Former President Bill Clinton has issued a warning to Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer about the upcoming midterm elections.
Speaking during an appearance on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” Clinton expressed concerns about the Democratic Party leadership’s ability to hold on to power.
“We could hold both these houses,” Clinton said.
“But we have to say the right things, and we have to note the Republicans always close well.
“Why? Because they find some new way to scare the living daylights out of swing voters about something.”
With President Joe Biden’s first two years underwhelming if not downright terrifying, the Republicans will have a lot of targets.
“It’s just that there’s so many fewer because as the parties have gone more ideological and clear and somehow psychically intolerant, they pull more and more of people toward the extremes,” he said of polarization in American politics.
“But there’s still some people hanging on there who are really trying to think and trying to understand what’s going on.”
Speaking about the GOP’s closing skills, Clinton said:
“That’s what they did in 2021 — where they made critical race theory sound worse than smallpox.
“And it wasn’t being taught in any public schools in America. But they didn’t care.
“They just scare people,” he said.
Clinton’s bagman Terry McAuliffe lost to Republican Glenn Younkin in the 2021 election in Virginia after Democrat leaders messed with advanced classes in the school districts.
Asian immigrants are the swing voters in Virginia and they rely on those AP classes to get their kids into the best universities in the country. Or try to.
Voters saw the Democrats’ were doing as a threat to their kid’s future and many of them voted Republican for the first time in their lives.
These were minority voters voting against whatever the Democrats were doing in the schools whether they call it CRT or something else.
“I think we did the right thing at the right time,” he said of NATO expansion.
“And if we hadn’t had done it, this crisis might have occurred even sooner.
“When I did what I did,” Clinton said,
“I offered Russia not only a special partnership with NATO, but the prospect of eventual membership in NATO, arguing that our biggest security problems in the future were going to come from non-state actors, or from authoritarian states selling chemical, biological and nuclear capacity to terrorist groups.
“And that we should do this together.
“You’re supposed to tell the Poles they should live the rest of eternity with insecurity that Russia won’t try to come after them again?
“Or the Hungarians or the, you know, all the others.
“The Baltic states.
“Really, after what they did, did they ever want to be in the Soviet Union?
“And the Czech Republic was the most democratic of all and the best-managed,” he said of the countries who joined NATO during his presidency.
Is the economy working for enough people? What can we do about America’s broken refugee-asylum system?
Part 3 of my interview w/ former Pres. @BillClinton: pic.twitter.com/mRcReMwZXr
— Fareed Zakaria (@FareedZakaria) September 18, 2022
Some say NATO enlargement is to blame for the war in Ukraine. What does former Pres. @BillClinton, who presided over much of that enlargement, have to say about it?
Part 2 of our wide-ranging interview from today’s show: pic.twitter.com/jSJPL0ueYz
— Fareed Zakaria (@FareedZakaria) September 18, 2022
