President Clinton Likens His Wife To Roosevelt
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President Clinton is billing his wife as the “best qualified, nonincumbent” to seek the presidency in his lifetime and is likening her to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Mr. Clinton made the comments while campaigning for Senator Clinton in western Iowa, according to Fox News and the Web sites of the Des Moines Register and Washington Post. He also said his wife should not be blamed for the failure of the health care plan she fashioned in 1993.
“Let’s just face it. We couldn’t raise money,” he said, according to the Register. “This time, when you let the tax cuts for upper-income people expire, it’ll create a pool of money that wasn’t there last time. We told her she had to get to universal coverage and there would be no new money.” Most analysts have pinned the health plan’s failure not on financial issues, but on backers’ inability to rebut an advertising campaign that painted the program as a bureaucratic nightmare.
As effusive as Mr. Clinton was about his wife’s abilities yesterday, he has been even more complimentary in the past.
“I believe she is the best qualified, best suited nonincumbent ever,” he said in Harlem last month, according to the Associated Press.
“In my lifetime, I have never had a chance to vote for anyone who is better suited to serve — given the demands of the time, based on experience and proven ability to produce results — than my wife,” the former president told a crowd in Reno, Nev., in August, the AP reported.
Mr. Clinton’s superlatives about Mrs. Clinton suggest he views her skills as superior to his own during his first and perhaps his second presidential bid, as well as those of Vice President Gore when he sought the presidency in 2000.
Mr. Clinton was born in 1946, during President Truman’s first term in office. He was first eligible to vote for president in the 1968 election, which put President Nixon in the White House. In comments broadcast on Fox News, Mr. Clinton addressed his wife’s failure to give a clear answer on whether she supported Governor Spitzer’s plan to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants by saying that FDR was also sometimes difficult to pin down on an issue.
