Former President Bill Clinton just agreed with Republican Party voters: His wife, twice failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, was not electable because she was too liberal.
Indeed, Clinton suggested in a CBS News interview that the United States’ first female president would be a Republican after Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to President-elect Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
CBS’ Tracy Smith asked the 42nd president if the country was ready for a woman president.
“Maybe. I think in some ways we’ve moved to the right as a reaction to all the turmoil. And I think if Hillary had been nominated in 2008, she would’ve walked in, just like Obama did,” he responded.
Clinton, discussing his new book “Citizen,” reflected on the challenges facing female Democratic Party candidates because of the far-left shift among liberals in recent years.
“Well, I think all these cultural battles that we’re fighting make it harder in some ways for a woman to run,” he said.
Smith asked if party affiliation mattered more than gender.
“No. Although I think it would probably be easier for a conservative Republican woman to win,” he said, and referenced former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s success, adding, “I still think we’ll have a female president pretty soon.”
The former president, who served from 1993 to 2001, campaigned for Harris in the final stretch of the 2024 campaign and appeared alongside President Joe Biden while Biden remained in the race. Clinton called the prospect of Trump returning to the presidency a “travesty.”
In “Citizen,” Clinton addresses his sexual affair with then-intern Monica Lewinsky in the White House.
“I thought I needed to say something about it, and I wanted to be as helpful as I could to let her turn the page,” he said. “I think she should be given a chance to build a life that is about her and the future, and not, you know, being whiplashed into an old story.”
Clinton wrote in the book lives with guilt “all the time,” and expressed support for Lewinsky’s work on anti-bullying initiatives.
“I wish her nothing but the best.”
The interview comes after two prominent Democratic women lost presidential bids to Trump. Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state, was defeated in 2016, while Vice President Harris lost the 2024 election.