In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Bill Clinton said he doesn’t think he could be elected these days due to his distaste for embarrassing people.

Like Donald Trump does, that is.

“I couldn’t be elected to anything now, ’cause I just don’t like embarrassing people. My mother woulda whipped me for five days in a row when I was a little boy if I spent all my time badmouthing people like this.”

Bill then went on to…well, badmouth people:

“There’s a Trump supporter here in town that — I walked past his house with my dogs. He had a ‘Lock Her Up’ poster in his front window. And I said to him, ‘If you’re gonna do that to my wife, you make sure the prisons are comfortable. ‘Cause you’re gonna have a lot of company of your supporters in there.”

Clinton championed decency:

“There’s division. But underneath that, there’s a core of fundamental decency that can be really skewed when people feel abused, left out, or looked down on.”

Former President Clinton’s remarks seem odd, given his wife’s penchant for the exact opposite of what he defines as decent, having called half the country (in the case of the 2016 election, the winning half) a “basket of deplorables” who only want white males to succeed:

“I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward, and his whole campaign…was looking backwards. You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs, you don’t want to, you know, see that Indian American succeeding more than you.”

It should be noted that black people attained effective suffrage via the Voting Rights Act 1965; that law followed 1964’s revolutionary Civil Rights Act, which was supported by 80% of House Republicans and 82% of the GOP in the Senate. By contrast, Democrats favored the bill at a rate of 63% in the House and 69% in the Senate. The Voting Rights Act garnered a similar dispersion.

Mr. Clinton also responded to Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s November assertion to The New York Times that he should have voluntarily left office after the public exposure of his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky:

“You have to really ignore what the context was. But, you know, she’s living in a different context. And she did it for different reasons. But I just disagree with her.”

Twitter was alive with reaction to Clinton’s appearance:

https://twitter.com/jenannie/status/1003285607551045633

This Bill Clinton CBS Sunday morning interview is cringey as hell

— Bridget Geerlings (@bgigglings) June 3, 2018

Bill Clinton, despite his Public Enemy #1 status with Republicans in the 1990’s, has surprisingly become the lesser of two Clintons, in terms of terrible impression. Hillary has far outdone him in the court of GOP opinion, it seems, due to her unrelenting disdain for anyone who didn’t desire her to be the leader of the free world. It would be nice if Bill could recognize her ugliness toward those voters in favor of Anything But Her, and perhaps not trumpet decency as she stands as a pillar of vitriolic contempt.

Check out my article on a really decent woman, Barbara Bush, here, and all of my stories at the A.P. Author page.

And please follow Alex Parker on Twitter.