“Back to Work” is scheduled for release next Tuesday by Knopf. (AP)
Bill Clinton thinks the country is “in a mess” — and some of the blame goes to President Obama and the Democrats.
In a new book, Clinton writes that Obama blundered when he failed to fight for a raise in the federal debt ceiling while Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress.
Clinton even praises Wall Street executives — and implies that Obama’s populist rhetoric and attacks on them are bad for the economy.
BAM LETS A SMILE BE HIS UMBRELLA
“Many of them supported me when I raised their taxes in 1993, because I didn’t attack them for their success,” Clinton writes about the execs.
He also faults Obama and Democrats for failing to articulate a strong campaign message and losing the 2010 midterm elections.
That left Obama with “a tough hand to play” with Capitol Hill and led to last summer’s debt-ceiling crisis, which made the US appear “weak and confused.”
In “Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy,” due out Tuesday, Clinton saves most of his criticism for Republicans and the party’s unrelenting “antigovernment ideology.”
But the 42nd president also suggests his own party failed to sell its own agenda.
“The Democrats did not counter the national Republican message with one of their own,” Clinton writes of the 2010 election that cost Democrats control of the House and saw several Democratic senators defeated.
“There was no national advertising campaign to explain and defend what they had done and to compare their agenda for the next two years with the GOP proposals,” the former president writes.
Clinton said he and Vice President Joe Biden urged the Democratic National Committee to distribute a clear set of talking points to activists so that they would know how to discuss what the party had accomplished.
“We couldn’t persuade the decision makers to do so,” Clinton said.
In contrast with his best-selling 2004 memoir, “My Life,” his new book is policy-heavy.
He proposes, for example, that Obama should restore the Small Business Administration as a Cabinet agency.
Some of his recommendations have been instituted already.
For example, Clinton argued in the book for letting homeowners with government-guaranteed mortgages refinance their loans at a lower interest rate — which the White House did two weeks ago.
But the book also paints his tenure as much better than that of his two successors, George W. Bush and Obama.
“We’re in a mess now,” he writes.