Bill Clinton’s attention-grabbing Democratic National Convention speech seems to have renewed everyone’s desire to speculate about the possibility of the Clinton White House: Part II. (Though, as we’ve learned over the past year, people are also happy to talk about this with pretty much no prompting.) And so, once again, the former president is fielding questions about Hillary’s plans for 2016. And, once again, he’s claiming not to have any inside information on the subject. (What do they talk about up there in Chappaqua?)
During an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation this morning, Bill said he had “no earthly idea” whether Hillary might decide to run for president. “Whatever she decides, I’ll support it,” he said, though he also took some time to praise his wife’s abilities as a public servant:
“I know I’m biased,” he said, “but I think she demonstrated as senator and as secretary of state that she has extraordinary ability, a lot of common sense, a lot of, you know, stick-to-itiveness. She’ll push a rock up a hill as long as it takes to get it up the hill.”
On the other hand, he said, all that rock pushing has left Hillary a bit “tired.”
“She’s really worked hard. I think she’s done a fabulous job. I’m very proud of her. But she wants to take some time off, kind of regroup. Write a book. I hope we’ll be working together,” presumably on the charitable and philanthropic efforts of his Clinton Global Initiative.
Clinton was considerably more forthcoming when it came to his take on 2012’s candidates. “I think that the president’s winning, and winning in the swing states,” he said. He also offered up his take on Mitt Romney’s 47 percent comments:
“You know, I know a lot of higher income people, a lot of whom help me do my work and they’re supporting Governor Romney. And a lot of people say things like that,” Clinton said on CBS’ “Face The Nation,” before taking on the premise.
“First, they do pay taxes — they pay Social Security taxes, they pay Medicare taxes, they pay state and local taxes,” he said. “Second, they are out of the income tax pool for two reasons: one is the economic crash, which lowered a lot of peoples’ incomes. … Now the second reason is interesting, it’s a bipartisan reason in the past: it’s because of the combined impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit.”
It seems safe to say that, even if he doesn’t get to be First Lady, Bill can hold onto his new position as Explainer-in-Chief.
