Now that Chris Christie's lap-band surgery's got everyone remembering how much fun it is to speculate about presidential elections, the Post has an EXCLUSIVE clip from a book about President Obama that claims the Clintons bullied him into endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016. Not that she's running, or anything.
According to Edward Klein, a former NYT Magazine editor and current conservative conspiracy theorist/political figure sensationalist, Bill Clinton agreed to stump for Obama in 2012, but only if Obama endorsed his wife when she ran in 2016. Klein writes:
“I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama,” my sources quoted Clinton as saying. “I have no relationship with the president — none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s an amateur!” For his part, Obama wasn’t interested in Bill Clinton upstaging him during the presidential campaign. He resisted giving him any role at the convention. But as last summer wore on, and Democrat enthusiasm waned, chief political strategist David Axelrod convinced the president that he needed Bill Clinton’s mojo. A deal was struck: Clinton would give the key nominating speech at the convention, and a full-throated endorsement of Obama. In exchange, Obama would endorse Hillary Clinton as his successor.
And that farewell "60 Minutes" interview Obama and Hillary Clinton did in January when she signed off as Secretary of State? That was just for show after Obama threatened to back down on the deal, say Klein's "sources." "Bill Clinton went ballistic and threatened retaliation. Obama backed down," Klein writes. "The result was a slobbering televised love-in—and an embarrassment to all concerned." That's right—Hillary and Obama might not like each other, and politicians apparently do things for political gain sometimes. Is your mind blown yet?
Take Klein's quotes with a grain of salt, though. The book from which these quotes derive is an Obama-skewering biography called The Amateur, and when a pre-2012 version of it was released last year, critics questioned Klein's seemingly secondhand, "I heard it from this guy who heard it from this other guy" sources. He's also written a book called The Truth About Hillary that suggests, among other things, that Chelsea Clinton was born out of rape, and that Hillary is a lesbian—conservative NY Post columnist John Podhoretz described that book as "one of the most sordid volumes I have ever waded through." "Thirty pages into it, I wanted to take a shower," he wrote when the book was released in 2005. "Sixty pages into it, I wanted to be decontaminated.”
