Former President Bill Clinton used an expletive in the course of defending disparaging comments Clinton had made about Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson in a radio interview Tuesday.
“I don’t think I can take any s*** from anybody on that, do you?” Clinton said at the end of an interview on Philadelphia’s WHYY radio, the city’s NPR affiliate.
At a January stop in Columbia, South Carolina Clinton had said, “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.” As a result of those comments the Clinton campaign has lost some support from the black community.
Interviewer Susan Phillips asked Clinton if he thought it was a mistake to compare Obama to Jackson earlier this year. Clinton answered, “No, I think that they played the race card on me.”
He went on: “And we now know, from memos from the campaign and everything that they planned to do it along. Jesse Jackson -- I said, if you go back to what I said … First of all, there was a conversation that I engaged in that included two African America members of Congress, who were standing right there, who were having the conversation with me. And I said that Jesse Jackson had won a good campaign with overwhelming African American support and white supporters. And this was started off because people didn’t wanna -- they wanted to act like, for reasons I didn’t understand, that Senator Obama didn’t have this African American support, or they thought his white support was better because Jesse Jackson had blue-collar working people, and most of Senator Obama’s support were upscale, cultural liberals. So it was like beneath them to be compared to Jesse Jackson.”
After Phillips thanked Clinton for appearing on the show, Clinton replied: “Thank you. I hope everybody will go out to vote tomorrow. Buh-bye… I don’t think I can take any s*** from anybody on that, do you?”
Clinton lashed out at a reporter who asked him about the morning radio interview. He was unwilling to discuss it. He said, “"You always follow me around and play these little games. And I am not going to play your games today. This is a day about election day, go back and see what the question was and what my answer was. You have mischaracterized it just to get another cheap story to divert the American people from the real urgent issues before us, and I choose not to play your game today."