for the presidency in 2008, which she lost to Obama.
Hillary reportedly shot down the primary run saying that she prefers to leave a legacy as Secretary of State.
“I want my term [at the State Department] to be an important one, and running away from it now would leave it as a footnote,” Hillary argued. “I’m the highest-ranking member in Obama’s Cabinet. I eat breakfast with the guy every Thursday morning. What about loyalty, Bill? What about loyalty?” she responded.
Bill Clinton’s spokesman Matt McKenna said the excerpts were “totally and completely false” and called Klein “a known liar.”
Klein, a former editor of The New York Times Magazine and Newsweek, defended the book.
