Former New York City Mayor and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani said he wants Bill Clinton back in office in the wake of President Barack Obama, who he called a “disaster.”
“For the last couple of years, having been a critic of President Clinton, I’ve been saying to myself, ‘I want you back. You weren’t so bad. You reformed welfare and you put 100,000 cops out on the street. You understood how to compromise with us, and this has been really a disaster,'” Giuliani said during his keynote speech at a National Press Club Luncheon.
Giuliani’s comments were made in response to a question from the moderator of the program on whether or not conservatives can win the electorate in the next presidential election, which, the moderator said, tends to “have to be won in the middle.”
Giuliani replied, “I think that this election will get determined — like most re-elections of presidents — based on our economy and the president’s performance with regard to our economy. I think his speech the next night is going to be really important. It’s his last chance to be moderate.”
“It’s his last chance to do a Bill Clinton, ” he continued, “which is what he has to do if he wants to give himself a chance to be re-elected. But if he remains tied to extremely unrealistic ideas about our economy and those unrealistic ideas are borne out by the poor performance of our economy, it doesn’t matter if somebody’s right-wing, middle-wing or no-wing, they’re going to beat him because the American people will say, ‘let’s give something else a chance. This isn’t working.”
“Right now, if the election took place,” Giuliani concluded, “I believe the president would lose to any one of the… top two or three Republicans that are running.”
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