“Well, first of all, Hillary has to win the nomination. If she wins the nomination, then she has to win the election. If she wins the election, the chances are 100 percent I’ll move back. If — wait, wait — if I’m asked.”
— Bill Clinton, quoted by Politico, when asked by David Letterman if he’ll move back into the White House.
“I just work here. I don’t know.”
— Bill Clinton, quoted by the Weekly Standard, on why he isn’t spending more time defending the Clinton Foundation.
Bill Clinton told NBC News he has “no regrets about taking millions in foreign cash for his foundation — even though the donations have caused a political headache for Hillary Clinton as she tries to follow him into the Oval Office.”
Said Clinton: “There is no doubt in my mind that we have never done anything knowingly inappropriate in terms of taking money to influence any kind of American government policy.”
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“Bill Clinton is privately pushing back against the idea that he’s become frail and will play a more limited role on his wife’s impending 2016 campaign than he did in her 2008 bid,” Politico reports.
“A new book on life inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue offers a grim portrait of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s dealings with each other coming off disclosures of the ex-president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky in 1998,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The book by Kate Andersen Brower, The Residence, relies on interviews with an extensive roster of butlers, ushers and other professional staff who’ve kept the White House up and running through the years. These aren’t the sorts of folks who typically spill secrets, but Ms. Brower, a former White House reporter for Bloomberg News, pried out some nuggets that add to our historical understanding of first families from the Kennedys to the Obamas.”
“I’ve told Hillary that I don’t think I’m good at campaigning anymore because I’m not mad at anybody.”
— Bill Clinton, quoted by CNN.
“It’s hard for any party to hang on to the White House for 12 years, and it’s a long road. A thousand things could happen.”
— Bill Clinton, in an interview with Town & Country magazine.
Bill Clinton “practically serves as a series advisor” to the Netflix’s House of Cards, according to Gotham.
Said actor Kevin Spacey: “He tells me, ‘I love that House of Cards. Kevin, 99 percent of what you do on that show is real. The 1 percent you get wrong is you could never get an education bill passed that fast.”
New York Times: “But even if his step has slowed, Mr. Clinton is hungering once again to play a central role in his wife’s presidential campaign. And Hillary Rodham Clinton’s advisers are once again grappling with how to deploy Mr. Clinton, a strategic imperative that was executed so poorly in 2008 that it resulted in some of the worst moments of her campaign.”
“In that race, the former president was at times a frustrated and unpredictable presence, operating on his own, calling up some of his wife’s aides to second-guess strategy and shifting the news media’s focus from her to him with stray remarks, such as when he set off African-American anger by diminishing Barack Obama’s success in South Carolina.”
“This time, advisers and political associates say both Clintons understand how critical it is to harness both the rare gifts and rash impulses of a former president on behalf of a potential one.”
Josh Marshall: “The relationship between the Clintons and the press and the political class generally is codependent, toxic and frankly ridiculous on both sides – with extreme self-protection and legalism on one hand and hyperbole, nonsense and wolf-crying penalties on the other. Like any perennial and bad relationship it is exhausting to watch and generally impossible to pick apart where one part ends and other starts. Which is a reaction to the other, which is first? I have no idea anymore. It hardly matters.”
Jonathan Ladd: “With the media feeding frenzy the past two weeks over Hillary Clinton maintaining a private e-mail account while she was secretary of state, the 1990s dysfunctional marriage between the Clintons and the DC press has come roaring back—no lessons learned or maturity built up on either side since Bill was president. On the Clinton side, there is a hostility and lack of openness to the press that is self-defeating. It provokes the negative coverage it intends to avoid. On the press side, the DC establishment media always seems to believe that the current scandal will be the one to bring down the Clintons, all evidence to the contrary.”
Bill Clinton declined to weigh in on news that his wife exclusively used a private email account during her four-year tenure as secretary of State, The Hill reports.
When asked his wife has been treated fairly over the emails, Clinton said: “I’m not the one to judge that.”
He added: “I have an opinion, but I have a bias… That I shouldn’t be making news on this.”
Bill Clinton defended his foundation’s acceptance of donations from foreign governments, “pointing to the track record of his global philanthropy as Hillary Clinton nears an announcement on a 2016 presidential campaign,” the AP reports.
Said Clinton: “My theory about all of this is disclose everything and then let people make their judgments. I believe we have done a lot more good than harm and I believe this is a good thing.”
Pennsylvania artist Nelson Shanks told the Philadelphia Daily News that he included a reference to Monica Lewinsky in his portrait of Bill Clinton.
Said Shanks: “If you look at the left-hand side of it there’s a mantle in the Oval Office and I put a shadow coming into the painting and it does two things. It actually literally represents a shadow from a blue dress that I had on a mannequin, that I had there while I was painting it, but not when he was there. It is also a bit of a metaphor in that it represents a shadow on the office he held, or on him. And so the Clintons hate the portrait. They want it removed from the National Portrait Gallery. They’re putting a lot of pressure on them.”
“In hundreds of documents released to Politico under the Freedom of Information Act, not a single case appears where the State Department explicitly rejected a Bill Clinton speech. Instead, the records show State Department lawyers acted on sparse information about business proposals and speech requests and were under the gun to approve the proposals promptly. The ethics agreement did not require that Clinton provide the estimated income from his private arrangements, making it difficult for ethics officials to tell whether his services were properly valued.”
Bill Clinton is “already deeply engaged” in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, “warning that Jeb Bush is a real threat, while New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is probably just a sideshow,” Politico reports.
“The former president got a ‘heads-up’ from the camp of President George H.W. Bush a few days before Jeb Bush made his surprise Facebook announcement in December that he would “actively explore” a campaign. The two former presidents have developed a friendly bond, partly because of their work together on earthquake relief for Haiti.”
“Martin Scorsese has tackled the mob, the Dalai Lama and the real-life Wolf of Wall Street. But he appears to have met his match in Bill Clinton,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Scorsese’s partly finished documentary about Mr. Clinton — which once seemed likely to be released as Hillary Rodham Clinton was navigating a presidential run — has stalled over disagreements about control, people briefed on the project said.”
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus told BuzzFeed that Bill Clinton’s personal life would be “fair game” if Hillary Clinton runs for president.
Said Priebus: “Bill Clinton’s activities are fair game for Hillary Clinton to answer, absolutely. And if there are things that Bill Clinton has done that we don’t know about, politically or through business enterprise, that are questionable and/or illegal, then we ought to look into it and ask Hillary about it too, because the presumption is that she’s gonna benefit from the successes of Bill Clinton, so I think it’s fair game.”
He added: “I would say that the Monica Lewinsky stuff is a little stale and old, obviously. But if it turns out that there are things that are going on, and that we didn’t know about, he’s a public figure. He’s a former president. And they want to launch Hillary into the public eye. She deserves just as much scrutiny as anybody. And if Bill Clinton was up to things we find to be unscrupulous, I think that people ought to know about it.”
The Atlantic: “A little over a year after Bill Clinton left the presidency, a stream of former administration officials began making quiet, unannounced visits to Charlottesville, Virginia, to spend a day or two alone with scholars. They usually came to the parlor of an antebellum mansion named for William Faulkner, where they reflected privately into a tape recorder on what they had experienced… Over a 10-year span, the center collected 134 oral histories on the 42nd presidency. The Clinton archive now runs to 10,000 pages of transcribed conversations, making it the largest of the Miller Center’s presidential projects, which date back to the Ford White House. Roughly half of these interviews were released to the public in November. The rest, following standard oral-history protocols, will be opened as soon as each interviewee is comfortable doing so.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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