Obama strong-armed by Clintons to endorse Hillary for 2016, new book says

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks about "The American Experience in Southeast Asia, 1946-1975", the Vietnam War, at the State Department in Washington. Clinton said that day, "I have no advice for anyone in politics. I am out of politics." As Democrats and Republicans fight for control of Congress in next month's midterms, the former first lady and senator will be sitting it out, literally half a world away.

Former President Bill Clinton scornfully dismissed Barack Obama as an incompetent amateur even as he helped to push him to a second term in 2012, according to a new book.

“I've heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I've heard from Obama,” Clinton once reportedly said of the sitting chief executive, who he ironically and incongruously endorsed with a rousing, game-changing speech at last year’s Democratic National Convention, ahead of the general election that pitted Obama against Republic challenger Mitt Romney.

"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 amateur!” Clinton said, according to the book.

Such revelations were rendered in Sunday’s edition of The New York Post by author Edward Klein, who teased in the article some of the most meaty passages from his new book, “The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House.” The book is scheduled to hit stores this week.

Also among the piquant political morsels Klein foreshadowed in The Post:

Bill Clinton only – and begrudgingly –endorsed Obama in 2012 after horse trading with the president for Obama's promised approval of a 2016 White House run by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

But Klein reportedly credits sources with informing him Obama reconsidered so as to remain neutral in 2016, as is the wont of most immediately outgoing presidents. The president apparently changed his mind only after Bill Clinton delivered the DNC speech and he had safely secured re-election.

But Obama, Klein wrote, capitulated and eventually upheld his end of the bargain, agreeing to an awkward "60 Minutes" interview with Hillary Clinton once an irate Bill Clinton “went ballistic and threatened retaliation," for the slight.


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